The Right to Design

Disability History collection at Brandeis

2011-09-08T11:48:00.002-04:00

via Stephen Kuusisto:

Brandeis University has a current spotlight on their disability collections:

Brandeis University’s Robert D. Farber University Archives & Special Collections Department houses a wide array of material from the Walter E. Fernald Developmental Center’s Samuel Gridley Howe Library. This collection includes several hundred books from scholars and experts in the fields of science, medicine, and disabilities; the papers of Irving Kenneth Zola and of Rosemary and Gunnar Dybwad; and thousands of pamphlets, case studies, and journals on topics ranging from what were then called feeble-mindedness and cretinism to eugenics and crime.

The material, which dates from the 1810s to the 1950s and is related primarily to North America and the United Kingdom, was compiled by the Howe Library from the school superintendent’s library as well as international libraries. It includes works from world-renowned doctors such as psychologists Alfred Binet and Edgar A. Doll, polymaths Francis Galton and his protégé Karl Pearson, Walter E. Fernald, Dorothea Dix (who championed for the rights of the indigent insane), Ellis Island medical officer Howard Knox, and eugenicists Charles B. Davenport and Henry H. Goddard, among hundreds of others. The Samuel G. Howe Library Collection’s academic scope is vast and will be of interest to historians of science and medicine, anthropologists, sociologists, and people with disabilities and their families.

What follows is a lengthy article that details the evolution of the Massachusetts School for Idiotic and Feebleminded Youth (later called the Walter E. Fernald State School), reflecting changing social and medical attitudes about mental illness and intellectual disability. Looks like an impressive collection.

See also: Online Disability History

Smithsonian Podcast on Universal Design

2011-05-09T16:53:00.004-04:00

I'm excited to say that the Smithsonian's Lemelson Center interviewed me recently about my work on universal design. The podcast followed up on a special symposium on "Food for Tomorrow" in which I presented some of my research about how new awareness of the needs of people with disabilities has changed design of kitchens and kitchen tools, including such examples as the Cuisinart food processor and (of course) OXO GoodGrips.

There is a great blog post by National Museum of American History curator Katherine Ott to accompany the podcast. Here is an excerpt explaining the origins of the term "universal design":

Universal design rejects traditional "separate but equal" facilities for people with disabilities. The original principles of universal design grew out of a 1974-77 Department of Education grant to architect Ron Mace that involved extensive product and architectural analysis. That lead to a working group to develop core principles for universally-designed facilities, which would provide for equitable and flexible use; be simple and intuitive; present perceptible and sensory information; tolerate error; entail minimal physical effort; and be of an accessible size and orientation. Mace used a wheelchair as a result of contracting polio when he was a boy. His early engineering and design talent resulted in numerous gadgets and adaptations and eventually a career in dismantling architectural barriers.

Listen to the podcast here. Thanks to the Lemelson Center for interviewing me and asking such great (easy ) questions.

In addition to discussing mass-market products like the Cuisinart and OXO, I also mention how people with disabilities themselves altered kitchens and other parts of their houses to make pre-existing spaces work for them. Here are some images from The Toomey J Gazette, the magazine "by and for respiratory polios" that ran from 1958-1969 (and then became the Rehabilitation Gazette). The images show (1) a kitchen sink with the cabinet below cut out to make space for a wheelchair, and a decorative curtain added to maintain a tidy look; and (2) a variety of storage approaches for pots and pans and pantry items, such as lazy susans, pegboards, and wall-mounted racks - all of which were common sights in 1950s/60s households, but here were selected for their particular advantages to people with disabilities. Images are from "Homemaking," The Toomey J Gazette, 1968.

Ed Roberts campus opens in Berkeley

2011-03-24T15:24:00.004-04:00

East Bay folks, take note - the new Ed Roberts campus, a community service center located at the Ashby Ave BART station in south Berkeley, is opening April 9. I am a bit fuzzy on the details, but I believe this gorgeous, universally-designed building with a large central spiraling ramp (reminiscent of the Guggenheim) will house several of the major disability organizations in Berkeley (but correct me if that is wrong). This image of the center (which I believe is a computer projection) is from worldarchitecturenews.com.

The campus is named for Ed Roberts, dubbed by some "the father of the disability rights movement," a MacArthur genius award-winning activist who lived in Berkeley for most of his adult life, starting in 1962 when he became the first student with physical disabilities to live on campus at UC Berkeley. Roberts was also a founder of the Center for Independent Living and the World Institute on Disability. Here's a picture of him and Herb Willsmore, a fellow student at Berkeley, at the University's stadium, from the Disabled Students Program Photograph Collection at UC Berkeley's Bancroft Library.

The Best Arms? Prosthetic limb improvements - or not

2011-02-23T09:47:00.015-05:00

In the image above, veterans from a post-World War I workshop at Walter Reade Army Medical Center demonstrate new attachments for their prosthetic limbs - such as a welding tool. Though these tools did not catch on as much in the US as in Germany (according to research by Heather Perry published in this book), the idea of a worker restored to function through such a tool was of interest to American medical and military authorities too. Image via the amazing National Museum of Medicine flickr set.

In another image, below, from the Science Service photograph collection at the National Museum of American History, a veteran of World War II demonstrates his new prosthetic arm to a group of ladies visiting a Washington exhibition in 1948. The exhibition showcased the results of a multi-million dollar (a lot back then!) project to improve the design of artificial limbs, including (in the foreground) using new plastics and hydraulic joints. (note: portions of the Science Service collection are online, but not those related to disability/medicine).

I thought of these images after reading this story on the Guardian on British TV Presenter Cerrie Burnell. Burnell, who was born without the lower part of her right arm, chooses not to wear a prosthetic limb. Since childhood, she resisted wearing "this heavy, uncomfortable, ugly, pointless . . . thing," finding a prosthesis more cumbersome than useful.

Burnell is not alone. Despite the improvements made after WWII, in a 1950 study rehabilitation doctors reported that as few as 12% of single-arm amputees wore prosthetic limbs - and of those, only half wore them for daily work and hobbies! The rest simply found it easier to operate using one hand. Limbs have improved (though not as much as you might think!) but I have heard anecdotally that the number is still only about 50%. Sometimes there really is no design solution for everyone - no product/technology at all might be the best.

The point that Burnell raises - that people would rather see an obvious prosthetic limb than the stump of her arm - brings up interesting issues about the kinds of disability prejudice or discomfort that exist our modern visual/technological society. Is it that people are more comfortable with plastic and metal - even though they clearly indicate a lost limb - than the actual flesh of an impaired body? Or that they want to see that the person is at least trying to repair/replace their disability - to make themselves more "normal"? Does the strangeness of a prosthetic limb somehow trump the taboos around physical difference or disability?

Given its frequent appearance in both sci-fi and cultural studies, there is clearly some fascination in our modern society with this technology that can extend or replace human function - or even, as in the case of recent carbon-fiber sprinting legs (note: legs, not arms), surpass it. After wars, the press scurries to investigate the state of prosthetic limbs, and the government funds massive new projects to improve them. As the images above show, the ideas of what constitutes an "improved" arm change over time - sometimes focusing on utility for particular jobs, sometimes pushing to include whiz-bang new technologies and materials. Despite all of this attention, however, sometimes the fascination about prosthetic limbs has little to do with the material reality that an individual person with an amputation or missing limb has to use this object, and they may just choose to go without.

3 quick links to 3 smart things

2011-02-15T10:33:00.004-05:00

1. Steven Kuusisto on the "post-physical" fantasy of many technophiles -

We are, it seems, living in the age of the promissory “improved” body—yet that body is still stuck between the territories of production (politics), reproduction (material expense) and imagination (compulsory normativity).

Kuusisto writes that this ideal of a mechanized world that alleviates or "eliminates" disability is not a neutral product of technological innovation - it is the result of particular processes of imagination, wrapped in political concerns (i.e. who plans, who pays, who decides who and what gets to be post-physical?). In other words,

[the post-physical ideal] evokes Bill Clinton’s remark: “If you see a turtle on a fence post you can bet he didn’t get there by accident.”

2. Wheelchair Dancer on emergency plans - personal and administrative - for people with disabilities.

Katrina seems to have been a turning point in disaster planning for people with disabilities... Since then, I have seen numerous conference announcements, notices for research reports and lists of paper abstracts talking about disaster planning for people with disabilities. (An unfortunate side effect of all this good work is the now popular phrase "vulnerable populations.")

(note: this is an issue that also came to mind for me at the time of the inauguration, when officials suggested people with disabilities stay at home)

3. An interview with Pattie Moore, an industrial design consultant whose 1979 experiment of disguising herself as an elderly woman brought light to accessible design issues (via Core77).

In the 70s, we were told we design for a Caucasian, 40 years old, living on Long Island, with 2.3 kids. We didn’t even really design for women. And if you brought up the idea of designing for people with arthritis, for example, they would say, “We don’t design for those people!”

Also related: giant NY Times magazine article about the aging "market."

Bricolage

2011-02-01T16:58:00.002-05:00

I was just (re)reading Bernard Herman's material culture essay "The Bricoleur Revisited," from Ritchie Garrison and Ann Smart Martin's American Material Culture: The Shape of the Field (1997) - the bricoleur, Herman writes, is a "putterer with a message" - basically us, scholars and lovers of stuff, picking through the detritus of history for little messages and meanings.

I thought of that figure of the bricoleur in this world of not just objects, but bodies. Disability studies helps us think of not all bodies as the same, and I kind of waffle about whether I consider that to be a material culture statement or not. (bodies are not objects, but they are part of the material world. I am not crazy about a lot of scholarship on "the body" however, because it tends to be singular).

Something I read today made me think of it again.. Steven Kuusisto (fantastic poet, blogger, joker, and activist, who is blind) writes about becoming an honorary member of the "Wretches and Jabbers," a group of non-speaking writers (apparently there is a new documentary out about the group), and visiting them for a meeting. He describes sitting among them, everyone typing out words on talking computers, jumping and lurching as they needed to or wanted to:

Suddenly I was in "a happening"--a cognitive, inter-active jam session with four men and one woman, each with an electronic keyboard. Stories emerged about loneliness and about being misunderstood. (People with Autism can tell you things about childhood that will curl your hair.) But there were also many joys for this was a kind of autistic rock and roll session. (from Planet of the Blind)

The bricoleur looks into a box of things - stones, shells, an earring, a shard of a ceramic pot - and constructs stories. I liked thinking of how that applies to modern life, our funny tools and sounds and the stories and connections they help us make. I don't want to say bodies are objects but they are part of the picture.

Worlds with and without stairs II

2011-01-31T19:39:00.012-05:00

Above is a video that has been circulating in my facebook feed and various blogs, showing an experiment to see if altering the experience of walking up stairs would change people's likelihood of taking the stairs rather than the escalator. It's pretty cute and simple, and it's nice to see people having a fun time in the mundane setting of a subway station. This is not a strictly "accessible" form of design, though it does play off of choice between ways of moving through a place, which does have to do with physical access. And it makes me wonder - how much do designers think about stairs? Are they inviting, discouraging, or just plain functional? In a world when we often have the choice of elevator, escalator, stairs or ramps, could designers make these experiences more distinct?

When I first started this blog, I posted about the idea of a "world without stairs" - wondering whether an accessible world could actually mean the disappearance of such a standard architectural feature as the stairs.

I've learned a few things since then... one is, of course, that stairs are just one kind of physical barrier, for one kind of access issue. In fact, many people with disabilities prefer stairs to ramps - for example, if they use a prosthetic leg or a cane, that straight platform can be easier to use. The first ever Architectural Standard in the U.S. included not only measurements for ramps, but design guidelines for stair heights and angles that would not interfere with those who needed to drag their feet up the front of stairs:

(image: figure showing unacceptable and acceptable stair designs, from the 1961 American National Standards Institute's Specifications for Making Buildings and Facilities Accessible to, and Usable by, the Physically Handicapped, which became the guidelines for state and federal accessibility laws in the 1960s and 70s).

In my earlier post on stairs, I noted some architectural examples (such as the Guggenheim) that used alternatives to stepped surfaces as a design feature. These were not spaces explicitly designed for wheelchair use (in fact some of them might belong in the Facebook "Wheelchair Ramps and Access from Hell" photo collection), but might suggest ways of making access an explicit part of design, rather than an afterthought.

I was also thinking about ways that stairs themselves can be accessible or inaccessible. For those who walk up and down stairs, they can have a pronounced effect on how we experience a place. Think of the difference between ascending a grand staircase, feeling that you are rising up to an important and elegant place - perhaps like the Metropolitan Opera's lush red stairways - and scrambling up the narrow spiral stairs of a cathedral bell tower or a lighthouse.

In some cases architects consciously use stairways to dramatize walking through the space - in other cases, I wonder what thought went into a stair design.

