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Critical Design Lab

Mapping Access

A map, with colorful pins and a pop up
Image Description: Sample Vanderbilt University campus accessibility map. Text at top says “VU Mapping Access, About, Vanderbilt Library, and Mapping Access Facebook.” Image shows an aerial photographic view of the campus, with trees, buildings, and streets. Dots in multiple bright colors cover the map. A pop-up from one dot says “Curb Center Building,” showing the glass door entrance to a red brick building. Text on the pop up says “There are three barrier-free entrances.”

The architecture of inclusion too frequently relies on codes and standards to define disability access. Building codes can create access, but compliance with codes alone can also produce complacency. User expertise becomes a technical problem to solve through design solutions. The question remains: how can access be understood as an issue of collective spatial concern, an emergent quality of built environments, a project that is always in production? And how can studying built environments collaboratively yield more critical modes of attention to injustice?

Mapping Access draws on social practice, participatory mapping, and digital media to produce more critical forms of collective access. Through carefully-staged Map-a-Thon events featuring collective and relational forms of accessibility, this work disrupts narratives of easy code compliance as access, leaning instead into the frictions of disability culture to show the complexities of access-making. Mapping together becomes an opportunity to revise our understandings of the most mundane aspects of built environments, to develop intersectional analyses of environmental exclusions, and to tell new stories about the places where we live and work.

Download the Mapping Access Toolkit (PDF graphic version in dark mode)

Download the Mapping Access Toolkit (Word Doc via Google Drive).

To read more about Mapping Access protocols and social and spatial practice methods, visit Project Muse to: Aimi Hamraie, “Mapping Access: Digital Humanities, Disability Justice, and Sociospatial Practice,” American Quarterly, 70.3 (2018): 455-482.

This project is funded through the generous support of the Library Dean’s Fellowship, the Curb Center for Art, Enterprise, & Public Policy, the Vanderbilt Institute for Digital Learning, and the National Humanities Alliance.

Critical Socio-Spatial Practice Methods

Critical Crowdsourcing

faculty member and two students survey a campus
Image Description: A faculty member and two students survey a campus building for accessibility. One person holds a measuring tape and two others look at the survey text while leaning against chairs in a brightly-lit nook.

Mapping Access adopts a critical and participatory approach to crowdsourcing. In the digital humanities, planning professions, and user-experience design, crowdsourcing is often taken as an efficient way to gather large amounts of data. Mapping Access asks additional questions:

How do typical modes and structures of data collection condition who participates and who is left out?

How can we understand participants as critical thinkers, and not only as those who record objective truths about the world?

How can distinguishing between types of expertise in crowdsourcing enable us to work toward social justice?

User-generated Surveys

Accessibility survey in table form
Image Description: Accessibility survey in table form, shown against the backdrop of a yellow manilla folder and a white tape measure.

Mapping Access adopts the Disability Justice principle of "leadership of those most impacted." In addition to members of our lab, who identify as access users, we also engage directly with potential users of accessibility features to define meaningful access. This often means going beyond the minimal standards required by law.

Community Conversations

students, faculty, and staff are seated, looking at a speaker
Image Description: A room with turquoise walls and tables, where students, faculty, and staff are seated, looking in the direction of a speaker at the front of the room.

Community conversations serve as opportunities to debrief following accessibility surveys, raise critical questions, and build coalitions around shared opportunities for access.

Map-a-Thons

poster advertising an Accessibility Map-a-Thon
Image Description: A gold and black poster advertising an Accessibility Map-a-Thon at Vanderbilt University, April 8, 2016. The caption says "help make Vanderbilt a more inclusive campus for all students, faculty, staff, and visitors."

Mapping Access uses "Map-a-Thon" events to develop a participatory culture around accessibility. Studying and enacting accessibility can be forms of direct action in the built environment. Watch a short captioned documentary about one of our Map-a-Thons below.

Mapping Access Documentary Trailer

Edited by Kevin Gotkin. Earlier version by Heather Rippetoe.

Aesthetic Description: Note that in addition to the text below, the video shows images of groups of people gathered in particular spaces: a classroom with tables and a projector screen, in hallways and other rooms measuring the space, and walking out of buildings. The video is captioned and includes much of the text below on text slides. The audio track, in addition to spoken language, has a digital and poppy aesthetic.

Transcript:

George C. Hill: "Every word, every action, every priority is a choice. Whether intentional or not, these choices have impact. To be truly excellent in the realm of inclusion and equity, we must think and act with intention. Assess the space you enter. For whom was this space created?" -Quoting Liv Parks, LGBTQI Program Coordinator, Vanderbilt University.

Aimi Hamraie: That accessibility map by design is created through participatory research. And what that means is that people who are students, faculty, or staff at Vanderbilt are actually involved in the process of determining what counts as accessibility, who gets to have access to this place.

Aimi Hamraie: what we’re trying to foster here is a sense of what Disability Justice activists call “collective access.” That’s the idea that we are collectively responsible for creating access for one another and that’s a way of relating and being in community.

Aimi Hamraie: they’ll hang out with a speaker for a little bit and then on the half hour they’ll go out and do what folks were just doing. We have these little kits for them. There’s a survey inside that’s based on the ADAAG ADA Accessibility guidelines and participatory research we did with different groups on campus.

Student: That’s not really [inaudible]. I don’t think that counts.

Melanie Adley: How do our students even enter buildings? How can they be in a building and feel welcome and comfortable. And all these things they seem separate from learning and pedagogy but actually they participate and make students feel aware and present and invested in a classroom if the campus itself is welcoming them.