beyond accessibility? re-thinking the user in architecture
by Jos Boys (Mar 2009)
In this article, I want to explore some of the limitations of locating disability as an issue of accessibility in architectural design. This is not to undermine the important shifts enabled by disability activists since the 1970s, particularly in equality legislation aimed at improving the built environment for everyone. But it is to explore why, in many ways, not much has changed over that 35 years, with disabled and Deaf people still facing a multitude of barriers to participation in ‘normal’ life. I will suggest, first, that the way in which the social model of disability has interacted with architectural education and practice continues to be problematic; and the explore how thinking disability differently might offer some news of thinking not just about accessibility but also about users and difference more generally.
The social model of disability and architecture
Over the last 20 years or so, the disabled people’s movement has made considerable advances in persuading the non-disabled world to adopt what we call the ‘social model’ of disability. This means recognising that people who have physical, sensory or intellectual impairments, or mental/emotional distress, are denied opportunities, discriminated against and excluded by the barriers that society creates. It means focusing, not on our impairments – what is wrong with our bodies or our minds – but on what is wrong with the way society is organised. In other words, focusing on the prejudice that we experience, inaccessible physical and communication environments, the failure to put resources into enabling technology, and other socially created barriers.
Jenny Morris (Ed) Encounters with Strangers 1996 p11
Rather than a medical model of disability which focused on impairments and understood these as a personal problem, the social model emphasises external barriers. This approach had a direct influence on architectural and urban design; because many barriers to everyday participation are physical and material. However, whilst disability activism was directly responsible for pioneering legislation related to architecture such as the Disability Discrimination Act (DDA) of 1995, and despite the value of notions such as accessibility and inclusive design, the barriers model as commonly understood within architecture still tends to frame disability in quite a limited way. It has become not about changing attitudes and assumptions but about legal and technical solutions, added on to 'nomrla' design activities.
Contemporary architectural and educational practices have certainly reflected the wider cultural shift from medical to social models of disability, that is away from a ‘special needs’ approach which individualised and separated out the ‘disabled’ from the ‘normal’ body (see histories section of SWIN website). But, I would argue, the disabled body remains an ‘awkwardness’ for architectural theory, practice and education, and is all too often still ‘left out’. Here, I will propose some reasons why this happens - which must also engage with the problematic concept of the ‘user’ more generally in architecture.
'Imagining' the disabled user
Much consideration of disability and architecture is still treated resolutely in a functionalist way, at the practical/technical end of architectural considerations. The whole language of accessibility tends to be framed around a belief in functional solutions to the problems of a range of specific impairments, which can be coherently and comprehensively detailed. Concepts such as inclusive design and accessibility thus predominantly aim to make disabled bodies be more ‘normal’ through the addition of designed devices (ramps, platform lifts, grips), which enable them to overcome the physical restraints of different impairments. Thus, the emphasis of the social model on the importance of physical barriers – to be resolved by their designing out – appears to support architectural solutions, but fails to challenge the underlying assumptions of disability as an ‘abnormal’ condition.
There are several problems with this approach. First, individual disabled and Deaf people come to stand for/conform to a whole category of medical impairment, their particular desires, preferences and personalities left without a ‘space’. The rich experiences, responses and strategies of different disabled and deaf people to their material surroundings are thus flattened out into a single dimensional, essentialist relationship of physical access.
Second, locating disabled people predominantly within the separate category of accessibility leaves them over-exposed as a difficulty for designers -somehow ‘different’ - people whose needs can only be met through a series of awkward to achieve, yet basically technical (thus banal and dull) solutions. What is more, in design teaching and learning, these solutions are perceived as being ‘added’ to the more important and initiating conceptual ideas or processes; as a drag or a potential undermining.