At the Frank Furness-designed Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts, the central stair to the galleries has no handrail. The effect is subtle, but nonetheless jarring - your hand might reach out for something to hold, but instead you feel a bit out of sorts, pitched downward with no assurance. In the context of this historic building, we get a sense of a different time and a different set of expectations about bodily composure walking down the stairs. (Image shows a woman from the back, descending a set of stone stairs without a handrail in sight). In 2011, the museum has been designed to provide an alternate route to the stairs, but in its original design, Furness certainly made a distinct statement for those coming and going into this temple for art.

On a recent trip I discovered another set of museum steps that literally stopped me in my tracks. The newish Center for Contemporary Art in Cincinnati is the only American building by Zaha Hadid, the Pritzker Prize-winning architect best known for prototype or drawn work, so I was excited to visit while I was in town for a wedding. The sleek lines and geometry of the museum building are appealing, but the stairs immediately stood out to me - and not in a particularly good way. Criss-crossing the void in the main entry lobby, these stairs have a much shorter rise, and longer step, than we expect in standard staircases. They are so awkward to walk up that I almost wondered if this was an installation of the museum collection itself. As a long-ish strider I was constantly tripping up these stairs, and almost fell on the way up. I asked the guards if they had gotten used to them over time, and they chuckled, no, and confirmed that I was far from the only visitor to ask about the stair heights.

It's interesting to me to wonder how Hadid came to these stairs. Did she deliberately design something that would halt your walk, maybe prepare you to pay attention as you see the artworks? Is this an explicit message that we should not relax too much or feel too comfortable in a museum? Or are the stairs, like many functional elements of contemporary architecture, just the product of some low-level drafts-person who designs based on general instructions of the architect? In any case, I wondered if Hadid had ever walked up these stairs. They are certainly dramatic, but the ultimate result for me was to feel frustrated and a bit indignant - how dare this architect tell me how to walk! And of course, I thought of how these steps would feel for someone with a physical impairment - for whom that break in routine might be more than an annoyance.

Leaving the CCA, I decided to take the elevator down. In a world with stairs, we might choose to avoid them too.

online disability history

2010-12-13T10:19:00.006-05:00

Image: Grey Sweatsuit, hanging in exhibition case with shelves of folded, identical suits next to it. From "Out from Under: Disability, History and Things to Remember," at Ryerson University.

From the quote accompanying this piece in the exhibition:

[T]he memory that has stayed with me so powerfully is that of the singlemost prevalent institutional “outfit”—the ill-fitting, nondescript, grey sweat suit. In choosing this “object” I was struck by how the sweat suit—devoid of any labels, markers or designer logos— represented the monotony and routines of institutional life.

Preparing a talk on the history of assistive technology and innovation recently, I drew on some great online resources for some of my older images and stories. It made me realize I had some across some of these sites entirely by accident, via links to links to links.. and maybe it would be helpful to compile a couple of them here.

I would love more links, suggestions, etc in the comments!

Top 5 Disability History Websites
Note: all of the sites below include image captions and are (I believe) screen reader accessible.

National Museum of American History: Disability Rights and Polio exhibitions. These sites provide ongoing access to two wonderful exhibitions curated by Katherine Ott at NMAH. I also recommend the volume Ott edited (along with David Serlin and Stephen Mihm), Artificial Parts, Practical Lives: Modern Histories of Prosthetics as one of the best (only?) history books on technology and disability.

Disability History Museum: an ongoing, ever growing online database of images and text related to a long history of disability (mainly US oriented). Strengths in ephemera (photos, clippings, brochures) on everyday life. Use the sidebar to search by keywords, time periods, etc.

Bancroft Library (UC Berkeley) Disability Rights and Independent Living Movement Collection: Excellent, cross-reference-able source for primary source documents, (some) photographs, and an unbelievable oral history collection related to the Disability Rights Movement (mainly American and Californian). Easiest to get to are names and organizations, many of which have short audio/text clips from oral histories. To go deeper, the full texts of the oral histories are also available - providing hours (or months/years) of reading material. A highlight for Disability History scholars: the late Paul Longmore's oral history - providing a very rich, deep discussion of his and others' origins in disability studies scholarship.

Ryerson University's Out from Under: Disability, History and Things to Remember: This is really more of an experiential site than one with hard facts and famous names - looking at specific objects and short texts that evoke Canadian disability history (such as the sweat suit above). Great images and everyday object interpretations - particularly covering the history of institutionalization and intellectual disability.

The Missouri History Museum's Action for Access: Changing Perceptions of Disability in American Life: a friend recently pointed me to this site, a multimedia presentation on current and recent past perspectives on disability. The "disability rights movement" tab includes a recap of disability history in the US in general, with a special focus on Missouri. A great example of how deeply local disability history is. Includes historical images, videos of people with disabilities telling their personal stories, and reference links.

Honorable Mention
these sources are more limited in focus - but still good sites to hit for disability history.

Museum of disAbility - a virtual museum with artifacts and documents on disability history. I find their interface a little overwhelming, but there are good materials to be found (similar scope/content to the Disability History Museum, above).

Disability History Timelines - someday I would love to see (or make) a compilation of all the disability history timelines I have seen. In the meantime, here are two:
Timeline from the ABC-CLIO Companion to the Disability Rights Movement by Fred Pelka
Timeline from the Disability Social History Project

The New York City Origins of the Disability Rights Movement (link goes to audio mp3 - for the main site click here; no transcript online) - a talk from Warren Shaw, historian of New York City whose father, Julius Shaw, was an early disability rights activist. Very interesting story that has not really been told in standard disability history books/timelines.

Temple University's Disability Studies Blog - posts and links about disability studies and disability history

H-Disability - email listserv for disability history discussion/posts

ooh / ah.

2010-10-11T21:31:00.006-04:00

- ooh! Tennis champ Esther Vergeer poses nude, embracing her tennis racquet, in her wheelchair on the cover of ESPN magazine. Commentary here:

While we're hard-pressed to celebrate the reveal of a bunch of hard-bodied women like it's a major coup for femininity, a spokesperson for the magazine said: "ESPN The Magazine's Body Issue is a celebration and exploration of the athletic form, honoring athletes of diverse shapes, sizes, colors, genders, and race."

...

the paraplegic has made kicking ass her business since childhood. She recently won her 396th straight U.S. Open match in her chair.

- ah. Last week on This American Life, there was a segment on people with disabilities suing businesses for being out of compliance. It was on a show titled "Crybabies," but I would say that, on balance, it approached the issue pretty well. It edged into questioning whether suing small businesses for seemingly small instances of noncompliance (coat hangers or mirrors too high for wheelchair users, e.g.) is fair or even effective, but ultimately pointed out that this is basically the only way that the ADA can get enforced after the building permit phase is over. One business owner complains that he would have changed the height of the coat hook had someone just asked him, rather than suing, but the counterargument is implied as a woman tells the story of repeatedly asking her hair salon to provide wheelchair parking (they do initially, then repaint the lines to make two standard spots) to no avail.
Click here for full episode (story starts at about 33 min).

links - art/design edition

2010-10-08T09:27:00.005-04:00

Cool artist-in-residence project with inside views of Smithsonian collections: Tracy Hicks

D-Crit conference keynote: Peter Hall, "The Uses of Failure":
a failed design is often one in which all the wrangling, hidden agendas and vested interests that preceded it are laid open for inspection

Customize Almost Anything You Can Buy to Fit Your Tastes, Lifehacker

On the Metropolis magazine blog, Emily Leiben on Two Decades of Living with the ADA

quick and should-be-easy

2010-09-09T15:47:00.005-04:00

Memo to journalists, bloggers, and other writers everywhere: language like this is soooo yesterday (or several decades ago):
Polio-stricken architect worked on raising accessibility awareness, from the San Diego Union-Tribune.
"When Berenice Bernard was stricken with polio in 1951...
"Confined to a wheelchair for the rest of her life..."
I mean, really? Thanks Blanca Gonzales for covering this woman's obituary, but you couldn't have updated your language?

Here's an easy guide to appropriate language, from the Smithsonian's Guidelines for Accessible Exhibition Design:

Yes / No
People with disabilities / The handicapped, The disabled
People who are deaf or hard of hearing / The hearing impaired, deaf mute
People who are blind or have low vision / The blind, The sightless 
Wheelchair users / Confined to wheelchairs, Wheelchair bound
People with mobility impairments / The crippled, The lame
People with intellectual disabilities / The retarded, The mentally deficient
People with mental illness / schizophrenic (as a generic), the insane
People with learning disabilities / dyslexic (as a generic), the retarded

what is good architecture?

2010-08-16T09:02:00.004-04:00

A couple of interesting links...

First, Paul Goldberger and Richard Cook discuss sustainable architecture for The New Yorker. Cook is a principal in Cook & Fox, designers of the new Bank of America Tower, the largest building ever to receive LEED Platinum certification (the highest energy performance standard).

they discuss a lot of things - but I find the beginning, when they discuss the "next levels" of green building, particularly notable. Cook talks about how better energy performance, materials use, etc will cease being "green" and start being the "normative standard." But the bigger challenge, he says, is for buildings to be regenerative, to improve quality of life. This part might represent a trade-off - e.g. that creating the best possible air quality requires energy-expending filtration systems. Of course, he doesn't (can't) touch on the really big conundrum - that these supposedly most-humanistic-possible buildings are giant office towers, but this is true for a long history of making spaces more comfortable - ergonomics creates safer workplaces, better productivity, and so on.

Another issue Goldberger and Cook raise is about the LEED standard itself - many have criticized it because it does not necessarily reward innovative design, but rather to-the-letter technical performance. There are so many comparisons to ADA standards there - likewise, some architects have argued that the ADA is not necessarily equipped to evaluate a broader definition of Universal Design, vs. a rigid conception of access (though frankly, I would like to see a building or feature that really offers excellent accessibility and is not ADA compliant). It would be great to see a discussion of sustainability - as a design approach, not a technical standard - that incorporates accessibility as well - as a part of the human health considerations that go into these extremely high-design, high-cost sites like the Bank of America building. As Cook describes, he sees a sustainable approach as leading to ways of making an office building "feel fundamentally different" - for me, this point certainly raises a host of issues about what we expect of design, in terms of environment, experience, comfort, health, and otherwise.

Another quick link - Metropolis points us to OpenBuildings, a "crowdsourced" architecture info/criticism site. On this "mega-resource," Metropolis reports, "readers can submit buildings to the site and upload images, additional information, or even their own opinions." So far it looks like most buildings just have excerpts from either Wikipedia or a more official architecture review source. But - what possibilities for a user-level impression of these sites! It would be so great to see this forum used for accessibility reviews, and other insights that only members of the "crowd" can point out. I think I'll download the app to see what there is around my city..

Remembering Paul Longmore

2010-08-10T16:50:00.008-04:00

I was sad to hear yesterday of the passing of Paul Longmore, a leader in the field of Disability History. I have gotten to know Paul over the past three years as I work on my dissertation about disability rights and design. Reading others' remembrances of him online, and talking to fellow young scholars, I know I was just one of many who consider him a great teacher and mentor. Berkeley lawyer Lainey Fairgold wrote on her website that, reading and speaking with him, "I could actually feel my mind opening up to new ideas, new ways of perceiving the world." I have felt that many times as well.

Paul was one of the most generous scholars I have ever met, always willing to chat with me - sometimes for hours, as we sat in the sun outside of his San Francisco State office or in his apartment. As a non-disabled person with little experience in the disability community before I started my dissertation, I felt tentative about my project when we first spoke. He was immediately supportive, and over time was very forthcoming about his own life history and the ways it overlapped with the work I am doing on the everyday lives of people with disabilities in postwar America. I came to think of him as a friend as much as I did a professor - until I would return to his written work, and, like Lainey says, I could feel my mind expanding. His insights on practices of history writing - for example, in his essays on the League of the Physically Handicapped and on the reformer Randolph Bourne, both in the collection Why I Burned My Book and Other Essays on Disability - are seminal works for any historian of 20th century America.

Paul was an accomplished scholar in two fields: Early American History and Disability History. After he completed his MA and PhD at Occidental College and Claremont Graduate School, Paul taught at Stanford and USC before coming to San Francisco State University in 1992. He received tenure in SF State's History Department in 1998 and directed the Institute on Disability starting in 1996. He published The Invention of George Washington, based on his dissertation, and a collection of essays, Why I Burned My Book; at the time of his death he was nearing completion of a new work on telethons. He edited The New Disability History with Lauri Umansky, and has been the organizer of countless conferences, panels, journal issues, and professional groups (including H-Disability, as Penny Richards notes). A more complete bio is here.

