Designing disability: symbols, space, and society

Designing Disability explores the conceptualisation of disability and access through the context of the International Symbol of Access (ISA). The ISA was commissioned as part of a competition organised by Rehabilitation International in 1968, and Susanne Koefoed, a Danish graphic design student, produced the winning design. The ISA was endorsed by the International Organisation for Standardization in 1969, and adopted by the United Nations in 1974. It has been widely disseminated and it is a feature in many public buildings and spaces. The ISA depicts a wheelchair user and it is simple in conception and form. The original intent of the ISA was to indicate accessible facilities in buildings and the broader built environment, but it is a controversial symbol that, for some, is based on a reductive and essentialist conception of disability that reinforces caricatures about disabled people. The symbol appears to be a cultural representation of disability that reflects and reproduces societal understandings that do not acknowledge the complexities of embodiment or the manifold ways in which people’s bodies interact with (in) the material world.

In this book, the intent of Guffey is to deconstruct the ISA and to show how it ‘came into being, not just as a design, but also a matter of thinking’ (2). This is a welcome addition to the large number of writings about the ISA, and the book provides an interesting historical account of how the ISA has its roots in a particular conception of disability and mobility that relates, primarily, to the wheelchair. For Guffey, the development and increasing usage of the modern wheelchair, post 1945, enabled many more ambulant impaired people to move around and, in doing so, raised awareness of how little of the built environment was accessible to them. Wheelchair users were often rendered ‘misfits’ in hostile spaces in which the minutiae of design, from cracked pavements to steps into public buildings, prevented their ease of mobility and access.¹ This was discrimination by design that was less about the functional limitations of disabled people’s bodies and more about the socio-cultural values and practices underpinning the (re)production of disabling and disablist spaces and places.

Guffey’s book draws attention to the misfitting nature of design as the basis for the ISA, and acknowledges that her original intent, to focus on the ‘design history of a single symbol’ (2), unravelled into a ‘multi-layered story of ideas’ (2). This story is divided into three parts and is focused, primarily, on the politics and politicisation of mobility and access in the United States and Europe. The first part seeks to understand the socio-political contexts that shaped the advent of the ISA, and Guffey claims that the invention of the modern wheelchair was crucial in transforming ambulant impaired people’s relationships with the environment by enabling them to escape the confines of their homes. By the early 1950s the wheelchair was a common sight in many American cities, and it brought ambulant impaired people newly found freedoms but also brought them into conflict with inaccessible design that prevented their ease of access. These conflicts were the basis for new knowledge about disability and design generated by disabled people’s experiences, and they helped to shape a politicisation of access that stimulated, in part, the creation of the ISA.

In part two of the book Guffey develops the observation that the development of the ISA was characterised by divergent views on the role of signage in the built environment. In the United States, there was antipathy to design that constructed places with ‘special features’ or provision for a specific group or part of the population independently of providing for everyone. The politics of disability and access in the United States was premised on integration and mainstreaming, and the creation of designed environments that worked for everyone irrespective of their bodily capabilities and capacities. There was a rejection of any distinction between the categories of ‘disabled’ and ‘abled’, and designers were encouraged to create places that did not segregate people or draw attention to people’s bodily differences. Signs depicting accessible features and facilities were rejected because they drew attention to disabled people’s bodies and were a potential source of stigma. Instead, the objective was designing environments that facilitated self-help or design as enabling self-directed and intuitive mobility and movement.

Guffey contrasts this perspective of disability and access with the social welfare tradition in Europe, particularly the United Kingdom, which advocated the use of signage as part of society’s responsibility to care for, and respond to, the particular needs of disabled people. Whereas signs were often seen in the US context as a means to segregate, and discriminate against, people, in the European context they were portrayed as a means to positively discriminate and ‘favor people with certain characteristics’ (95). One of the main advocates for signage, Selwyn Goldsmith, argued that people were necessarily dependent on others to live their lives, and recognition of the specific, bodily, needs of disabled people necessitated the provision of design features that were tailored to them. For Goldsmith, to deny differences between people was unhelpful and unlikely to encourage designers to create environments that were responsive to the manifold variations in people’s bodily capacities. Part of this responsiveness was providing signs to direct people to where accessible design was located, or the use of visual cues and signifiers to ‘treat people differently according to their differing needs’, as Goldsmith states (95).

Designing Disability provides a detailed and insightful commentary on the tensions between the contrasting views of disability and access, and documents the emergence of the ISA as part of a contested field that, if anything, has intensified since its inauguration in the late 1960s. In part three of the book, Guffey notes the uneven ways in which the ISA has been received and adopted, showing that it was often misunderstood, and even ridiculed, by builders and others in the design professions. The ISA was not universally popular amongst disabled people, and while some groups adopted it as a sign of protest, others regarded it as a caricatured representation of disability. The ISA has, however, stimulated debates about what access is or ought to be regarded as, and, for Guffey, there is a need to recognise the positive contributions of the symbol. These range from drawing attention to the inequities of access and the rights of people to be part of a broader collective, public, presence, to the more mundane, but vital, task of providing information to enable ease of navigation and movement around the built environment.

Guffey’s book is well crafted and very well written, and it brings together a wealth of information about the politics of disability and access. It would have been easy for the author to produce a myopic, and reductive, account of the ISA but this has been sidestepped by a careful contextualisation of the symbol in the broadcloth of access issues that have shaped disabled people’s lives since the mid twentieth century. Designing Disability works at a number of levels, from its historical account of the wheelchair and its role in shaping popular consciousness about disablement, to the intriguing discussion about the struggles between different protagonists seeking to shape the ISA and subsequent approaches to signifying access in the built environment. The book is a fine piece of work and deserves a wide readership.

Rob Imrie
Department of Sociology
Goldsmiths University of London, London, UK
[email protected]

Notes

1 Guffey, like some other authors, associates the term ‘misfit’ with the work of Rosemarie Garland-Thomson. While Garland-Thomson does refer to the term, and develop aspects of it, I would like to direct readers’ attention to the work of Kevin Lynch, a wonderful academic who wrote major texts about design and the environment and who coined the notion of ‘misfit’ as far back as the 1950s. For readers interested in the notions of ‘misfit’ and ‘misfitting’, particularly in relation to embodiment and design, then a careful reading of the writings of Kevin Lynch is recommended (see Lynch 1960, 1981).