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Critical Design Lab

Episode 31: Contra* Accessibility's History with Elizabeth Guffey and Bess Williamson

October 30, 2024

Transcript

Introduction:

Welcome to Contra*: the podcast about disability, design justice, and the lifeworld. This show is about the politics of accessible and critical design—broadly conceived—and how accessibility can be more than just functional or assistive. It can be conceptual, artful, and world-changing.

I’m your host, Aimi Hamraie .  I am a professor at Vanderbilt University, a designer and design researcher, and the director of the Critical Design Lab, a multi-institution collaborative focused on disability, technology, and critical theory.  Members of the lab collaborate on a number of projects focused on hacking ableism, speaking back to inaccessible public infrastructures, and redesigning the methods of participatory design—all using a disability culture framework. This podcast provides a window into the kinds of discussions we have within the lab, as well as the conversations we are interested in putting into motion. So in coming episodes, you’ll also hear from myself and the other designers and researchers in the lab, and we encourage you to get in touch with us via our website, www.mapping-access.com or on Twitter at @CriticalDesignL

What is the history of disability-accessible design? And how does this history get written? In this episode of Contra*, I talk to historians Elizabeth Guffey and Bess Williamson about their books on this topic. We  discuss new terms and theories of accessibility, other key scholars working in this area, and the archives that have been important for all of us as we investigate the influence of accessibility on U.S. culture and society.

Interview:

Aimi Hamraie: I am so delighted to be here with Elizabeth Guffey and Bess Williamson, who are two of my favorite people and colleagues in disability studies. We've all written books about histories of accessibility, and so today we're going to be having a conversation from our perspectives as scholars who are writing about the history of accessibility.

Aimi Hamraie: Elizabeth's book is called Designing Disability: Symbols, Space, and Society. It was published by Bloomsbury in 2018. Bess's book is called Accessible America: A History of Disability and Design, published by NYU Press in 2019. My book is called Building Access Universal Design and the Politics of Disability, published by the University of Minnesota Press in 2017. Welcome to Elizabeth and Bess.

Elizabeth Guffey: Thanks.

Bess Williamson: Hi Aimi.

Aimi Hamraie: Hi. To get us started, we were discussing some general themes and questions before recording this episode. One of the questions that has come up between us a lot, I think, is why it is that these three books were in development and published so close to each other temporally and that before this it seems there wasn't a lot... There were more articles and things like that, but not books. There's this moment happening in which we find ourselves in a relatively new field or subfield. I wonder what you all think about that and why you think this may have happened. We can talk a little bit about how we came to our projects too.

Elizabeth Guffey: It's weird, because often in academia you always have this fear that you're going to be scooped. You get this idea, you want to do something, and then there's this fear, oh my God, I got to work on it really fast before somebody else does it. I guess when I entered into this topic, I didn't even think about that anybody was doing anything related. And then when I discovered that... First I discovered Bess, and then you Aimi too.

Elizabeth Guffey: But you guys were doing it from such different angles, there wasn't really anything threatening about it. But the fact that we've all come at this from different directions at the same time. I'm curious to hear what you guys think about that too.

Elizabeth Guffey: I feel like obviously my project grew out of my own disability, my ways of dealing with the world, and the problems I was having. But as I started to get angrier and angrier about all those issues, I started to look around and I came across Rosemary Garland Thompson's writings, and David Serlin, and because they had already started to conceptualize this field, I in many ways feel that I've just been building on that. Building out to design, which they never explicitly have dealt with. So for me, I feel like they really were foundational for what I did. But I'm eager to hear about your interest and how it is that you ended up doing this and why at this moment.

Bess Williamson: This has been really interesting. For me, my book was published about a year, about, who's counting, 13 to 15 months after both of your books. It was this amazing... I already obviously knew your works in progress when we had been on all kinds of conference things together and so on, but it was this amazing moment of being able to read these books that there are these key moments of overlap where we are looking at the same materials.

Bess Williamson: It was just incredible, because otherwise I was so often speaking from a perspective where nobody had really written historically about these issues. But to say a little bit about where I was coming from, for both me and Aimi, these projects started as our dissertations, whereas Elizabeth you're a more seasoned scholar.