I was often bowled over by how openly Paul discussed the difficulties he had faced in his career path. As he details in the title essay of Why I Burned My Book, throughout graduate school and his early career people told him frankly that he would never be hired as a person with a severe disability (though one professor did concede that he was "not bitter like many cripples"). The title of the essay comes from a protest Paul staged in 1988 after he was warned his book royalties would render him ineligible for the Social Security Income (SSI) payments that supported his medical and attendant care (at the time, totaling more than $20,000/year - history book royalties do not come close). He burned copies of The Invention of George Washington on a barbecue grill in front of the federal building in downtown Los Angeles, an action that was part of a years-long battle to change SSI policies that effectively discouraged people with disabilities from pursuing professional career paths. Despite his own battles, he never dismissed or belittled others' problems. He often asked me how I was doing, offering supportive words when the dissertation process got me down. We academics rarely discuss our feelings - Paul did, reminding me to seek support and see the long view of my project. I believe his mentoring and teaching were a part of his activism, changing the profession that had not always treated him fairly. Up until his death he was still planning more projects to encourage disability studies and disability history.

Paul sardonically wrote in Why I Burned My Book, "when I published [The Invention of George Washington], one reviewer remarked that it drew on a 'truly astounding amount of research.' Of course it did . Would a postpolio supercrip do anything less? How characteristically disabled of me to undertake so grandiose a project." Still, as he continues, "I don't want to reduce my work to 'overcoming.'" Neither do I. Paul's work is not only remarkable because he "overcame" odds in a society that did not - does not - imagine that people with disabilities can make a contribution. He will have a long legacy because he investigated topics that few historians had considered critically, if at all, and because he did it while maintaining a personal practice of support and generosity. One has only to skim a few of the personal remembrances popping up online (for example, on Not Dead Yet and Media Dis-n-Dat, as well as Paul's facebook page) to see how many scholars, writers, and activists were influenced by his presence, whether in one-time meetings or life-long friendships.

Thank you, Paul. I will miss you tremendously.

20th anniversary of the ADA, other news

2010-07-29T09:51:00.007-04:00

I've been a bit slow on the blogging this summer (well, slow meaning fully stopped) - such is the state of dissertating, researching, traveling, and letting time pass, I guess. I have two longer posts in the works, but in the meantime, some bits and pieces:

- There were many celebrations and reflections this week in commemoration of the 20th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act on July 26- the major civil rights act, passed in 1990, that barred discrimination against people with disabilities and mandated equal access to work, employment, and public spaces/services. The best stories, of course, avoided sappy "celebrations" of overcoming and cut to the chase: this Act has made a significant difference in many people's lives, but remains controversial and in many cases, its mandates are unfulfilled (with improvements seen in the 2007 ADA Restoration Act).

NPR's news shows had several stories, many of them authored by, or prominently featuring people with disabilities reflecting on the Act and their lives facing discrimination, like Ben Mattlin telling of how one job interviewer asked, "How would you make photocopies? I mean, you'd be here to help us, not for us to help you," and special education specialist Deborah Peters Goessling talking about the "one inch" that still often prevents her from participating in everyday life (interestingly, she is really touching on "visitability," i.e. being able to visit people's private homes, not covered under the ADA). In a story on the Act's effects on architecture, U. Penn professor Monica Ponce de Leon talked about the more widespread acceptance of the ideal of Universal Design. She described a project for the library at the Rhode Island School of Design, where her firm developed furniture and study space for a diversity of students:

[Robert] SIEGEL: So depending on one's individual needs, one's individual size, or for example if one used a wheelchair, you could find a space that would work for you in that.

Prof. PONCE DE LEON: Exactly. You're actually acknowledging that we all have different degrees of abilities. So at RISD, since you have a student body that is there for four or five years at a time, there was a great possibility that a student may find actually their favorite spot, maybe because their legs are longer than the average or maybe because their height is a little shorter. And it enabled us to embed different ranges of abilities within the design of the space.

- In remembrance of the 20th Anniversary of the ADA, the National Museum of American History's fantastic curator and disability historian, Katherine Ott, presented some objects out of storage on Monday the 26th. I saw the announcement too late (not in DC anyway), but we can all look forward to an exhibition on American disability history in the coming year from the Smithsonian; in the meantime, here are some old links to Katherine's excellent past exhibitions on Polio and the Disability Rights Movement.

- Various spots around the web remember the irreverent cartoonist John Callahan, who spurned the "pathetic" narrative of most disability discourse in pieces like this one:

Image via the New York Times: obituary for Callahan here. A fond and personal remembrance from Portland here (via SDS listserv).

Looking up some of Callahan's old cartoons and illustrations, I also liked this one, which accompanied an article in New Mobility on visitability in housing:

American Able is Awesome

2010-05-14T12:58:00.007-04:00

Oh man, I am so thrilled by American Able, a spoof of the ridiculous quasi-porn hipster photos that dominate American Apparel ads, shot by the photographer Holly Norris and featuring "crooked" artist/performer Jes Sachse (side note: it doesn't surprise me that a sly shot at an "American" company comes from a different part of North America, Canada):

The photos fantastically, directly confront the lack of disabled and queer images in pop culture, with a cool and upbeat vibe that almost makes you want to buy those clothes just so you can be as cool as Jes (if only American Apparel realized the potential of going beyond their usual pool of young, thin, women making porno faces/poses at the camera). Read more on Worn Journal and Threadbared (where I first read about it)- two great, smart fashion/art blogs! Image via.

groping

2010-04-18T16:49:00.003-04:00

A few stories have crossed my screen/desk/whatever lately that concern blind people and sexuality that seem very weird and misplaced: first, the release of Tactile Minds, a tactile image and Braille text pornography/erotica book by a Canadian graphic designer named Lisa Murphy. This project sounds interesting enough (I really don't know anything about the availability of erotic materials for blind and visually impaired people - though it is notable that Playboy published a Braille edition from 1970-1985), though it was unfortunately mostly covered as a kind of "news of the weird" item, as if no one has ever heard of blind people having an interest in sex or sexy images or whatever [via Jezebel, Village Voice).

This wouldn't be particularly notable, but today I read in the NY Times Magazine of a study that aims to find out what men's "real" preferences in women's body types are by toting around headless mannequins of various dimensions for blind men to grope. Hmm, how many things are wrong with this study?
a) just because blind men are not exposed to the actual images in commercial culture, that somehow means their opinions/preferences are not shaped by prevailing social attitudes about body type and sexuality?
b) the goal of the study was "an attempt to gauge the force of culture, to weigh the learned and the innate, in determining sexual attraction" -- so the blind are not part of culture, and are somehow more "innate" in their sexual desires?
c) if blind people feeling up mannequins is an accurate judgment of men's "innate" preferences, then sighted people judge body shape alone, without any other contextual clues? (without heads, for example - so race, skin color, hair, and facial expression don't factor into sexual attraction?)
d) the study was careful to select only "blind from birth" subjects - but how did it define "heterosexual"? Because that's a totally static category, right?

The study - and the article about it - show the appeal of these tidy, evolutionary explanations of the roots of our desires and preferences:

...sighted and blind men both strongly favored the mannequin with the lower W.H.R. [Waist-to-Hip Ratio], but this slimmer-waisted body received especially high scores from the men with sight, maybe because a life spent amid cultural signals compounds the work of evolution. Still, the gropings of Karremans’s blind offer a glimpse into the ancestral depths of our desires.

Sure-- OR the fact that the two subject groups matched pretty closely could be because the blind men are part of the larger culture? Their slightly less strong preference - could that be because of the compounded cultural messages that de-sexualize blind people and other people with disabilities? Just a guess.

fun ideas for a sunny friday

2010-03-19T15:47:00.004-04:00

I always feel a bit touchy around the many "experimental design for the disabled" sites/blog posts/articles you see around.. but these wheelchair designs, selected by mainstream design site Switched, are pretty fun:

A pink-cushioned bent plywood armchair in the style of the Eames Chair, fitted with matching tires and an ottoman, would be hell on the balance but makes a clear (intended) comment about the difference between brand-name design icons and designs for assistive technologies.

Roll.Charge.Light.Protect offers the idea of wheelchair spokes that light up (charged by the wheels, of course) for safer night wheeling. Definitely reminiscent of the many light-up gizmos commuter cyclists choose for helmet, seat, clothes and fenders.

Switched also did a post of design prototypes for gadgets for visually impaired users - interesting that all but one are for computerized readers/sensors of some kind. Designers often fall into the trap of assuming all assistive devices are extremely high-tech, expensive specialty items, and overlook the everyday technologies everyone uses - wonder what potential any of these have to be integrated into mass-market products, as current screen-readers are - on the iPad, for example..

olympic interlude, paralympic prelude

2010-02-24T14:58:00.004-05:00

Peter Axelson (image via Disabled Sports USA), an inventor, promoter, and 7-time World Champion in monoskiing, will be one of the U.S.' official delegates to the Olympics closing ceremony on Sunday, Feb 28 (via). Axelson has designed sports equipment for people with disabilities since 1981, when he founded Beneficial Designs and produced his first monoski. Since then Beneficial Designs has produced equipment for alpine and cross-country skiing, surfing, and rowing - releasing each design for open-source use rather than patenting and limiting its availability.
(while looking up images for this post, btw, I came across this great article on the history of adaptive skiing on disaboom)

Then the Paralympics start shortly after the Olympic Games - March 21.
The Paralympics are unlikely to be on NBC - but there is an internet TV channel for them here.
This is a great preview of the Canadian sledge hockey team (they won gold in 2006):

If anyone reading this hasn't seen it, the 2005 documentary Murderball is a fantastic warm-up to the Paralympics.

misc. links

2010-02-11T10:38:00.006-05:00

I have just started a new fellowship at the Lemelson Center for the History of Invention & Innovation at the National Museum of American History. It's great to work here, partly because there are a bunch of people working on a Disability History exhibition coming up in the fall (I think) - great because I don't meet a lot of people who work on disability history in my everyday academic life. One of the staff pointed me to this video - from the Disability Rights Commission in the UK - which shows some of the common accessibility issues people with disabilities face through an funny imagined scenario... watch the full version here in 2 parts.

- Remarkable profile of Roger Ebert from Esquire, describing in moving and non-sappy detail his life since he lost his voice.

- Interesting project: DesigNYC (founded by Ed Schlossberg, student of Buckminster Fuller as well as husband of Caroline Kennedy) pairs designers with social causes: examples include an "Eating Healthy in Bed-Stuy" booklet for Bed-Stuy Farm Share; a safer, brighter winter lighting plan for the Broadway commercial district (60th-135th); and several interior/community spaces, including one for a housing project for people w/ mental illness. Article at Design Observer.

- Kansas City Star remembers Paul Levy, activist for accessibility and director of non-profits including The Whole Person Inc., Kansas City; the Coalition for Independence; and Universal Design Housing Network

The Other Disabilities

2010-02-10T09:31:00.005-05:00

It's pretty rare to come across much writing/thinking about design for disabilities other than mobility and dexterity impairments: paralysis, arthritis, etc. Here on Design Observer (one of the best design commentary sites around), a reflection on design and OCD by Chappell Ellison, a designer based in New York. Not surprisingly, the essay won a 2009 AIGA Winterhouse Award for Design Writing & Criticism.

Mainly, the essay is a poignant memoir of difficult objects in Ellison's brother's life as he lives with OCD. Laundry baskets with endless holes to clean, restaurant tablecloths rife with germs. But the last few paragraphs address how and whether designers can respond to this particular disease. Universal Design, she (I think?) admits, may not be a useful paradigm, and ultimately it will never be possible to anticipate all of her brother's (let alone the other thousands/millions who have compulsive disorders) object-related concerns. I'm thinking that even Ellison's awareness of such compulsions probably makes her a better designer, aware of the unintended consequences of surface, texture, and form. As she writes,

As a designer, I know that it is impossible to consider every tiny percentage of each special interest group when creating a new product... To create an object for someone who fears tactility and physical interaction is the sort of assignment that turns a designer’s world upside down.

But maybe that is part of the point - design cannot address every variation in human bodies and experiences. Universal Design even has its problems for people with mobility issues - many blind people who use canes have a harder time determining the end of the sidewalk with a curb cut; some people prefer stairs to sloping walkways, etc. Disabilities that affect cognition and behavior are even harder to address and anticipate through design. But as this article suggests, the aim of acknowledging, if not "solving," disability in design might prove to be a fruitful one.

2010-02-09T09:51:00.004-05:00

Dwell presents | The Bathroom Reinvented: Universal Design in Public Bathrooms | Part 1 | by Gary Nadeau from gary nadeau on Vimeo.

Nice video clip of Gary Nadeau (of Dwell magazine) visiting public bathrooms with Dan Formosa and Richard Whitehall of Smart Design (designers of, among other things, OXO Good Grips). They are a great odd couple on Universal Design.. Formosa gives the technical definition - its roots in barrier-free legislation - while Whitehall gives the larger meaning/context: Universal Design suggests the possibility of attending to human needs, including emotional, political, social.

Also maybe the best looking collection of people ever collected to expound on the experience of going to the bathroom.

two new architecture projects

2009-11-12T10:30:00.005-05:00

very different ones...