Third, both the concepts of accessibility and inclusive design imply that disability is a ‘fixed’ and ahistorical category where all the limitations of different impairments can be listed accurately and completely and then can be resolved ‘straightforwardly’ through design. The very ambiguous slippages between what is abnormal (Cancer? Deafness? Obesity? Baldness?) and what is ‘normal’ are ignored, as are the considerable conflicts, gaps, complexities – and sheer impossibility - of meeting everyone’s needs, everywhere, all the time. Unintentionally, then, the barriers/accessibility model ends up focussing on what the social model has tried to avoid – an endless attempt by legislators, planners, designers and other experts to pin-down the ‘correct’ special needs requirements of different impairments and provide the ‘neutral’ solution.
I suggest that to understand why this has happened better we need to untangle some of the ways in which ‘users’ more generally have been conceptualised within architecture – both historically and more recently; and how ideas about disability have intersected. At the same time, disabled and Deaf people fail to fit much contemporary architectural discourse. Whilst many of the shifts in architectural design processes and practices have been effectively and poetically critical of older functionalist 'modernist' models of design, the more recent emphasis on difference and hybridity - particularly within architectural education and the more avant-garde ends of architecture - somehow do not manage to ‘fit’ disabled and Deaf people in either. I suggest that this is because both the older modernist frameworks of accessibility and more contemporary understandings still share, at base, some simple and problematic assumptions about human beings. What has not changed is the assumption that both the ‘ideal’ and normal individual is a mobile, autonomous and unencumbered subject. But disabled and Deaf people cannot be categorised so conveniently; they often do not always have the privilege of such autonomy (however hard they try to achieve it), or are assumed not to want or need it. Rather than perceiving this as a problem for disabled and Deaf people which needs to be fixed on their behalf, or ignored as marginal, we could instead see it as a challenge to our assumptions about who and what is ‘normal’.
Next, then, I want to examine why this particular figure of the whole, self-sustaining and independent subject survives from modernist to post-modern paradigms; and then to explore how imagining human subjects differently, starting from the perspective of disability, might offer some other ways of conceptualising architectural occupation and inhabitation.
From functionalist user to hybrid abstraction
Jonathan Hill suggests that users are imagined by educators and practitioners through three main modes: as engaging in functional and ergonomic relationships with material space and objects; as experiencing sequences of “emotive spatial experiences” ; or as partaking in an aesthetic and concentrated contemplation of the building itself. As Rob Imrie writes, these bodies continue to be conceived of as functional and mechanical:
The body, in this view, is little more than an object with fixed, measurable parts; it is neutered and neutral, that is, without sex, gender, race or physical difference. It is residual and subordinate to the mind, or that realm of existence that is characterised by what the body is not; such as self, thought and reason.
Ron Imrie quoted in Hill 2003, 24
Yet, in fact, the disabled body most blatantly opens up these assumptions to discomfort (for architects and other users) and to the complexities and contradictions of difference; they just somehow refuse to fit, they will not be categorised conveniently; they cannot be ‘made to work’ coherently and completely as smoothly independent, self-locating and circulating mechanical bodies. Many such bodies speak too insistently and visibly of the powerful value of other modalities; of touch, of smell, of different kinds of spatial sensitivities. At the same time, and in many different ways, they expose the ambiguity of assuming mobility and autonomy, and of failing to engage with importance of interdependencies, the effortfulness of mobility and the special and privileged nature of autonomy. All of these other qualities are, of course, also valued by those not conventionally labelled as disabled, and consistently (re)appear in aspects of architectural education and practice. But they are not built into the ‘normal’ concept of the user, who implicitly operates functionally (efficiently), experiences space as a free being, and sees the world around as a set of predominantly visual sequences.