Bess Williamson: As I was working in design history and American history, history of technology, I really came to a totally, from an intellectual standpoint, since I am not disabled myself, and had had relatively limited personal experience with the many issues of making access on a day to day basis, I really came to this through scholarly reading.

Bess Williamson: I was reading a lot of design writing from the 1960s about everything that was wrong with design technology of that moment, a search for environmental solutions addressing over consumption and inequality. And the design writer activist, Victor Papanek, folds into his critique of US and Western capitalism and design, the pointing out that things don't work well for disabled people. He uses his mother as an example.

Bess Williamson: And I just at the time I had never really seen those things all discussed in the same breath. That was the point of entry for me. It obviously goes a lot longer than that, but it really was looking at designers and what they were identifying as some of the problems that needed to be addressed in design in the later 20th century.

Aimi Hamraie: For me, I think I had a weird path to working on what I eventually came to because I was not in a history program. I was in a women's gender and sexuality PhD program. My advisor was Rosemary Garland Thompson. I had all these interests in architecture and the body that were more theoretical. But through various circumstances narrowed my project, and it became more empirical and historical.

Aimi Hamraie: I think one of the reasons why I came to studying universal design was that I was, when I first entered graduate school, I was really coming into my disability identity for the first time and having disability culture and community. But I, for the most part, most of what we talk about as accessibility in the built environment sense and the universal design sense does not address my access needs.

Aimi Hamraie: A lot of my questions came from the perspective of trying to understand why our universal design and other types of accessibility in the built environment, like barrier free design, so focused on physical disability in a specific set of ways and finding the genealogy of that. What I ended up doing was more of a history of science and history of technology, science and technology studies approach. Which was very, very different from where I started.

Aimi Hamraie: It's interesting to look back on the genesis of that and also to think about how we have all interfaced with each other at various times in the development of these projects. I think Bess, you and I met pretty early on in graduate school, maybe in our third year, or something like that. I remember sharing PDFs of resources and things like that. Elizabeth, I met you for the first time at the Society for History of Technology Conference, which was a while ago now.

Elizabeth Guffey: But you had also reviewed some books for a design and culture journal I was editing.

Aimi Hamraie: Exactly. This has all been cooking for a really long time and maybe not, it's not like we had some meeting at some point where we were like, one day we we'll have a field and it'll look like this. But it did work out in a really interesting way.

Aimi Hamraie: I wonder if we could just talk a little bit just thinking about some of the disciplinary similarities and differences in our approaches and also how they relate to the archives that we're using. Because something that is really interesting about these three books is that they do reference in some ways a lot of the same archival and primary source material. And so it allows for this consideration of how we're all reading those materials in similar or different ways. I wonder what are your thoughts about this question of discipline and archive.

Elizabeth Guffey: Just to jump in. I love working in archives and that really was what drew me into the field as a historian and then as an art historian later. But as my own disability has become more pronounced, it's actually harder and harder for me to travel and also to be going to libraries. In a way that was a startling realization.

Elizabeth Guffey: My whole practice as a scholar has really shifted over the years. But at the same time as my disability is more pronounced, archives have started to go online much more. So that in a way has been a real grace note for me and it probably is not being highlighted enough the way that these archives are starting to open up.

Elizabeth Guffey: Anyhow, to bring that back to your initial question, so for me, the University of Illinois, we were talking about Tim Nugent worked there and I think all three of our books address that. The fact that Illinois actually digitized big chunks of that was a huge help for me. It also was a way for me, somebody who has these mobility issues, to really access all this stuff that I used to love getting into and doing, but have left my life. To be able to come back and do that research online is really important for me.

Elizabeth Guffey: There is something in the field too and maybe the way that these archives are being handled. I don't imagine though that frankly at the University of Illinois they were thinking of a scholar like me with mobility issues being able to work online with what they have. But I would say that the digitization of archives has been a great help to somebody like me in a way that even 10 years ago I probably would not have been able to do that kind of research.

Elizabeth Guffey: On the other hand I think of Bess, and also you Aimi too, as people who really roll up your sleeves and actually go into physical archives.