- The Interlock House was a recent entry in the Solar Decathlon in DC (via Urbantrekker). Designed by a team from Iowa State, the house "is designed specifically to appeal to seniors and meets all regulations for accessibility under the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act. The house is also designed to "interlock" into existing communities instead of taking over undeveloped land—a much more sustainable approach to building." (nice way of putting the joint goals of universal design and sustainability)

Image: Computer drawing of the Interlock House, a modern, rectangular house with an angled roof covered in solar panels and surrounded by a yard and blooming garden. A wide, flat deck that wraps around the corner. In the mock-up, an older couple go about their daily tasks: she is arriving with a bag in hand, he is raking leaves.

- Temporary solar-powered wheelchair lifts are to be installed at the Duke of York steps in London for the Festival of Architecture next year (via bd). Cool solution for the age-old historic buildings accessibility problem, and fitting modern look for the festival. Reminds me of my old post on a world without stairs.
Image: Computer drawing of the three-tiered Duke of York steps, with the mock-ups of three glass towers installed on the landings to house wheelchair lifts.

college

2009-11-09T14:51:00.002-05:00

Apparently a new building at Cal State - Long Beach has all the signs of accessibility we've come to recognize -- that is, just the signs. Beyond the standard blue wheelchair signs indicating access, the planners seem to have forgotten to actually add accessible features. I love the outrage of the op-ed in the student paper, the Daily 49er:

This is a brand new frickin’ building. If no accommodations are made to make it easier for disabled persons to enter, what is the purpose of the signs? Are they just put there to tell people with disabilities they are welcome inside — if they can manage to get in? It’s like saying, “We have food, but you’re only allowed to smell it from outside if you can’t open the door yourself.”

I'm dismayed at this design goof, but I love the insight into how students these days see accessibility requirements, which for many of them have been in place since they were born (sorry fellow old folks -- many college students were born in 1990 or later). The op-ed quotes the ADA and the University's diversity policies and asks how this oversight could have happened. For them, these codes are a given, and violations (at least violations this obvious) an outrage. We're a long way from the early disability rights activists at UC Berkeley in the late 1960s, who had to ask fellow students to drag their wheelchairs up and down stairs, and plan their classes around physical barriers around campus.

new links

2009-10-28T15:08:00.003-04:00

Ablegamers is a site about disability and gaming -- a niche I did not expect to be so interesting (being a total non-gamer)! Got to love extra nerdy stuff like an exploration of Dean Kamen's "Luke Arm" (a robotic prosthetic arm named after Luke Skywalker) as well as more serious content like discussions of connections between the female gaming community and disabled gamers.

"Art and Abilities" - an annual special exhibition/event at the University of Michigan.

Online slide show about web accessibility, by Ann McMeekin.

Cool thing: via Designing Well, a 1949 film clip of the "Step-Saving Kitchen," with a reminder of how many of these suggestions (standard postwar scientific management stuff) would be considered "universal design" today (music added by YouTube user and is not original):

Easy-to-reach shelves and storage, cookbook page holder, pull-out work surface to sit at, and a rolling cart. Not to sure about those drop-in cooking surfaces though...

New Blog (feature): Accessibility Watch

2009-10-20T11:11:00.004-04:00

Last week, Metropolis editor Horace Havemeyer III described going to an event at the Player's Club in New York, where he had a hard time ascending the stairs to the parlor floor where the event was happening -- Havemeyer uses forearm crutches, and given the Players' Club's landmark status they have been exempt from accessibility requirements. This week, Havemeyer announces that there will be regular "accessibility watch" columns on Metropolis' blog. He writes:

Some restaurants that lack elevators, or that have stairs without proper hand rails, train their staff to look out for the handicapped and help them enter. But, in my experience, most do not. I know of many clubs in wonderful older buildings, often ones that are landmarked, that have little or no access for any level of the disabled. I wonder if the general feeling is that a landmarked building is exempt from the ADA.
We are looking for comments and examples of accessibility issues from all who visit our site. Please remember that at any hour of any day, any of you could join us handicapped—temporarily, I hope—due to a sprained ankle, a bike injury, or other chance accident. Leave your public comments using the form below [here], or e-mail your examples to pov@metropolismag.com.

The call is for New York complaints, mainly -- but it would be interesting to see a central spot for accessibility watches. I wonder what the most common access issues are, in ADA compliant, noncompliant, and exempt spaces?

I like this poster

2009-10-15T15:08:00.002-04:00

Poster designed by three Delcastle, Delaware high school students for Disability History and Awareness Month. One of the team drew on her own disability experience in the design, which I find very clever. It must have been fun making up handwriting for all of those people! Read about it here.

Photo description: the poster reads "Don't Label Me As a Failure!" in block letters, with a lot of colorful "Hello, My Name Is ___" stickers below with the names of famous people with disabilities - ranging from Helen Keller (with a smiley face) to Jay Leno (dyslexia), Dan Ackroyd (Tourette's Syndrome) and Thomas Edison (Deaf).

Access, info, technology

2009-10-01T11:03:00.004-04:00

A few weeks ago a NY Times video/article on "Expanding Options for the Disabled" addressed the expense and difficult insurance issues around people with disabilities being able to access improved technological tools for speech, reading, etc. A lot of these fairly simple tools -- like speaking computer technologies -- are not standard on PCs and are not covered by insurance. The problem in many cases with assistive technology development is not designing or inventing them, it's making them available and accessible. One strategy is "universal" design as a marketing strategy, e.g. making something like touchscreens that are an appealing technology for anyone and also advance usability for people with disabilities. Another is low-tech, affordable tools that might be less technologically advanced but which people with disabilities have been making and adapting at home or in small production for many years.

In access hacker Liz Henry report on visiting Whirlwind Wheelchairs - a great review of the work Whirlwind does making wheelchairs for (and in) developing-world contexts - she describes conversations about sharing DIY tinkering/engineering info. One of the Whirlwind folks mentions having piles of plans and materials but no where to put them; they also discuss how many people have small technical solutions that could be shared with fairly simple instructions, but no easy way to distribute. Liz writes,

I ended up feeling like we were all talking about a similar vision and project. A central repository, managed by a trustable institution that won’t go away, with the information portable, translatable, and with room for comments and input and tagging. Phase 1 might be simply scanning rather a lot of information and sticking it up somewhere that it could be indexed by search engines. Metadata could be added and good OCR correction done on the PDFs, by people hired from a grant and/or by volunteers coordinated in the manner of open source software projects. Phase 3, probably at the same time as phase 2, would be builders and makers, trying some of the projects and posting feedback, which might just be a photo or two of the build or the result, with a paragraph of description. Phase 4 we can think of as the times people improve on an original design in their subsequent builds.

I think Liz really hits on one of the big issues in assistive technology development: information and access. My sense is that there are parts of the design world who are interested in simple instructions, easy DIY products (like ReadyMade, which publishes simple home/furnishing hacks as well as selling mail-order kits; and the whole Make/Instructables world). It really strikes me that this is what Graham Pullin's Design Meets Disability misses (though it raises other interesting issues) - the reality of how people get things, afford them, make them. I'd love to see more about groups like Whirlwind that operate outside of the giant medical technology company world. It doesn't seem like a coincidence that they are operating outside of the US health care system.

notes

2009-10-01T10:40:00.003-04:00

Exhibit Relates Architecture to the Body - Penn State hosts a program called Deviant Decoration: The Architectural Interior, which I have to say sounds like a weirdly/poorly titled show of works related to the body and disability, since the works don't seem to attack deviance so much as the lived experience of the body in architecture/space. Title, aside, interesting-sounding content: the exhibition Body Works features art/design models by Sarah Wigglesworth, an architect who presents work on a science classroom for blind students and an inclusive dance studio. As part of the program, disability scholar David Serlin also discussed his work on Hellen Keller's diaries, describing her travels and interactions with city and building space. Body Works will be on display Sept. 28 to Dec. 15.

Speaking of David Serlin, he is giving a talk called “Touching Histories: Personality and Disability in American Sex Studies of the 1930s” at U Penn next week, on October 6: info here.

The Ugly Laws book tour dates

2009-07-14T10:57:00.002-04:00

I am looking forward to seeing Susan Schweik speak and read from her book tonight at Modern Times bookstore in San Francisco.. here are other events related to her new book, The Ugly Laws: Disability in Public.

San Francisco: Tuesday July 14 (With "Tiny" Garcia of Poor Magazine,
Leroy Moore, Coalition on Homelessness and the Po' Poets): Modern Times
Bookstore, 888 Valencia St, 7 pm. Focus on connections to continuing
criminalization of poverty today.

Cleveland: Sunday July 26: Barnes and Noble Eton Collection, 28801 Chagrin
Blvd, Woodmere, 2 pm. Focus on Cleveland and Ohio disability history.

Chicago: Tuesday July 28: Access Living, 115 W. Chicago, 6-8:30 pm. RSVP
to Riva, 312-640-1919, rlehrer@accessliving.org. Focus on poor disabled
peoples' resistance to the laws.

Chicago: Wednesday July 29: Women and Children First bookstore, 5233 North
Clark Street, 7:30 pm. Focus on connections betwen the policing of
disability and the policing of gender in the laws.

See http://www.booktour.com/author/susan_schweik

thoughts on the Kindle and computers

2009-07-06T09:52:00.004-04:00

As the Chronicle of Higher Ed and others report, the National Federation for the Blind and the American Council of the Blind are suing Arizona State University over its new policy to provide textbooks to students via the Amazon Kindle, a device (as Blind advocates have noted for some time) that has the capacity to read books aloud but does not provide any non-visual prompts (i.e. you cannot get to the audio features if you are visually impaired). It seems that ASU is providing a way for some students to receive their course material electronically, but in a format that others cannot access; this is the definition of unequal access and does seem to this total ADA layperson to be questionable.

These kinds of debates will intensify as more and more electronics come out that use alternative interfaces. Fast Company recently asked top designers, "What Will Cell Phones Look Like 10 Years From Now?" and their responses showed this interest in multi-sensory, flexible computer interactions: phones of the future, they said, will fit on fingertips -- or even IN fingertips -- or will be gone entirely, as we will mine data from "account based networks" that one designer calls "the cloud" (though he is not specific about what kind of device would be used). Touch screen elements are still a curiosity in full-sized computers (2 M out of 300 M PCs sold have them, according to the NY Times, but more are on their way) .

Touch-screens, speaking computers, and interactive devices that are freed from the standard screen/keypad type of interface (like the Wii) have tremendous potential for disabled users. Still, as Jim Tobias of Access on Main Street comments, "we’re just doing target practice here until real stuff shows up" -- that is, a lot of these new devices point in the direction of greater accessibility, but are not there yet. One of the problems is that the makers of products like the Kindle do not integrate awareness of disability into their products from the get-go-- and for those who imagine improvement is inevitable, let's keep in mind that Kindle is already on version 2 without fixing this problem-- in fact the problem is worse now that publishers have some say in whether books can be read aloud. Here are some products that do address a fuller group of users from the start:

- I noted in an earlier post that Google has worked to make touch screens easier to use for visually impaired users. The design team (which includes engineer TV Raman, who is blind) came up with a "relative" touch application for Google's mobile Android operating system. The cleverly named "Eyes-free" shell makes any place the user hits become the center of the screen (for dialing, the first touch locates the 5). Eyes-free has a YouTube channel with videos about the program.

- Australian designer Rhys Cooper recently won a MEX Mobile User Experience award for his Doo Phone, a cell phone interface designed for people with intellectual disabilities. Its simplified menus and large images representing most frequently-called numbers help keep users from getting "lost" in their mobile phone menus. The Doo Phone certainly has promise for a broader population as phones become more and more complex-- and it helps that Cooper designed it for existing mobile platforms.

As for the Kindle in university education, it seems faulty to invest a lot of institutional energy and money in a device that still has a lot of problems from an intellectual property standpoint. Because of its strong Digital Rights Management aspects (i.e. you cannot read a Kindle file on another device), it limits the user to just one interface. Recently Core77 reported on some ID students' designs for smartbooks for Freescale-- they included touch screens, collapsible keyboards, and thin, mobile elements that could be arranged in a variety of ways. As the students brainstormed the design project, they drew inspiration from both mobile phones and video games-- drawing on their own knowledge of the potential for highly flexible and mobile devices. Variety and tactility will be key in this market-- something the Kindle seems still to be working out.