Of course, in individual design and educational projects, many variations on these unspoken characteristics occur. These, however, usually fail to problematicise assumptions about the ‘user’ or make explicit (up for discussion) the complexity of articulations different students and tutors might have as they imagine occupation and inhabitation. Staff and students may base it on what they already know (themselves?) or on stereotypical notions of the other (disabled = wheelchair) or on an artificially created ‘performative’ figure (the artist or other creative/eccentric figure) as a deliberately poetic abstraction. However, then, do disabled and Deaf people predominantly ‘fit’ into these different articulations of the user? I suggest that their ‘special needs’ status is endlessly reinforced and reproduced in the same way as other marginalised groups, that is, through the ‘live’ project.
The ‘live project solution’
Across architecture, teaching students about the needs of disabled users is still usually done or bests seen to be done via live (that is, client-specific or site-specific) design projects. This approach came into common use in the 1970s across both radical architectural and design education and practices, as a response to the commonly held belief that modernist architects and designers had failed to understand users’ needs. By involving ‘ordinary’ users on a case-by-case basis, attempts were/are made to guarantee an ‘authentic’ understanding of these particular users through some form of participation.
Such methods were introduced for a variety of reasons: so as to move beyond the perceived modernist reduction of users as mere ergonomic entities: to not ‘speak for others’: and as part of a wider radical shift towards locally-based democratic and participatory practices. These have been an extremely valuable response in educating students about the multiplicity of lived experiences, but – importantly – I want to suggest that the live project also has its own gaps and problems in relating disability, difference and architecture.
This is for three reasons. First, social design engagement easily became framed ‘as giving people what they want’, as if this was a transparent, consensual and straightforward process of gathering peoples’ views and producing a proposal in response, with the designer as merely a neutral conduit. The users under consideration are then a special case, so that lessons learnt about developing awareness of difference (which are relevant to all projects not just ones designed for ‘others’) are not transferred into ‘normal’ projects.
Second, the live project works on the assumption that user requirements are best learnt ‘from the horse’s mouth’, that is, are true and accurate when offered up by a particular (in this case) disabled person. This fails to engage with the complexity of difference; by making individuals stand not only for an entire category, but also as a cover for the difficulties of prediction, future uncertainities and likely changes of occupancy. Thus, whilst it is essential to take notice of disability-led perspectives, the architectural process that follows must also be explicitly made problematic.
Finally, the live project tends to only put ‘non-normal’ categories of users (disabled, poor, working-class, developing world) into this different and special relationship with designers; leaving these groups still located ‘on the outside’ of mainstream assumptions about what spaces are for ‘normally’. Most architectural educational or design projects are not, after all, ‘normally’ such participatory projects. When designing for ‘normality’ it is assumed that creative professionals will be capable of integrating complex and partial variables – always analysing situations about which they do not know very much and predicting how to instigate social, spatial and aesthetic improvements through the transformation of material space and objects. Conventional learning and teaching design emphasises this process of iteration and values the ability to creatively and critically empathise with ‘other’ situations based on limited knowledge, through sensitive understanding and interpretation. Disability continues to remains absent here, an anxiety we don’t want to speak about; where the non-disabled hide their insecurities by asking for design ‘solutions’ from the disabled themselves; where engaging in critical debate/ disagreeing with a disabled person feels awkward; where the case-specific approach can become a crutch for the fearful non-disabled to lean on, as they suddenly seem to forget their ‘normal’ professional design skills.