Bess Williamson: I had such a grad student lifestyle and I'd say very privileged and mobile in many ways in that I had no family attachments during graduate school and was able to spend a summer... Well, I should say I had family attachments, I guess, my sibling lived in Berkeley, so I spent a whole summer there doing research at the Bancroft Library.

Bess Williamson: I think you raise a really good point. Just to backtrack, while we all three touch on the history of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign as a central first site for wheelchair access on a wide scale in the US, we all touch a little bit at least on the emergence of a disability rights scene in Berkeley. Aimi and I have a lot of that material as well.

Bess Williamson: Their archive, the disability rights independent living movement collection. I'm not sure what the last letter in that archive is. Has a lot that's digitized, but I would say that has a lot that's not digitized. What's amazing is their fantastic oral history collection, which was started, I think, in the late 1990s basically as some of the original players in that scene started to die, they realized the urgency of interviewing them and that having this just reams of pages of oral histories that you can just download and search and look for.

Bess Williamson: You get pulled into this intense interpersonal issues and gossip among the different characters. It's an intense archive. But it occurs to me how much isn't, in fact I'm thinking Aimi of this one image that of both of us use that I think maybe I sent my scan of it to you, the cover of The Independent that has this great scene of these activists as they're scanning the city, documenting access being pushed up. A curb cut.

Bess Williamson: But it's those little individual pieces of paper, a lot of them are still just in a box offsite, have to be ordered a few days ahead of time. So there is still a lot of that labor. I would say as somebody who doesn't live a lot of these issues on a day to day basis as much, I say that just to acknowledge that once you, as a non-disabled person, once you get into this terrain, you realize that access issues are not so cut and dry, that of course I experienced them in a variety of different ways in my life. I won't get into that too in detail, but I just don't want to be too black and white about it.

Bess Williamson: But being in the site was really significant to me as a historian. I'm a historian trained in material culture studies. There's an incredible emphasis on being in places and doing things, which we could consider the problems of that in a lot of ways, but it establishes a certain method, like walking the streets of Berkeley, taking photographs of all, or biking in many cases, taking photographs of old ramps, and houses, and curb cuts, was a big part of this.

Bess Williamson: I actually visited Urbana-Champaign now that I live in Chicago later in the process and became so aware of the subtle differences there between a 1950s era access and the 1970s, 1980s in Berkeley. Even though all of these things have been renovated in the interim, there's still a rugged access at Urbana-Champaign.

Bess Williamson: There's a lot of cracked concrete, ramps that go on the back sides of buildings. It's just you can still see that in the fabric of the landscape. So being there was significant to me and I think I try to sink this through a little bit now in terms of what that opened, but also what areas of archive work can we get rid of a little bit of this urgency to be places and replace those things with digital approaches for greater access.

Aimi Hamraie: I think both of your responses raised so many interesting questions because in the fields that we're working in, especially if we're talking about material culture, architecture, cities, those places are a part of the historical archive. Studying such recent histories makes them even more so a part of that historical archive.

Aimi Hamraie: But physical presence is mediated by all the accessibility issues that we've been studying. And then of course archives themselves present so many issues that are intensely physical. I've revisited a few archives to get digital pictures late in the process of working on my book, getting higher quality, higher resolution scans. It had been six years since I'd been to those places and I just remember feeling what had happened to my body in those six years and how different it was to access the lifting of boxes, the physical space, the lights, and the tables. Things that were easy to power through, we're very different.

Aimi Hamraie: That also raises additional questions, or it connects to conversations that many scholars, especially community scholars like Corbett O'Toole have been having about these specific archives themselves and the story that they tell about disability rights, the histories of access, and the ways that they're limited in other ways too.

Aimi Hamraie: What it means to present the history of Berkeley or the history of Urbana-Champaign in according to the narratives that are in those archives, when the archives are also extremely white and exclude a lot of queer people, and lots of other people who we're part of the history, but aren't documented there.

Aimi Hamraie: One thing I want to point out about all three of our books that I think is interesting is that we are also involved in critiquing the archive and making evident the limitations of the evidence itself. That is maybe part of a methodology that we have been trying to create around accessibility too, that departs a little bit from some other histories of disability or histories of design.

