<p>Universal Design (UD) is a movement to produce built environments that are accessible to a broad range of human variation. Though UD is often taken for granted as synonymous with the best, most inclusive, forms of disability access, the values, methodologies, and epistemologies that underlie UD require closer scrutiny. This paper uses feminist and disability theories of architecture and geography in order to complicate the concepts of "universal" and "design" and to develop a feminist disability theory of UD wherein design is a <em>material-discursive</em> phenomenon that produces both physical environments and symbolic meaning. Furthermore, the paper examines ways in which to conceive UD as a project of collective access and social sustainability<em>,</em> rather than as a strategy targeted toward individual consumers and marketability. A conception of UD that is informed by a politics of interdependence and collective access would address the multiple intersectional forms of exclusion that inaccessible design produces.</p><p>Keywords: universal design; collective access; interdependence; built environment; feminist theory</p><p> </p><p> </p>
As disabled people engaged in disability community, activism, and scholarship, our collective experiences and histories have taught us that we are effective agents of world-building and -dismantling toward more socially just relations. The grounds for social justice and world-remaking, however, are frictioned; technologies, architectures, and infrastructures are often designed and implemented without committing to disability as a difference that matters. This manifesto calls attention to the powerful, messy, non-innocent, contradictory, and nevertheless crucial work of what we name as "crip technoscience," practices of critique, alteration, and reinvention of our material-discursive world. Disabled people are experts and designers of everyday life. But we also harness technoscience for political action, refusing to comply with demands to cure, fix, or eliminate disability. Attentive to the intersectional workings of power and privilege, we agitate against independence and productivity as requirements for existence. Instead, we center technoscientific activism and critical design practices that foster disability justice. Hamraie and Fritsch Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 5(1)
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.
<p>In Disability Studies, Universal Design (UD) is a concept that is often borrowed from an architectural or design context to mean an ideology of inclusion and flexibility with a range of applications in education, technology, and other milieus. This paper returns to UD as a design phenomenon, considering knowledge production practices as conditions of possibility for inclusive design. UD appropriates and redefines normalizing research methods, namely anthropometry, that were developed in the 19th century for uses that are contrary to disability rights and justice, such as eugenics, colonialism, and scientific racism. The paper argues that critical disability theory should understand work in UD research and design practice in order to formulate a nuanced, new materialist and historical disability epistemology, particularly in engagements with scientific knowledge.</p><p> </p><p><strong>Keywords</strong>: Universal Design, accessibility, anthropometry, normate, misfit, 19<sup>th</sup> century science, eugenics, new materialism</p>
Critical access theories and digital projects, by contrast, approach access as an "interpretive relation between bodies" rather than an objective quality. 3 Critical accessibility mapping acknowledges compliance as a foundation for the material and conceptual dimensions of digital humanist, activist work, similar to what Beatriz da Costa and Kavita Philip (cited in the epigraph) call "tactical biopolitics." But this practice goes farther than compliance, using humanistic tools to unsettle the modes of "subjectification," in the Foucauldian sense, that inform compliance mapping. 4 Using what I call "sociospatial practices," critical accessibility mapping reconceptualizes data, crowdsourcing, and public participation. This practice thus treats access as an open-ended process, a negotiation, and an intersectional and multimodal issue, rather than an easily achievable end point. This essay offers accessibility mapping as a critical method for the digital humanities, American studies, and critical disability studies. My primary example is Mapping Access, a critical design and participatory digital mapping project that uses campus spatial documentation to generate more politicized and intersectional interpretive relations surrounding access. The project's purpose is not to produce an objective spatial representation but to enroll broad publics in the iterative, troubled work of defining and detecting access. I argue that Mapping Access offers a new method of sociospatial practice, with distinct benefits over compliance mapping: it recognizes marginalized experts; redefines data, crowdsourcing, and public participation; offers new stories about disability and public belonging; and materializes the principles of disability justice, an early twentieth-century movement emphasizing intersectionality and interdependence. Each section of this essay uses one iteration of Mapping Access to discuss broader conceptual, practical, and methodological issues. First, I trace the project's emergence through functional needs and conceptual debates about compliance. Second, I show how digitization and digital humanities methods led to questions about spatial reading, thick mapping, crowdsourcing, and multimodality as collective labor processes. Finally, I conclude by discussing opportunities for critical accessibility mapping as "convivial design," a never finished and always troubled project of access experimentation.
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