The contemporary shift
In the contemporary period some of these assumptions are being challenged, both at the level of theory and in architectural education and practice. Rather than meeting the needs of users, by defining and orchestrating their activities, much contemporary architectural design and education instead emphaises and enjoys the accidental and unforeseen, is interested in events rather than representation, and takes a design approach based on a series of lateral or ‘sideways’ approaches:
The first phase of the diagram describes a practice in which architects have almost always been adept. Taking the given brief for a proposed architectural project, the architect sets to work. First, the functions that the project will accommodate are specified. Second, these functions are arranged according to type. Third, the above arrangements according to type and function take into consideration a given site. (…) Finally, the architect discovers he has his container. (…)
The second phase of the diagram is where (…) the traditional process described above is insufficient. (….) The second diagram answers to a force that is preferably derived from outside the field of architecture so as to invest new possibilities into the architectural process. Take your pick – diagrams of solution waves, DNA structures, liquid crystals, geometric processes such as sine waves, fractals, morphing – it is up to you. These diagrams from the outside are then superimposed across the traditional diagram. The idea is to destroy one clarity with another clarity in order to create a blurriness, or what we might call a zone of obscurity…
Frichot (2005) ‘Stealing into Deleuze’s Baroque House’ pp 74-5
For architects such as Reiser and Umemoto, who explicitly engage with much contemporary theory – in particular the writings of Deleuze and Guttari who have been very influential across a number of disciplines - the older functionalist tropes of modernist architecture are no longer viable. If modernist space was seen as having neutral and universal, “co-ordinates without qualities” space must now be conceived instead as “a material field of ubiquitous difference.” (Atlas of Novel Tectonics Princeton University Press New York 2006, p26)
How can architects engage with such a field? Not, they argue, through mapping functional relationships or representing social or cultural meanings in the appearance or layout of buildings. Instead they look for a design approach which works by extracting ideas from the multiple properties and tendencies of all aspects of architecture – its materials, spatial arrangements and/or structural combinations. Building design becomes the practice of various processes of selection and combination, aiming at realising a set of conditions and/or potentialities.
The diagram is an invisible matrix, a set of instructions, that underlies – and most importantly organizes – the expression of features in any material construct. The diagram is the reservoir of potential that lies at once active and stored within an object or environment (or in any aggregate or section of these). It determines which features (or affects) are expressed and which are saved. (P 12 - 13)
A major shift from modernism to contemporary approaches is that the social and the physical are no longer articulated through representation. Reiser and Umemoto’s example of this is a shift from Le Corbusier’s aesthetic analogy between object and function through the image of the streamlined car, to it’s processes and their creative and energy potentials, that is, through ideas of the internal combustion engine. For them, “Architectural systems are not human relationships: like nature they are impersonal, yet inhabitation is augmented by the pressures of their indifference.” (P 58)
Here, in perhaps an extreme version of the argument, users have ceased to exist, except as hybrid events, processes and patterns. Users may no longer be the abstracted neutral and ergonomic machines of modernism, but neither are they now concrete, situated and encountering bodies. Instead it is the patterns of complexity and the ideas of partiality and hybridity which inform creativity, abstracted to the level of dynamic and layered systems.
All the while the concrete particularity of, insistent differences between, rich materiality of, and situated engagements between all our various human bodies somehow continues to fall down the cracks and disappear. Partly this is for a positive and creative reason. As Smith writes: “to be provocative or inventive, we must constantly ‘sidestep’ established paths and approaches, always moving between different course of action.” But in this transversing is a different kind of sidestepping going on, an avoidance of engaging with both the multiple experiences of others, and how hard it is to conceptualise such processes theoretically? If disabled people underline the untenability of conventional notions of the user, they also expose the unwillingness of much contemporary architectural education and practice to risk its theories and approaches beyond the academy; to open up its assumptions and beliefs to wider debate and criticism; to listen to outsiders rather than play just ‘play’ at the outside.
These newer trends, then, have enabled a re-energised design process, but still fail to make any kinds of productive space for articulating the experiences of deaf and disabled people (or of the diversity of occupation of space more generally). Disabled people are left with a very problematic choice of locations. They can be over-visible within the limitations of the accessibility debate as ‘abnormal’ users defined only by their disability; they can be invisible in mainstream architectural thought (and cultural theory more generally); or they can be subsumed into some poorly fitting notion of ‘hybrid’, ‘nomad’ or ‘cyborg’ within contemporary lateral-shifting ideas.