Disability Meets Design meets the press

2009-07-05T18:40:00.005-04:00

Alice Rawsthorn reviews Grant Pullin's Disability Meets Design for the NY Times (she writes regularly on design for the International Herald Tribune and others). This is an excellent book that goes beyond anything I have ever read from the design world in terms of really examining both "design" and "disability" as constructed concepts-- as richly varied and variable arenas where human experience can be examined in relationship to the world of objects/spaces. The review picks up on one of Pullin's easiest to grasp examples: that glasses are fashionable, desirable, and not at all discreet products that could also be classified as "assistive devices." It's a great example, as is the design project called HearWear in which designers created prototypes for similarly varied and fashion-conscious hearing aids (pictured below: 'wearhead, the HearWear contribution by Hulger -- a camouflage-patterned set of oversized headphones, with options for a variety of patterns/colors -- which suggests the varied forms that specialized earwear, like sunglasses, might take). Source.
As this book gets attention in the non-disability-related press, this example will appear again and again. It's a good one. But Pullin also discusses design for people who use significant and very visible equipment, such as communication/speaking aids. Pullin also mentions a project in which designers worked in close collaboration with individual children with disabilities to develop products specifically for them. One of the designers created a light-up badge (I think we Americans would say "button") for a girl named Somiya, whose speech is impaired, so that she could quickly and easily add her own voice (so to speak) to an initial encounter. The message she chose was "Somiya says SOD OFF" -- a greeting I find so delightfully pissy as it completely refuses to capitulate to the charitable gaze that is most likely sent her way a lot of the time -- and which infuses a lot of writing about design and disability (below, the badge with its white words on a bright red background). Source.

The SOD OFF button isn't in any of the reviews of Pullin's book, as far as I have seen. I can't help but think this might be because it does not have a feel-good tone -- one that might fit with Rawsthorn's title, "Crafting for the Body and Soul." It's important in our discussion of design for disability to note that it is not just "sub-standard" design that stigmatizes-- it is disability. Design has the power to call into question stereotypes and expectations, and to provide alternatives to existing limitations. HearWear is the low-hanging fruit of that project-- a great example, but one that is still a fairly small target. Pullin's book rejects (implicitly and explicitly) the idea that design for disability is a charitable, "responsible" project -- instead, he argues that it cuts to the core of what design is about, shaping human experience. Even in some of the terms Rawsthorn uses-- noting the "heroes" of Pullin's book -- she retreads some of the same tired ground where disability is a do-gooder project, not just one that makes a lot of sense.

design and disability -- practitioner version

2009-06-26T01:22:00.001-04:00

Royal Institute of British Architects announces new research project on disability inclusion IN the profession of architecture (i.e. inquiring into the status of architects w/ disabilities):

"This is an opportunity for all constituencies in the profession of architecture to hold up a mirror to their everyday attitudes, and re-evaluate the manner in which disability is treated in both architecture education and practice," commented David Gloster, Director of Education at the RIBA."

link roundup: city life/facilities edition

2009-06-13T19:25:00.009-04:00

San Francisco has unveiled some new bus stops with touch-screen (and audio enhanced) information screens and wifi hubs, once again putting my home city of New York to shame in their public transit accessibility and use of technology: they are currently in testing phase and 1,100 are planned.

The Dallas Morning News describes the experiences of an architect who spent 24 hours as a resident in a nursing home to understand the design issues

Chicago will open a National Public Housing Museum in the last remaining building in the WPA-era Jane Addams Homes. I wonder if there will be any discussion of disability issues, like the poor choices people with disabilities face in public housing and long histories of abuse in public hospitals/nursing homes.

Another tidbit of history: Penny Richards at Temple's Disability Studies blog spends some time in the Library of Congress' "Flickr Commons" and finds evidence of early 20th c. wheelchairs as a public convenience at the Bronx Zoo (much like at zoos/museums/etc today).

summer reading

2009-06-11T14:20:00.008-04:00

Looking over DesignObserver's latest new books list... as usual, a lot of books on sustainability alongside glossy coffee table books. For once though, there is a disability-related book: Design Meets Disability, which I am reading right now and will hopefully review soon.

a few others that caught my eye...

Design Your Life: The Pleasures and Perils of Everyday Things by Ellen Lupton

Good Design: Deconstructing Form, Function, and What Makes Things Work by Terry Marks

Design Activism: Beautiful Strangeness for a Sustainable World by Alistair Fuad-Luke

and a book I contributed an essay to (on bicycles and user-focused design studies): The Design Studies Reader, whose $100+ price is pretty disappointing.

Old Houses

2009-06-02T17:40:00.004-04:00

It's been a while since I lived in a HOUSE -- a free-standing, non-attached building where I have free range of 2 (3 counting basement) stories. I'm in Newark, DE, for a couple of weeks for the second annual Public Engagement/Material Culture Institute, a part of an NEH-funded program to support graduate students in sharing their research with a broader public. I am renting a room in the top of a small, mid-century (my guess would be postwar) house on a cute leafy street very close to campus. The neighborhood has similar Cape Cods and other revival-ish single- or multi-family houses, many of which are chopped up into collegiate apartments.

Pictured at right: the house where I am staying, a beige-stuccoed house with a low gable and a small awning over the stoop to the left of the picture. Plants are overflowing in the Delaware sun.

Being in this house I am immediately aware of the dimensions of houses built in the mid 20th century. These are modest spaces compared to the "great rooms" of McMansions and even the roving open living/family areas of 60s ranch-style homes. And the doorways: small. 30" doorways -- 32" is the ADA-compliant minimum-- and similarly narrow, as well as steep stairway. It's just a different scale than recent construction.

In the 1940s through 60s, when this housing type was increasingly common, filling the middle-class suburbs of postwar America, people with physical disabilities and their families had to take some creative approaches to make do with cramped spaces and narrow passageways. The polio-generation magazine the Toomey J Gazette ran pictures of a lot of these home-fixing projects, like a ramp pinned to the side of a house, with a trap door so the non-wheelchair-using household members could still use the steps.

(image from Toomey J Gazette, Spring 1961: three shots of a modest, clapboard house with a wheelchair ramp attached to the front. Images show a man pushing a woman in a wheelchair down this ramp; in the others, the man demonstrates how the middle of the ramp can be raised or lowered, adding or removing access to the stoop.)

Back in Newark, across the street from the house where I am staying there is a pretty non-descript rental house with a brick front and porch with a balustrade-- but no handrail down the few steps leading up to it. Someone has added one, a bright red number made of pipe parts. No doubt someone -- a landlord or a resident -- decided this house should be kinder to the tired legs that might be climbing up those steps.

2009-05-10T22:22:00.003-04:00

image: Martha Mason, a woman with glasses and a long gray ponytail, is pictured in her wood-paneled living room, lying horizontally in a creamy yellow-colored iron lung respirator. A younger woman, Mary Dalton, sits in a chair by Martha with her head tilted to look at her friend.

The NY Times has an exceptionally evocative, personal obit today for Martha Mason, the author of a memoir, Breathe, about her life using an iron lung for the last 60 years. According to the article she was one of about 30 people who still use iron lungs in the US. The article tenderly evokes the rhythms of life using a large, unwieldy, but life-saving piece of equipment that eventually becomes part of the daily routine:

From her horizontal world — a 7-foot-long, 800-pound iron cylinder that encased all but her head — Ms. Mason lived a life that was by her own account fine and full, reading voraciously, graduating with highest honors from high school and college, entertaining and eventually writing.

She chose to remain in an iron lung, she often said, for the freedom it gave her. It let her breathe without tubes in her throat, incisions or hospital stays, as newer, smaller ventilators might require. It took no professional training to operate, letting her remain mistress of her own house, with just two aides assisting her.

...
Ms. Mason often gave dinner parties — she ate lying down, with her guests around the table and the iron lung pushed up beside it — and savored lively conversation, good gossip and the occasional bawdy story. Amid the rhythmic whoosh ... whoosh of the iron lung, the local book club met in her home.

This was a good sentence to read too:

Ms. Mason’s only immediate survivors are her aides, Ginger Justice and Melissa Boheler, whom she considered family.

Hat tip: SDS-discuss listserve.

speaking of iPhones (or at least touch screens)

2009-04-08T09:32:00.005-04:00

From the NY Times: Google's Phone Apps for the Blind, and Everyone Else.

Pretty much a classic Universal Design scenario-- two engineers (one of whom is blind) at Google develop an option on a phone where the touch-screen does not require you to look at it (wherever you touch becomes the "center"). Presto, it works for everyone who is trying to do stuff on a touch screen without looking at it, like while driving.

It makes sense when you design interfaces to think of a broad group of users. The Amazon Kindle, which seems like such a great product for blind/low-vision users, has an audio option but not an accessible interface (voice prompts, etc). Opportunity missed, PR screwed up. (hat tip)

I hate my iPhone

2009-04-05T13:49:00.006-04:00

or at least Virginia Hefferna n does (I don't have one-- thanks, I'm online too much already).

When I talk to anyone over 60 or so, the cell phone issue often comes up. These things don't work that well for a lot of people-- they are small and hard to see and hard to program. The market seems to provide for the range of preferences-- don't like the iPhone, get a Blackberry.. or a Jitterbug, pictured above. The letters are larger and "click" when you push them, the screen is stripped down to the basics with few add-ons or menus, and there's an ultra-simple keypad option to use the phone just for emergencies.

aimee mullins

2009-04-01T22:53:00.004-04:00

via the SDS listserv-- Aimee Mullins, who "cheetah" prosthetic limbs have been much photographed, speaking at TED:

"the prosthetic limb doesn't represent the need to replace loss anymore. It can stand as a symbol that the wearer has the power to create whatever they want to create... they can become the architects of their own identities."
I mean, she veers into sci-fi a little bit ("it's about augmentation") and her solution is not really one for everyone (duh). But that she is putting out this really jarring, antithetical image about what prosthetic limbs mean and what the disabled body does with them -- seems really important, and quite beautiful. I also can't help noting how she has worked with artists and designers -- creative worlds where fantasy and sci-fi often lean on pretty flat images of disability-- in a way where she clearly represents herself and sees it as a collaboration.

Also: HOT shoes. wow.

2009-04-01T17:47:00.023-04:00

I have been slow to update this blog lately-- oh, the cycle of academic work and procrastination and guilt!

But here is what I've been working on..

The main work I have been doing lately is about the do-it-yourself and small-production technical work for and by people with disabilities during the 1950s-60s. This time period, I find, is interesting for the history of disability-related design because it is a kind of transition time: on the one hand, people with severe physical disabilities (spinal cord injuries, cerebral palsy, polio) were more and more likely to live long and healthy lives with mobility impairments. Medical professionals and policy groups advocated "independent living" as a better choice for recovery and social order, but living in homes and communities was not so easy for folks who used wheelchairs, canes, crutches, respirators, and had manual disabilities. As a result, a variety of gadgets and gizmos appeared to bridge the gap between the ambitions and interests of people with disabilities and the world that was not designed well for them.

A lot of these were published by doctors or other rehabilitation experts as part of an effort to ease the transition from clinic to home, like Howard Rusk and Eugene Taylor's Living With a Disability (Blakiston Co, 1953), which featured low-tech options as make-your-own utensils with secure straps:
(image: black-and-white image shows forks and spoons with metal straps and finger sheaths attached to their handles, scattered on a black ground)

Rusk and Taylor also acknowledged the potential usefulness of new materials and gadgets of the postwar consumer culture, such as children's drink cups (aka sippy-cups) and electric razors.

(images: two layouts from Rusk and Taylor's book, with black-and-white images laid out around text. Left, three cups: one white plastic cup with a handle, one clear plastic with a white lid and with a hole and a straw, and one with and hand holding a cup with an attached metal handle with a large loop. There is also a clear plastic saucer on the page.

Right, a two-page layout with men shaving with electric razors: one uses a prosthetic hand, while the others hold handles and loops attached to the appliances.)

These kinds of technical fixes for day-to-day independent living also featured heavily in the content of the Toomey J Gazette, a publication "for by and about respiratory polios" that ran from 1958-1969 (before it became the Rehabilitation Gazette). The Toomey J allowed contributors a forum to share very personalized, creative approaches to making their mid-century home life work for wheelchair, respirator, and rocking bed living. The solutions were wide-ranging and sometimes fanciful, like:

(image: an ink drawing of an array of different mouthstick designs, each attributed to its designer. Splayed out in a fan from a central pair of lips, the materials include eye-dropper tips with dowels stuck in them, cigarette holders, even the rubber heel of a child's or doll's shoe to be held in the teeth. From the Toomey J Gazette, Spring 1960.)

Other contributions were more technical, like a Citroen 2 CV that had been cut up to make a flatbed platform for driving in a wheelchair: the car was equipped with two sets of hand controls and a swiveling floor so that the driver could turn around to drive in reverse, rather than having to crane his neck.
(image: three newsprint images of Fred Taberlet and his Citroen, a convertible-top car with an open space for driver and his wheelchair.)

In my dissertation, I write about these adaptations, adjustments, and inventions as part of the broader social context for the disability rights movement: this homespun work is a tacit assertion of the right for people with disabilities to operate and move within mainstream American spaces-- the "right to be in the world" that Jacobus tenBroek declared in a 1966 essay in the California Law Review.

