Universal Design and the Problem of “Post-Disability” Ideology

Abstract

Although Universal Design gains popularity as a common sense strategy for crafting built environments for all users, accessibility for disabled people remains a marginal area of inquiry within design practice and theory. This article argues that the tension between accessibility and Universal Design stems from inadequate critical and historical attention to the concept of disability as it relates to discourses of “good design.” This article draws upon critical disability theory to reveal the persistence of “post-disability” narratives and “ideologies of ability” from the eugenics era into the present theory and practice of Universal Design.

Keywords:

• Universal Design
• built environment
• Americans with Disabilities Act
• critical disability studies
• eugenics
• rehabilitation

Notes

1. The phrase appears as both “Universal Design” and “universal design” in the literature. Frequently, however, the latter is used as an ahistorical synonym for accessibility and barrier-free design practices. In this article, I use the capitalized form “Universal Design” to describe a specific phenomenon, which emerged in 1985 to distinguish itself from accessibility by making historical and substantive arguments (often against barrier-free design).

2. These debates dominate most discussions of Universal Design. For example, see Iwarsson and Ståhl 2003; Jones and Welch 1999; Mullick and Steinfeld 1997; Salmen 1994.

3. The consequences of eugenics and institutionalization were particularly severe for black and indigenous people facing segregation, and particularly for women of color who were subject to reproductive regulation and sterilization (Chapman, Carey, and Ben-Moshe 2014, 8–9).

4. To be sure, standards for “good design” rooted in ideologies of ability pre-date twentieth-century eugenics. Since antiquity, architects and designers had relied upon figures such as the Vitruvian Man to set standards for architectural aesthetics, form, and function (Hosey 2001, 102). However, twentieth-century “normate templates” for design drew upon eugenicists’ calculations of “average bodies” (Hamraie 2012). They also established hierarchies between supposedly normal and deviant populations (Davis 2010, 4–10; Mitchell and Snyder 2003, 117).

5. Similarly, Hayward (1998, 223) argues that in the post-Second World War era, “good design” discourse became “allied to a notion of national efficiency and post-war reconstruction.”

6. Nagi also distinguished between “functional limitation” and “disability,” defining the latter as disadvantage created by society, rather than the functional misfit between body and environment. Later models of disability would conflate functional limitation and societal disadvantage by focusing upon supposed bodily deficits.

7. Deaf culture (distinguished from deafness as a medical or physiological category) grew from these historic communities to emphasize a shared minority identity. See Padden and Humphries 2005; Bauman and Murray 2014.

8. The social model is widely credited to a UK activist group, the Union of Physically Impaired Against Segregation, although similar ideas circulated in the US Independent Living movement. See Pelka 2012, 113.

9. According to photographs and letters in Mace’s private home collection (courtesy of Joy Weeber), Mace spent one year (1950) in the Central Carolina Convalescent Hospital for polio treatment. Also see Golonka 2006.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Aimi Hamraie

Aimi Hamraie is Assistant Professor of Medicine, Health, & Society and American Studies at Vanderbilt University. Their areas of expertise are design, critical disability studies, contemporary feminist theories, and science and technology studies. Hamraie’s book on the history of Universal Design, Building Access, is forthcoming from the University of Minnesota Press in 2017. Their work also appears in Disability Studies Quarterly, Foucault Studies, and Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy.

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