Re-locating difference
In many ways it is not surprising that theoreticians slip away so often from the complex and messy realities of everyday practices and encounters into abstractions and simplifications about users/figures. For how does one encompass the full variety of personal preferences, individual needs and desires in the design process? What can one do in the multi-faceted and many-variabled procurement, development, design and delivery of buildings to make space useful, enjoyable and appropriate for everyone? In fact, it is also important to problematicise some of the commonsense expectations of architecture – and of architects – which can imply that such a thing is indeed possible, that all building should fit everyone, everywhere, all the time (and that if they don’t this is entirely the architect’s fault.) The responses from many disabled and deaf people of their experiences of material space are very similar to that of most users; that a particular light switch is in the wrong place, or a selected colour unattractive or lacking contrast.
This kind of oppositional relationship is maintained through reactive complaints about specific components of a design; with individual or groups perceiving themselves as victims of architectural arrogance. If all users feel that architects don’t meet their needs, then particular interest groups often find themselves demanding attention as a special case. This puts disabled and Deaf people in a double bind. On the one hand, existing buildings and spaces are often thoughtlessly designed or managed and do not operate well for disabled or deaf people. On the other, it is important to get beyond what Davis calls “oppressed identities or populations understood as docile/wounded” (Davis Bending Over Backwards p31), where disabled and Deaf people find themselves pleading a special case as in need of particular ‘protecting’. But it also puts architects into an ambiguous position; it assumes a simplified binary power relation of oppressor and victim. In this process both groups are put in stereotypical opposition, where the architect is assumed to have all the power (which given the complexity of building processes is simply not true) and the disabled person to be passive, ‘difficult’ and powerless.
We therefore urgently need a better way of modelling all the different participants in the process, which makes diversity central, but also engages with differential access - not just to space per se, but also to decisions about what matters and what doesn’t. What disability brings to this rethinking is profound; it cannot just be about abstract bodies but must incorporate the concrete realities of physical as well as personal, social, cultural differences. What it makes persistently visible (if we only stopped to take notice) is the unstoppable ambiguity of categories and the unevenness of difference. Ideas like ‘the user’, accessibility and inclusive design are all part of our various attempts to make sense (and survive in) the world. Once we start opening up the gaps in these ideas for questioning, we can begin to see why particular ideas take hold in different periods; and can explore the more wobbly areas of their construction. From this point of view, moving beyond accessibility is not about replacing it with another ‘solution’, but with developing awareness, an ethical position and an attitude.
In many ways this is actually more like architecture is ‘normally’ practiced. It demands the creative and effective engagement with a number of partial and often conflicting variables (social, material, financial, functional, cultural etc.,). It requires a complex set of interacting predictive actions, underlined by uncertainty. It operates in a wider context of decision-making where the designer may have little control and must always compromise; will never get everything right. Designs only come to fruition through complex negotiations across many, often conflicting interests.
How, in this process, then, should the diverse experiences of disabled and deaf people inform architectural practice and education? Here, I have three suggestions. First, by shifting from meeting the 'special needs' of an assumed unproblematic category of people and instead starting from disability as a way of challenging stereotypes, simplistic categories, false oppositions and lives too often lived as if our bodies don't exist, in a state of distraction. Second, by making processes and practices central, not ‘solutions’ or ‘products’. Disabled and non-disabled participants are not separated out; all have parity in the space of the various encounters involved in the procurement, development, design and occupation of buildings and spaces. In such a dialogue, everyone has things to learn - disabled people need to understand more about how architectural processes 'work': architects, tutors and students need to find ways to open up assumptions about 'normal' everyday experiences and encounters for creative critique. We need to find new ways of working together which explore just how both the pleasures and realities of difference can be translated into material form.
Finally, it remains very important to attend to the differential impacts of 'conventional' processes and practices - and their designed results - on disabled and Deaf people (in ways not of their making) and to find strategies and tactics which go beyond simplistic ideas of accessibility and the disabled user.
Selected Readings
Jonathan Hill
Jonathan Hill
Doina Petrescu
Jeremy Till