I'll be talking about this research in two upcoming conference talks:

Technocultures and Identity Conference (Mid-America American Studies Association meeting)
Center for Ethnic Studies and the Arts, The University of Iowa
Friday, April 3, 12:30 pm
Panel: Medical Technologies and Identity
Kirkwood Room, 257 IMU
Chair: Michael Krysko (Kansas State)
“Chemical Technology and Emerging Identities: The Role of Technology
and Rhetoric in the Construction of the Hyperactive Child,” Jonathan
Hansen (Iowa)
“Technology and Disability Identity: The Toomey J. Gazette, 1959-1969,”
Bess Williamson (Delaware)

Material Culture Symposium for Emerging Scholars
Winterthur Museum, Wilmington, DE
Saturday, April 25, 3 pm
Panel: The Private Lives of Public Objects
Emily Voss, Cooperstown Graduate Program (Museum Studies)
"Astronauts, Aliens, Rockets, and Ray Guns: Space Toys and American Children 1950-1977"
Bess Williamson, University of Delaware (History of American Civilization)
"Doing It Themselves: Gadgets for and by People with Disabilities, 1945-1970"Drew Sawyer, Columbia University (Art History and Archaeology)
"The Queer Life of Crisco"Commentator: Peter Stallybrass, Professor in the Humanities and Professor of English and of Comparative Literature and Literary Theory, University of Pennsylvania

living like a refugee

2009-02-01T20:22:00.006-05:00

Image: Vermont's Shelburne Museum's colonial jail, a small stone building with one small window and wooden stocks in front for public display of criminals. via the Shelburne Museum

I have seen a few blog posts referring to this horrid, embarrassing "Refugee Run" at the Davos summit where one can pretend to be a refugee for a day-- the flyer promises an "attack by rebels, a 'mine field', border corruption, language incapacity, black marketeering and refugee camp survival. Ooh, all in one day!! Extensive comments at Wheelchair Dancer, NYU's Aid Watch.

Why this is offensive is pretty obvious from a glance, right? You can’t simulate the feeling of being in danger, or being persecuted, threatened, humiliated, being lost and homeless, etc. But as a historian and educator schooled in material culture studies, I want to think about this in another way. This exercise reminds me of lots of “living history” and other similar spaces and performances where the bodily and environmental experience of another’s condition aims to bring greater awareness: I think of putting my legs through the stocks at the Shelburne Museum (image above) when I was a kid; standing in the dark entryways and crowded apartments at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum; walking along the cliffs at battlegrounds in Normandy, one of the only times I have felt even a shadow of what it must be like to be in a war; the elevator at the National Holocaust Museum, where the crowd and the silent moving box immediately make you think of a gas chamber or a terrifying train ride.

I have never done it, but I hear of a lot of exercises where people try out wheelchairs for the day—museum professionals, campus planners, etc—so they can get a sense of the physical barriers that people with disabilities face. Since I started studying disability issues in design, I have heard people talk or read people writing about these experiments and how it changed their awareness of their environment. I have steered clear of them, however, because it makes me somewhat uncomfortable. Who am I to act out someone else’s experience? Also, from the standpoint of really understanding what it is like to use a wheelchair, it doesn’t work—because people who use them adjust and customize them and get used to certain movements and tricks. It seems like cooking in Julia Child’s kitchen for one time only (without her present) and thinking that would teach you how to cook like her.

But then—here’s the problem. My brain tells me that we can never really feel what it is like to be in the shoes (or chairs) of others, but the truth is that I remember all of those places I mention above more clearly and viscerally than I do any particular room in, say, the Metropolitan Museum, where I have been hundreds of times and given guided tours. I definitely think they have taught me parts of their respective histories that I couldn’t get from just a book or a lecture. I don’t think any of them made me feel LIKE a ---- (colonial prisoner, immigrant, soldier, holocaust victim), but they have helped me understand sensory and experiential details of lives distant from mine. So, in re: wheelchairs, maybe I should give it a shot sometime after all.

The Davos workshop flops because it claims to let people BE refugees for the day. I do think recreating some of the experiences of refugee life might work (though really—I think there are so many possible versions of this thing called “refugee” that it’s hard to imagine this), but it would have to be done so much more sensitively and humbly—and indeed, maybe this one will be run by such wonderful, brilliant people that it will work after all. It may be that a more modest goal should be the starting-point, like just addressing housing or food issues—focusing on the material aspects instead of aiming to recreate the very state of refugee-hood.

While we try to dream up a better workshop, I leave you with some lyrics from the wonderful band Sierra Leone Refugee All-Stars’ (great documentary about them here):
You left your country to seek refuge in another man’s land
You will be comforted by strange dialects
You will be fed with unusual diets
You got to sleep in a tarpaulin house which is so hot
You will sleep on a tarpaulin mat which is so cold
Living like a refugee is not easy…

Manifest Hope Posters

2009-01-22T11:01:00.003-05:00

Image via Manifest Hope: "Yes We Can" Poster by Christopher Tucker. Three vertical US flags with symbols for "the green economy" (CFL light bulb), "workers' unity" (hand gripping a wrench), and "health care reform" (caduceus) in the blue fields.

This is one of fifteen posters chosen for Manifest Hope, a contest for politically-themed posters in time for the inauguration (slideshow of all winners here). These provide an nice snapshot of different strains in poster art-- ranging from the very handmade or painterly to a more glossy advertising style. It strikes me, though, that health care is very difficult to capture in visual language. The poster above is not from the health care section-- those ones are:

'
Obama for All America by Derek Gores. I guess the main representation of "health care" is the Red Cross here; though clearly the persona of the President is central. The focus is the author of the policy.

Potion Bottle-Hope by Marc Petrovic. I find this one a bit unsettling: a sterile glass bottle (which looks like a wine bottle) with four "hope" pills stacked inside. In the Brave New World version of the Obama administration, hope is a pill distributed by the government.

CaduceUS by Ian Simmons. I guess the caduceus is the default symbol for care-- overlaid with the red and blue of partisan politics, it makes its message clear. I do like the simple clarity of the image. If I go a bit further, I could say that if the first image puts health care in the hands of the Prez, this one puts it in medical professionals'.

Health Care Equals Justice by Esperanza Macias. It's the most metaphoric in some ways (statue of liberty in a life raft on a sea of diseases) and yet the most literal: Universal Health care "rescues" America from a whole load of diseases.

U.S. Health Care Just Ill by Sharee Davis. Sometimes words work better than images. I like the directness of this-- it really conveys a feeling of crisis, as well as frustration of something so basic not being available.

It does seem like someone is missing.. the patient/citizen? But overall, a rich group of different graphic strategies. Do you have a favorite political issue graphic/poster? I like this one, which I don't think was ever an official ADAPT poster:

from Microcosm Publishing

inaugural inaccessibility

2009-01-11T14:10:00.005-05:00

Sounds like there is not very good planning/accommodations for people with disabilities at the inauguration:
ABC affliliate: Disabled Citizens Say Inauguration Events Too Difficult to Attend
Stephen Kuusisto comments:
As the above article suggests, people at the Obama inauguration committee say that they've done all they can do to make the proceedings accesible. I believe them though not because I think they've turned earth and sky upside down but because the relative "built in" inaccessibility of our nation's second rate public transportation system and our inability to build disability into the first tier of event planning are commonplace matters that all pwds can relate to. "Oh," someone says after the first plans for moving crowds and setting up seats, "Oh, yeah there will be disabled people, we better figure out what to do about them." By then its too late.

It seems like an extra disappointment because the DC Metro is one of the more accessible systems in America (maybe the world?). I also think this sets some really bad principles out for high-stress, emergency type situations like the WTC attacks and Katrina, where we have all seen that people with disabilities end up in way more danger than others. If you plan an event and just say "people with disabilities, we suggest you do not attend," you are not really confronting the real issues about what it is like to hold large, public events. Not to mention the symbolism of more or less disinviting disabled or older folks to what the new administration is claiming to be "the most open and accessible Inauguration in American history" (from a letter I received from Obama-Biden since I volunteered for their campaign). I really think we need to examine how logistical complications become an easy go-to for exclusion or prejudice in "homeland security" contexts.

Arrogance will getcha

2008-12-10T15:31:00.006-05:00

Image: Fiskars Rotary Cutter and Softtouch Scissors, designed by a team led by Jim Boda and Doug Birkholz, now of Inspire Design (image via Inspire).

I just had a nice chat with Jim Boda, who was head of R&D at Fiskars' US division in the early 90s when they developed Softtouch Scissors. Originally called the "Golden Series," the scissors were developed with the goal of making cutting easier for older users and people with manual disabilities. A spring in the scissors helps them open automatically, saving the effort and eventual discomfort of opening after each cut, while the innovative offset handles and straight bottom edge let you rest them on the table during use. Focus group feedback indicated that they would be useful and appealing to a broad range of users, and the new name reflected this comfort and ease. I see these every time I go to the fabric shop, as all the fabric measure/cutters use them.

Jim commented that, when it comes to designing tools/products, "one of the things that you really want to do is separate yourself—a lot of things can be intuitive, but in watching other people use products I find they really use them differently. We could design intuitively, based on own experiences, but when we get it wrong it's usually because of arrogance. Especially when it comes to the human body... we are all made up of different parts and use them in different ways." Thanks, Jim. He also mentioned that the US division was the first to really bring product innovation to the company-- with total market dominance in Finland, the home company didn't really understand the need-- and that US R&D helped the Finnish and British divisions set up their own design/R&D teams in the 90s. Interesting trans-Atlantic business story.

Depression Design?

2008-12-05T06:58:00.002-05:00

Image: Fireside Chair No. 1, 1943: sturdy wooden chair with cushioned back/seat from the Utility Programme. From Making the Modern World.

Does recession make for better design?
The Herald Trib says it might:
"But the main reason why design could benefit from this recession is because it always thrives on change, and every area of our lives is currently in flux. The economic crisis will not only transform finance and business, but the way we think and behave. Then there's the environmental crisis, and the realization that most of the institutions and systems that regulated our lives in the 20th century need to be reconfigured for the 21st century."

The article focuses on the design of information and organizations to improve transparency; but also suggests the possibility of design contributing to new business models, e.g. the car/bike sharing schemes that are popping up throughout Europe and the US.

It strikes me that for a long time the argument has been that things like environmental benefits in design have to be made desirable and marketable based on a boom-time logic-- an argument backed up in recent years with things like megamansions w/ solar panels, movie stars in Priuses and "sustainable" materials in high-end fashion and interiors. I wonder what a bust-time alternative would be like-- something like Utility furniture, where government partnered with designers to produce affordable, well-designed furnishings for post-war British households. Design is more than a luxury...

accessible and Universal

2008-11-02T17:54:00.007-05:00

Image: A small crowd, including one person in a wheelchair, wait for a light on a Berkeley curb (with curb cut-- a relative rarity for the time), ca. 1977.

I feel like half of my posts refer to Wheelchair Dancer, but that won't stop me from making more..

In her thoughts on Universal Design here, she raises some interesting distinctions between functionality in design and what she calls "potential" -- the difference, as I read it, between designing for specific disabilities and designing for the body in a broader, maybe more imaginative sense.

In a lot of my writing I use the term "accessible" design separately from "Universal"-- Universal refers, I think, to a specific aspiration in design to try to include the broadest spectrum of users, and is rooted in a historical moment when the design world became aware of Disability Rights. Accessible is a kind of bare-minimum, as in "usable" (functional, in WD's discussion) by people with particular impairments. ADA compliance is accessible design; Universal Design goes beyond (and can even violate) codes and regulations.

She also quotes from a UC Berkeley course description for a studio on "Body-Conscious Design" in which students learn "to evaluate and design environments from the point of view of how they interact with the human body." The specific terms "disability," "accessibility" and "universal" appear nowhere, but clearly this course and its approach come out of the last 30+ years of experimentation in the design world around issues of access and usability; it also recalls Berkeley's legacy as a city and university on the forefront of Disability politics (see above). The language in the description points, I think, to the particular way that design can fulfill a certain dream (or even cliche) of Disability Rights-- that people should be seen in terms of their abilities, not disabilities. I don't want to recall the hackneyed language of "handicapable!"-- but, from the design perspective, functionality really is about ability: what is required of the body to open doors, read signs, operate machines/tools -- and, further, to feel comfortable, supported, welcome?

Another aspect here is what design can't do. In the worlds of sustainable/environmental design, some people have started to propose flexibility as a principle-- that things, forms, systems need to be able to change to accommodate new problems and new learning. Out of necessity, regulations like the ADA require specific benchmarks (this height/grade ramp, this width doorway, this sonic/tactile alert system)-- but they have to be seen as a first step only. To really respond to users, a designed system/space/object should allow the user to respond to it, to change it or rearrange it. I'm keeping my eye out for examples of this approach.. and will report if I find them.

architects riffing on ramps and etc

2008-10-27T08:56:00.005-04:00

Image: Entrance to the Rotterdam Kunsthal, designed by Rem Koolhass' OMA: a gently sloping floor enclosed in walls of glass, with massive dark cement columns. A small ramp to the left leads up to a sign reading "entree."