Elizabeth Guffey: One of the things in my book that I kept coming across, and this is probably from my training as basically a Europeanist in art history, is I was drawn of course to these early narratives, not in the US, but over in Europe, and the approaches there just kept striking me as being so different from the American ones.

Elizabeth Guffey: A lot of that was getting down to this question, what you're alluding to, Aimi, of whose voices are being heard. Those were issues over there too. You start to see, maybe it's easier when you're a little outside of the discussion, start to see these patterns of acceptance or there are certain things that people feel comfortable talking about, other things that are forbidden to be discussed.

Elizabeth Guffey: That really started to intrigue me, especially in the UK and in Scandinavia. The way that disability was dealt with. It's complicated everywhere. It's a fascinating to do an analysis of your books versus mine, because you guys go so deeply into the American context and really gives this counterpoint to what it was that I was writing about in my book too.

Bess Williamson: I think it would be helpful, I don't know, Elizabeth, for the purposes of the podcast to highlight that, I think, more specifically, because I think it's so significant. The US is the most prominent narrative in many ways around the issues of access and disability rights because of the greater presence of federal law, but that the counterexample that you bring to the in the book is so significant of this story of this other conversation that's going on there, which is much more based in a social welfare culture and primarily around visibility of disabled people.

Bess Williamson: That this architect, Selwyn Goldsmith, am I saying Goldsmith [crosstalk 00:19:35] comes across the American example and is like, "This is really great." And then starts to question it. Well what is this emphasis always on these hyper independent, super tough veterans? They never going to have to have a sign that marks the right way to go and they'll never be pushed and so on.

Bess Williamson: He's looking at these disabled folks in small towns in England who could really use a sign pointing to the bathroom and they're not part of these intense post-war rehabilitation programs. that's really the origin of a greater visibility in the international symbol of access.

Bess Williamson: I think that counter narrative is so significant and also points to the many counter narratives which existed in different countries that haven't really been written about at this point. There's a lot of work to be done there.

Elizabeth Guffey: I agree. There is a lot of work to be done there and it does give us a better understanding of the American context. We are of course all residing in the US and we teach in American institutions, but I think it's important to actually keep the big picture in mind too.

Elizabeth Guffey: When I started to work on the British stuff, it was really coming out of my own interest and the fact that I had lived in the UK and had vaguely noticed that things were different there. The approach was different. But I never really quantified it or what it meant.

Elizabeth Guffey: It was Goldsmith's idea initially was to accept everything American as being great. That everything that they were doing at Illinois and indeed that idea of independence above all. All you're trying to do is level the playing field for disabled people. That was so different than what he ended up deciding was a more socialist approach that was more appropriate for the United Kingdom than for the socialist democracies that followed his example.

Elizabeth Guffey: That though too has its limitations. For me it was a constant play in the back of my mind, which one of these did I really want to live in as a disabled person? It's nice to have people help, a lot, but it's also nice to be independent. Even in my own life it's a constant struggle. So maybe I was reading into these examples a little bit of my own issues and my own life, but at the same time it really did seem like a contrast other people were living out too. He certainly was.

Bess Williamson: All of us have engaged in different levels of critique of the international symbol of access and institutionalized the limitations of code driven design, as opposed to a more grassroots design. But your, Elizabeth, your piece in the Disability Series in the New York Times was so great in terms of thinking of what does it mean to live in a world where you're constantly surrounded by images of disability. Even if that white wheelchair stick figure has all kinds of issues with it, but just seeing it every day as a child that that was so significant to you.

Elizabeth Guffey: It does a lot of work in that way too that I never realized. It really is out there not just to show you where accommodations are, but that blue and white symbol teaches other people also what it takes to make an accessible world too. Because otherwise a lot of ramps and the rest of it would be overlooked by people who are going about their daily life and not really aware of it.

Elizabeth Guffey: Speaking of representations and the power that they have, have you guys seen that Apple is introducing new emojis, the disability emoji? Have you guys looked at this?

Bess Williamson: A little bit?

Aimi Hamraie: What is it about them?

Elizabeth Guffey: What do you think?

Aimi Hamraie: Your facial expression is incredulous.