A friend started this thread at Archinect asking about interesting examples of Universal (specifically wheelchair/walking accessible) spaces, sparking a wide-ranging discussion of what architects can, should, and do design for accessibility and inclusion. My quick observation-- some of the contributors to this discussion are quick to shut down the conversation with comments like "what would be the point" of designing a ramped area/space in a building that is not ADA compliant, or, alternatively, that buildings should not be the target of new design but that better wheelchairs and, indeed, re-engineered bodies should be the way to go. It strikes me that pointing away from the design problem is always an easy way to wriggle out of it. Yes, the ADA like all building codes can be shortsighted, but what does that mean-- keep addressing accessibility just as code and not as a real functional or formal issue in a building? Generally speaking, creative experiments may have gotten us all into a lot of messes but I still think it's worth it. I used the example of the Guggenheim in my post on the idea of a "world without stairs" knowing that Frank Lloyd Wright did not design its interior ramp with wheelchairs in mind-- but to show that the unintended consequences of design decisions can be delightful as well as disruptive (as in the case of the zillions of buildings/landscapes/products designed without thought of what they require of the body).

This thread also makes me more sensitive to the obstacles architects face to innovation, given that they have no more severe critics than their colleagues. And yet.. does all the criticism produce better architecture?

(side note-- Susan, if you are reading this, I can't comment on Archinect without being a member, but you might be interested in a few posts on Wheelchair Dancer's blog about her and her partner's and their architects' design process for ramps inside their house: for example 1 2 3.)

Using Design to Crack Society's Problems

2008-10-26T21:17:00.003-04:00

Yes, it is possible, says Hillary Cottam to Alice Rawsthorn in Fast Company.

A couple of projects from Cottam's past work with the Design Council in England:

"Earlier this decade, while working for the Design Council, Cottam turned to health care. Originally she planned to rethink hospital design but became more interested in community-based services for sufferers of chronic diseases such as obesity and diabetes. "One in four people in Britain now has a chronic disease that's treated at home," she says. "So why are we investing in hospitals rather than community-based solutions?

"[Another] problem the Design Council team identified is that diabetes sufferers often forget to raise important issues with doctors and caregivers. The solution was a pack of diabetes cards, each printed with a question to be used as a prompt. Superficially it looks like a health-care project but, as Cottam points out, design techniques were critical in identifying patients' problems and producing an efficient graphic solution. "It's amazing how new the simple design concept of understanding users is to many in the health-care field," says Tim Brown, CEO of the design firm Ideo, which works in U.S. health care, among other industries."

Cottam has started her own firm for these social design projects, Participle.

Universal Voting Booth

2008-10-26T20:50:00.005-04:00

From Norway (and via Core77):
Image via Kadabra: mock-up of a voting room with open booths to the left of the frame. The voters in the room are shown as white figures outlined in black: some are in the booths, some line up to deposit their orange ballots into boxes. The figures include women and men, a person with crutches, and a person whose wheelchair peeks out from under one of the booths.

Winners of a recent Norwegian State Design Competition called "Democracy by Design," KADABRA have designed a voting system that can be easily installed in the typical public places that are used for voting. The open booth, low console, and graphic images are the result of a process in which the designers interviewed what they call "elite" users-- I'm thinking that this translates to those with specific needs-- including people with visual, cognitive, and mobility concerns, as well as election volunteers and janitors. The result, they write, is "solutions that are for everyone’s best."

Related:
-Core77 1 Hour Design Competition: Voting Booth due Oct 30
-Marcia Lausen, Design for Democracy: Ballot and Election Design
-primer on disabilities and accessible voting from the Center for an Accessible Society.

people's design award winner

2008-10-26T20:26:00.004-04:00

Zon Hearing Aid wins Cooper-Hewitt People's Design Award, a contest decided by online popular vote. An elegant, top-of-the-line (and top-priced) little gem. A sculptured, dull-silver wedge attaches behind the ear of this jewelry-like (though designed to disappear) hearing aid. Image above via zon (I'm not sure how to make a line above the o).

electronics of the future-- more touchy-feely?

2008-10-26T20:07:00.004-04:00

I have posted a few times about how electronics can be hard to use-- touch screens, tiny numbers, etc. This is probably the #1 thing people mention when I talk to them about what products/spaces are inaccessible by design.

Image from C-Scout: hands demonstrating the smooth white Samsung Touch Sight Camera, which embosses images in Braille as well as providing a few seconds of sound to accompany each picture.

Here are some lovely prototypes for electronic gadgets designed for blind people and people w/ low vision. The article mentions a watch, a camera, a debit-card reader/PIN interface, and a Braille reader/writer that all integrate new digital approaches to tactile display. The article also mentions how these applications could improve usability for all, as is the mantra of Universal Design:
"Of course, many of these technologies can provide benefits to sighted people. For example, a tactile surface could be applied to a bedside clock, enabling one half of a couple to find out what time it is without disturbing the other."

disability and metaphors

2008-10-19T17:19:00.003-04:00

This is well-covered in the disability blog-world and in a lot of books on disability: disability and specific impairments are so often used in literature/movies/everyday speech as metaphors. I generally think of this as a thoughtless, uncritical thing-- for example, saying "blind rage" when you really mean something more specific. I like what Steven Kuusisto adds in a post about the movie "Blindness"-- here:

The film "Blindness" which is now in theaters offers the latest instance of what scholars David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder have called "narrative prosthesis" where in effect, disability is used as an artificial device to help what is otherwise a weak story line.

Blindness remains a frightening disability in no small measure because the literal condition, the disruption of the physical eye is invested with outworn symbolism that still resides in what the psychoanalyst Carl Jung called the cultural subconscious. People may know next to nothing about eye diseases but they know deep in their bones that there's something suggestive and darkly portentious about the blind.

[...]

There are of course real lives in the balance. As I have said many times previously on this blog the unemployment rate for the blind remains unacceptably high in the United States and around the world. The film "Blindness" or the execrable novel that birthed it are guilty of false disability figuration--aesthetic choices that can only further harm real people.

This also reminds me that I find "prosthesis" to be a really interesting metaphor too-- the collection Artificial Parts, Practical Lives: Cultural Histories of Prosthetics comments on this a little in ref. to Donna Haraway and other theories of technology and society, and it is prevalent in sci-fi too. I don't think we have to abandon all metaphors out of over-sensitivity... but I'm not sure how to unpack the meanings of prosthesis. I am also kind of intimidated by a lot of the theory that uses is, a la Haraway, so that probably doesn't help. I don't necessarily think being aware of disability (or any other social/political minority) issues means ending all use of metaphors-- it just means choosing words more carefully. Perhaps using "prosthetic" or "crutch" has different meaning if you really use a literal one.

as a side note, if I may gush, I love Kuusisto and his book Planet of the Blind-- which proves that one can talk about blindness in a lyrical way without resorting to lazy metaphor. I have been reading his blog for a while, and I love too the way he puts himself into the discussion-- in this recent post the title is "how many stories am I holding up?"; another time he joked about getting a t-shirt that said "I am not your metaphor." I dig it and would so like to take a class with him (he teaches writing and film at the U of Iowa).

links

2008-09-19T14:05:00.013-04:00

Image 1: From the NY Times today. A man and woman stand at adjacent cubicles, each with a treadmill installed under their elevated desks, talking on the phone and working.

Image 2: From Fortune. In a black-and-white image of a modern office interior, two desks flank a bookshelf-like room divider, creating separate spaces with matching desks and chairs.

NY Times: treadmills in the office. You know how there are tons of coffee table books showing people in their houses, talking about the stuff they use for their daily routines? I would like to see more about office space and how people REALLY use them... specifically how people are working out the problem of sitting still all day. To me treadmills go along with adjustable chairs, ergonomic stools, and the variety of office equipment that is specifically designed so that people with disabilities can work in offices (or at home).
It reminds me of Herman Miller's Action Office, which, when it was developed in the 1960s, brought the possibility of flexibility to office design-- and despite the general disdain for cubicles at least they allow a little more flexibility than the static grid that preceded (which we can remember through the fabulous TV show Mad Men, furnished in vintage Herman Miller.. but I am getting off topic here).
Anyway-- the Times says that "still, to most, work-walking is 'a freaky thing to do,' said Joe Stirt, 60, an anesthesiologist in Charlottesville, Va., who works and blogs in his off hours while walking up to six hours a day in his home office." "Freak" is in the eye of the beholder, of course...

Wall Street Journal via Core77: New Open Solutions High-Tech Usability Lab. This article is a little business jargon-y but it's interesting to note how market research has changed over the years.. going from "what would you buy" to
Usability tests can be conducted on existing products and at key points throughout the creation of a new product including: during and after the design process, after it's been deployed and when it's deployed in a different cultural environment.
Figuring out WHO you design for and all the many people who might not quite fit with your initial assumptions is basically what usability is all about. I wish I could figure out what "high tech" methods they use to figure this out!

Core 77 blogger hipstomp is "missing the tactility" of flip-phones vs. the new movement in many phones toward touchscreens. I totally agree-- hands used to keyboards, not to mention shakier hands or ones that find it hard to hit touch-screens precisely will benefit from the choice of high-performance phones that have buttons on them. The Blackberry Pearl may end up being the choice of many who like the feel of flips and buttons over the slippery smooth iPhone.

disability politics

2008-09-19T09:23:00.008-04:00

ADAPT public transit protest, Philadelphia, 1989. Image from the National Museum of American History's online Disability Rights Movement exhibition. Description: a black-and-white image of a crowd of people, many in wheelchairs, one at center with two canes, protesting outside a New Jersey Transit bus. In the foreground, we can read the sign on the back of one of the protesters' wheelchairs: "I CAN'T EVEN GET TO THE BACK OF THE BUS."

Memo to Governor Palin from Penny Richards:

Vice-president Cheney, by all accounts, loves his daughter Mary--but it doesn't make the administration in which he serves any friendlier to gay marriage or same-sex parents. And Sarah Palin, by all accounts, loves her little son--but that doesn't mean the administration in which she'd serve would set any priorities for the equality of people with developmental disabilities.

Paul Longmore, "What Kind of Advocacy Do People With Disabilities Really Need?":

In their convention speeches, Palin, John, and even Cindy McCain focused only on children. The media have talked almost exclusively about children too. What so many people seem to forget is that children with disabilities grow up to become adults. Ninety percent of the 54 million Americans with disabilities are adults. Most acquired their disabilities after childhood.

In addition, the media talk has mostly been about “compassion” not about “issues.” There has been little discussion about issues that matter to people with disabilities of all ages, issues such as health insurance, community-based personal assistance services, education, employment, and civil rights.

Finally, ADAPT is in DC right now with tents set up as DUH City (cleverly, HUD spelled backwards) to protest the lack of attention either candidate has paid to the problems of housing and poverty that many people with disabilities experience.

personal histories of design

2008-07-18T16:18:00.004-04:00

the design historian in me loooooves this history of chairs that has nothing to do with big names or evolution of styles:

A few quick things I take away:
- chairs are necessarily both visual and haptic things. No matter how high-design, hoity-toity a chair is, we seem almost always to ask under our breath, "is it comfortable?"
- the answer to that question is often as much about personal history as bodily experience
- it's surprising to me that he doesn't include wheelchairs

It got me thinking about personal histories of design.. artworks or writings that highlight how important particular tools are to how we express ourselves and live everyday. Here are some..

A fictional video-story of a fashionable woman and her walker, via Missability

Wheelchair Dancer discusses the importance of complete alignment in her wheelchair, making clear that the chair is not at all marginal to the dance.

playgrounds

2008-07-09T07:07:00.006-04:00

Image from NY Times: a 5-year-old boy in a baseball cap sits in a wheelchair to the left of the frame. His mother holds his hand as he reaches for a bright green digger at a playground sandbox.

When I was in San Francisco recently, I was amazed at the huge and fun playground in Golden Gate Park-- there were so many different options there that would have been fun for a lot of different sizes/shapes-- in fact I had a hard time restraining myself (and didn't much) from playing on the spinning flower-shaped chairs or climbing the big rope spiderweb myself. I was thinking that the spacious rolling rubberized landscape was uncluttered enough that kids and parents with wheelchairs could get around, and there were options at different levels that would be fun for people with various impairments.

This NY Times article reports on how hard it is to fund accessible playgrounds, but that a few organizations have pulled it off in the Northeast (this is a regional article). The emphasis is on play spaces that can be used by everyone, and several parents quoted in the article mention the problem of going to playgrounds that are accessible only to some of their kids.
- Boundless Playgrounds has helped CT and NJ communities build playground with things like raised sandboxes so kids in wheelchairs can play and toys like the extended-arm shovel in the image.
- Miracle Fields is an organization that builds accessible baseball fields-- 4 in the NY region and more than 10 planned, says the article.

fun little links

2008-06-25T13:28:00.008-04:00

- I have always heard good things about the NYU Interactive Technology Program, and this wii-powered large-scale drawing tool for wheelchair users sounds awesome.

Digital Wheel Art from YoungHyun Chung on Vimeo.
via Wheelchair Dancer, who got a little test drive. The video is of a young man in a power wheelchair, moving back and forth controlling brightly colored lines across a digital canvas. At one point he says (subtitled) "I know what I am gonna do."