Elizabeth Guffey: No, it's interesting for me. Somebody asked me about that recently, so I went back and went through them really closely and I realized the thing I guess... I certainly have no problem with emoji in general and those in particular are okay. But I did notice that they really seem to be as much about the technology that is being used to assist the individual disabled people as the people themselves. So you end with hearing impairment is being represented by a hearing aid around an ear, or the mobility impaired people are primarily, as I recall, two different types of wheelchairs, a power wheelchair and a manual one.

Elizabeth Guffey: So, a lot of it is technology that was being highlighted there, very little of the disabled bodies themselves, but instead how these people are fixing the disability that seemed to be emphasized.

Aimi Hamraie: Yeah, it's interesting because I think some of those, a few of them, are the international symbols equivalent to the ISA that exist for deaf people, et cetera. But they do add a few that also lead me to wonder about the history and development of those few. Like having the power wheelchair as distinct from the manual wheelchair, that's just an interesting addition that I wonder if there was a user involved as a designer who [crosstalk 00:24:45].

Elizabeth Guffey: Well, but, those of us we use wheelchairs will recognize it's not actually a wheelchair that's commonly used by individuals. It's really one of those hospital wheelchairs that you run into, or in the airport, or something. They have handles on the back and the rest of it's not that the type that most individuals who live their lives in wheelchairs would see commonly.

Bess Williamson: The manual chair, yeah, I've seen that critique as well. It is so interesting, right from a design standpoint, there was a time, actually one of my students, Effie, I don't remember her last name, Hakim, wrote this paper about a year ago or so, so before the new symbols, but about arguments from between the internet emoji international body that decides, and various disabled people asking for greater variety. There was an argument against greater variety. A scarcity argument. We can only have so many emojis and so we've got to have these ones.

Bess Williamson: And then there was all these counter arguments. Well, if there's four different expressions, there's four different heterosexual couples, why is there only one... I'm quoting from this paper a little bit wrong, but I thought that was interesting.

Bess Williamson: The new set presents abundance. There's so many possible choices. Of course, a lot of those choices, the more detailed you get, the more the details can be wrong, or feel wrong to somebody. Someone's probably thrilled to see any kind of wheelchair that's not a white outline, and others are like, that's not the quite the right thing.

Bess Williamson: But that design in general, in a digital environment, seems to be heading toward this variety is the solution. Which is so different from the era's that the three of us are primarily studying in our books, which is so governed by an attitude of scarcity that has to do with the material environment.

Bess Williamson: We just can't fit a ramp here. Or these, there's just no space for another toilet stall. Or whatever it is. And so I think we're in, in some platforms, we're in a different era of this variety and choice. That can lead also to sense of confusion. It does seem like people are using the emojis. I see them a lot on Twitter, stuff like that.

Aimi Hamraie: It just reminds me of that in terms of historical shifts too, we are in an era of widespread neo-liberalism and one of the defining features of that is this niche standardization. Have one of everything, but it may be imperfect, but who cares because we represented you, and also now we're going to sell you this emoji package or whatever, that has one of you in it.

Aimi Hamraie: That it's that ever expanding... What neo-liberalism does, according to people like David Harvey, is always expand and engulf difference rather than doing that normate standardization that we are all writing about. And so it really does then require a different historical narrative to be told about this period too.

Aimi Hamraie: I think it's significant that we all stop the historical scope of our books where we do, because it really is, I would say the ADA was wrapped up in early cultural neo-liberalism too. So that being a transition point distinguishes what kinds of people can really be represented.

Elizabeth Guffey: Right. I actually do go up into like the early 2000s, because a lot of my book was motivated by Sara Hendren's Accessible Icon Project. For me, the development of that was a fascinating wrinkle being brought in, bringing this discourse into that signage.

Elizabeth Guffey: To your point about neo-liberalism, I think I'm totally on board with that, Aimi, you're totally right. One of the things that I'm interested in right now and where my future research is leading is this question of what Bess and I have talked about in our calling a design model of disability. So building off of in designing referencing disability studies, the so called medical model or the social model, and starting to look at the way that design is becoming more and more important in the way that we are as a culture, thinking about disability.

Elizabeth Guffey: Just to go back to those emoji, these designs that have been created for disabled people that are really highlighted in those emoji, but more broadly what one of the things I find so fascinating is that design has become this thing that disability is expected to be treated by. That disability can be treated or even cured by digital material things, technology interface, all that can really start to change the way that we see disability, that we as a culture see it today.

Elizabeth Guffey: I think it just grows out of our obsession with design and technology in the 21st century. So much has changed in our lives and so we expect disability to change too, according to the norms of what is technologically acceptable. So for me, I'm fascinated by that.

Elizabeth Guffey: And neo-liberalism. Yeah. I think that's really behind this too. It's no longer necessarily doctors who are supposed to be curing disability, nor is it really laws or the government, we're looking to designers to be doing leveling the field and that costs money. We are paying designers to do that.

Aimi Hamraie: Yeah. It's agents of the market. That's one of the things that you write about a lot in your book too is that the market language and market logics are part of this milieu of accessibility and people critique that. They critique the modes of subjectivity that that may create, like disabled people only being consumers, et cetera. But it is part of the reality of how power is distributed and all of those things.

Aimi Hamraie: I remember talking to someone who came to a talk and I was talking about the critique of the disabled consumer. This person lives in a universal design showroom house. Their personal home is this mansion, universal design showroom, and the thing that she said was that you can talk to architects about these intellectual points, or whatever, about how to think about disability in a more proper way. But the broader market of manufacturers, and contractors, and stuff, they're not tapping into the same knowledge base, nor are they bound by the same professional codes and laws and things like that, in exactly the same way. They're pretending like the market is not the place where all of this goes down is an ineffective political strategy.

Elizabeth Guffey: We're also at a time where we're moving away from universal to design for one. Supposedly everything is being tailored to individuals, but what we often are losing sight of is a lot of that tailoring that's going on is being done by companies that are selling us designs. Most of that stuff that's being fitted out for you personally, costs money, costs a lot of money.

Bess Williamson: One of the things, I just, Aimi, I'm so struck by the terms that you just used, the universal design show house or mansion, the idea of disability being transformed into a form of luxury and a form of desirability as the best possible design. I think that's very much an outcome of the processes that all of us write about in our books of designers embracing this task. Whether because it's their own experience, like with Ron Mays who coined the term, or popularized the term, universal design, or companies who just recognize the market possibility there.

Bess Williamson: But that the idea that adding disability as a marker to certain categories of design can either produce the worst, inconvenient, difficult contested forms, or these luxury ideals. In that sense disability becomes, as you mentioned, another tool of the marketplace as a flip side of disability politics, I guess, a disability identity through the marketplace.

Tune in Next Time:

Hey, Aimi here. Just to let you know that we're about halfway through this conversation. And the remainder will be in the next episode, which will be out in about two weeks. so please remember to tune in.

Outro:

You’ve been listening to Contra*: a podcast about disability, design justice, and the lifeworld. Contra* is a production of the Critical Design Lab. Learn more about our projects at mapping-access.com., and be sure to follow us on Instagram and Twitter.

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Episode Details

Simple English summary:

What is the history of disability-accessible design? And how does this history get written? In this episode of Contra*, I talk to historians Elizabeth Guffey and Bess Williamson about their books on this topic. We discuss:

  • New terms and theories of accessibility
  • Other key scholars working on accessibility
  • The archives that have been important for all of us
  • The influence of accessibility on U.S. culture and society

Themes:

  • Disability and design
  • Historical archives
  • The way neoliberalism changes our understanding of disability
  • Accessibility and capitalism
  • The "design model of disability"

Links:

Scholars, books, art and designers referenced:

Archives:

Definitions:

Introduction Description:

The podcast introductory segment is composed to evoke friction. It begins with sounds of a wheelchair rhythmically banging down metal steps, the putter of an elevator arriving at a person’s level, and an elevator voice saying “Floor two, Floor three.” Voices begin to define Contra*. Layered voices say “Contra is friction…Contra is…Contra is nuanced…Contra is transgressive…Contra is good trouble…Contra is collaborative…Contra is a podcast!…Contra is a space for thinking about design critically…Contra is subversive…Contra is texture…”

An electric guitar plays a single note to blend out the sound.

The rhythmic beat of an electronic drum begins and fades into the podcast introduction.

Contra

Contra* is a podcast about disability, design justice, and the lifeworld.

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