- I love people who use stuff and redesign that stuff to make it work better.
Vietnamese pedicab driver designs a better pedicab that (via Core77) "resembles a bicycle making love to a wheelchair."

- New design doesn't always fit old infrastructure.
The NY Times hits the hard issues: when ergonomic toothbrushes don't fit in ye olde toothbrush holder.

- Is the iPhone less usable for women because of "the fingernail problem"? (via UnBeige, who seem unnecessarily snarky about it. Only yokels complain about bad design?)

democratic cities

2008-06-25T12:22:00.005-04:00

I feel like there has been a lot in the press lately about urban design and the "democratic" city. One of the endless fascinating things about urban life is how it is both public and private, accessible and inaccessible. The city for Baudelaire's flâneur is all about roaming about and being inspired, titillated, and entertained by the people and places of the city. I always felt as a longtime New Yorker that I am never alone as long as I have the city streets. But of course, the city has its flip side-- you can see and be seen, but you can also see where you are not welcome, or be seen in an unpleasant way, stared at out of curiosity, fear, or horror, or shoved out because you don't belong.

- In the Doors of Perception blog, an interview between John Thackera and Sunil Abraham is mainly about eco politics and sustainability in building cities. They emphasize a balance between speed and "slowth" (must be a british thing), not abandoning all goals of modernity and efficiency, but emphasizing local resources and measured mobility alongside speed of information. Their comments on urban planning as a government/commerce project are great:

JT. Show me a city with a “dynamic image” and I will show you an unsustainable city. “Dynamic” usually means high entropy buildings, financial speculation on a massive scale, and a low degree of social participation. From now on, the most interesting cities will be those whose citizens are able to invest their energy and creativity on “re-inhabitation” within the unique ecosystems of their place. This approach will often involve adaptive or more intense uses of existing infrastructure rather than the construction of signature buildings - and sometimes this approach will mean building nothing, nothing at all. To live sustainably we need to place more value on the here and now: a lot of destruction is caused when design is obsessed with the there, and the next - and the “dynamic”.

SA. First, the dynamism of a city can be found in the informal sector which in most developing countries accounts for 70% of employment. It is also where legal, technical and market limits and norms are challenged and redefined as everyday practice. The informal economy also has a much lighter infastructure. [...]

This last comment strikes me as so smart-- all the action is in the "informal sector" where streamlined resource use is not about "efficiency" or government protocol, but about reality. This "informal economy" is also run by personal relationships, not bureaucracy:

[SA continues]: ...non-market micro-economies such as gifting, barter, collectives and commons in developing countries are more effective than classical development interventions in addressing problems of social development. For example, home-based care is cheaper and more effective than hospice-based care for people living with HIV/AIDS. I would like to see more celebration of the informal sector, informal practices and non-market micro-economies.

- On a way fluffier note, the weird NY Times T Magazine style blog had a post about "off-limits" NY places. It is probably true that being hard to get into increases the "magnetism" of some spaces-- this is the whole model on which social clubs are based, right? I was glad to see a lengthy comment bemoaning the "travesty" of having so many architectural wonders of NY as spaces only for the rich. No mention of wheelchair accessibility (unsurprisingly) but I was thinking about what kind of exclusivity physical inaccessibility makes. When I walk around New York, I am often aware of how style and physical access are twinned, that high-end places often involve some form of physical venture to get into-- made all too clear to me, for example, when I mistakenly took my nonogenarian grandmother to a gorgeous, exquisitely designed vegetarian Korean restaurant where the seating was on the floor with legs shoved into a recessed hole under the table. Is a lack of ramp, or a narrow dark passageway, or the big heavy door at so many galleries and fancy stores, the same kind of message as a bouncer or the ubiquitous "girl with a list" at NY parties (or so I see when I walk by them)? It's a bit different, to be sure. Maybe it's more about asking you to feel unsafe for a second, increasing the "magnetism" via risk and fear? The more I look the more i think that the whole high-end fashion/design world is about this-- making you feel uncomfortable as a gateway. Ugh.

brand new blog manifesto

2008-06-25T11:37:00.007-04:00

So, time to write a bit about what this blog is about. This is my Right to Design Manifesto.

I chose this title for my blog that because it makes sense to me to describe the kind of design and design issues I am following. So:

- First, it is kind of a question. Do we have a right to design? That is, do we have a right to designed things that fit us, that work well, and that are comfortable? When is bad design a violation of civil rights or human rights? A sociologist met recently pointed out to me that current disability law is one of the only official avenues of citizen complaint about poor public design. Even twenty years after the ADA, though, these questions are somewhat unresolved in the terminology of “reasonable accommodation.” I think of the “right to design” as a question, a provocative idea that prods us to ask what rights are, and also how design works to provide or block access-- not just to buildings or places, but to experiences that we might define as part of citizenship.

- Second, there is “the right to design” as a verb. Do we have a right to design things, to demand to make our own world different? This part of the argument comes out of years of observing and participating in debates around sustainable, social, and universal design. A lot of designers want to integrate these alternative, progressive ideas into their practice, but they can’t because their clients are not interested, considering these approaches to be unmarketable, or because they don't pass the tests of contemporary aesthetic or intellectual design practice. I, too, have often fallen into the rut of pessimism, thinking when I see a really great prototype or student design project, ‘well, that’s great but it will never get made.”

The way design appears in our current world is as commerce. Design is fashion, is consumption, is the latest desired object. This is indeed one part of design, but it is not the only part. If we see the design world as entirely under the control of profit motives and rapid fashion cycles, we become disheartened, believing that design that responds to broader conceptions of human need and desire is just a "nice idea" that is out of reach on a practical level. One of the best responses I have seen to this feeling of skepticism and disempowerment is from the Social Design Site. In this wonderful 7-minute introduction to their project and to “social design,” this international and interdisciplinary crew assert that “We cannot NOT change the world” – everything we do changes the world. Everything makes the world different, re-designs the world.

I love this part: “We are living in a very complex world, and in everything we do, whether we are aware of it or not, we constantly shape it. We as people are constantly acting in relation to other people, and by doing so, each and every one of us creates the world we live in.” This is a pretty simple observation, yet it reminds me that we so often look at the world as “done,” already made by the people who run governments and own cranes and build bridges, tunnels, roads, buildings, appliances, clothes, and computers. Especially for people with disabilities, the world seems to be made by others, others who likely do not have much imagination about body types, sizes, strengths, and abilities in mind. For me, the “right to design” is about seeing the world as an unfinished design project with still a lot of spaces to slip a hand in and fiddle with the machinery.

Well, that's about as manifesto-y as I can get. I think this blog will vary widely in scope, examining the high-fancy-fluffy design world as well as world news and politics for questions of design and inclusion. I am new to blogging in this formal way-- please comment if you're reading and have questions, critiques, or just want to say hi.

disability and creativity sites of interest

2008-06-07T15:57:00.000-04:00

The Missability Radio Show A WGBR-Boston radio show about disability and creativity. I love the whimsical and crafty aesthetic on this website and need to catch up on some radio shows on it ASAP. So many creative projects worth mentioning after just a few minutes on the site.. a Walking Stick Cosy Competition, an Etsy store, and much more... the use of old-time radio/entertainment aesthetic is apt for radio stuff, of course, but also seems to subvert the freak show history of early 20th century pop culture.
(image from Missability.com is of a handpainted cardboard sculpture of an old-time radio with red stripes atop a table covered with a handmade quilt that reads "Missability")

Also via Missability: Pimp My Guide, 2 videos on YouTube about customizing guide dog harnesses.

Access Hacks. I first saw this link-filled, fact-packed post from Liz Henry's blog somewhere out in cyberspace, and since have followed her links to a bunch of other places, including...

Gearability, a blog by woman named Marty, who writes about caring for her stepfather as well as having her own health concerns. The blog discusses everything from electronic calendar use in a nursing home to wheelchair cupholders. As an avid reader of sites like Ikea Hacker, I really dig how she seems to see every product, material, gadget out there as fodder for redesign and customization.

On a non-DIY note, fans of Wallace & Gromit must check out these Creature Discomforts PSA spots from British TV.

a world without stairs?

2008-06-07T08:37:00.001-04:00

I recently met the pioneering disability historian Paul Longmore at SF State, a true pleasure not only because his work on disability history has been so important to my learning, but because he talked to me for 2 hours about my project, asked all kinds of useful questions, and sent me on my way with a notebook full of notes and thoughts. Anyway, one thing he mentioned as we were talking about design, accessibility, universality, etc, was that the facilities director at SF State is entirely committed to universal design. When they started a renovation project for the library recently, and the architects came in to show their plans, the guy apparently took one look at the entrance they proposed and said (something like), "no, that won't work-- we don't do stairs at SF State."

It got me thinking after the conversation-- is an accessible world a world without stairs? Universal Design promises spaces designed for all, and advises, when possible, to avoid separate entrances and pathways for people using wheelchairs, walkers, etc. So a gently sloped entrance, or maybe an understory at ground level and an elevator, are preferable to a main entrance stair and a side ramp. In practice, the main thing this means is reminding architects to do away with the small, unnecessary sets of stairs that might make an otherwise pretty accessible place or building inaccessible (like 2-3 stairs on a park path or in front of a house or building). But what about as an entire design strategy? A few thoughts...

- The first thing that pops into my head is: is the Guggenheim in NY, completed in 1959, accessible? Or-- more precisely-- is its principal design focus, the long spiral ramp around an open atrium, universal?

Photo by ghougham on flickr.
(Image: a ghostly Guggenheim. Two long ramps sweep across the black-and-white image, with three small figures seen, one on the top ramp and two below.)

John Hockenberry describes the Guggenheim as "the most spectacular (if not the largest) indoor wheelchair ramp in the Western Hemisphere... Frank Lloyd Wright's personal gift to me and my manual titanium-frame wheelchair" (NYT, 1995). Was FLW aware of this angle-- or unconsciously aware, having lived through all of the 20th century, with polio, 2 wars, etc?

- The long descending ramp is a common theme in museum design, for example at the prize-winning Mercedes-Benz Museum in Stuttgart, completed 2001.

by Unstudio, & via Core77 Clogger. Image: architectural rendering of Unstudio's Mercedez-Benz Museum in cross-section, with ramps encircling the building to connect concrete-slab floors.

The Brooklyn Museum's renovation a few years ago put a new ground-level entrance hall below the grand temple-like stair of the original Howe and Lescaze building.
Image from Architectural Record
(Image: The Brooklyn Museum, a classical temple-style building complete with Greek pediment and Corinthian columns. Below the column facade is the new entrance, an open glass arcade at ground level.)
Entering gives the feeling of going through a catacombs, with heavy brick arches supporting the building, an apt sensation for the entrance to house of collections. I think the driving principle in the redesign was to make it more accessible in a community sense-- not the mansion on the hill, but a Brooklyn Museum that is open to Brooklyn. There are a lot of nice metaphorical angles to the idea of all of us getting in at the ground level. Shame is that they included a stepped atrium to get down slightly below street level-- the side paths are step-less, but the design misses its chance on the world without stairs.

2008-06-05T19:49:00.000-04:00

odd (and old) links about how designers try to figure out who they are designing for

- Designing for the Senior Surge Wall Street Journal shows designers at GE wearing giant rubber gloves and glasses with scratched lenses to show how they try to understand the needs of an aging population in appliances. The new features they come up with-- a faucet that taps on and off, a double oven that fits into a single-sized space and has easier to open double doors-- are dubbed "aging-friendly" but would clearly benefit anyone (the double oven also seems like an energy saver since it separates a single-meal section from a section "big enough for a 22-lb turkey").

- via treehugger way back in 2006: Eco- and UD House demonstration by Panasonic also had designers using goggles to simulate visual impairment. Design features include unified standards for color and type size to enhance usability, as well as rounded furniture edges, wide threshold-less doorways. Some of the "sophisticated digital devices" also have voice guidance-- something I wish I had to teach me how to dress my second life avatar.

hello interweb

2008-06-05T19:39:00.003-04:00

I am starting this blog to try to keep track of links, images, thoughts, etc about design, rights, and particularly the intersection between disability issues and design. I am in the early stages of a dissertation on how designers and users tried to improve everyday spaces and objects to make them more functional for a range of physical abilities, both prompted by rights legislation and not, during the second half of the twentieth century (focusing on the decades leading up to the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990). That means things like custom cars, lighter and more flexible wheelchairs, and architectural accessibility, as well as "universal" design in buildings and products so that everyone can use them. This project comes out of several years of studying socially- and environmentally-conscious design; ultimately I am interested in how the built world responds to social change (or fails to).

A note about accessibility: when I use images in this blog I will describe them as best I can for text-only readers. I am new to this practice (though with art history training I should be better at it!). Please tell me if you have any problems reading this blog, for this reason or any others. I am new to blogging in general, so I genuinely appreciate constructive criticism of any kind.