BUILDING ACCESS

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 B U IL DING ACCES S

Universal Design and the

Politics of Disability

Aimi Hamraie

UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA PRESS

MINNEAPOLIS • LONDON

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 Every effort was made to obtain permission to reproduce material in this book. If any
proper acknowledgment has not been included here, we encourage copyright holders to
notify the publisher.

Chapter 3 was published in an earlier version as “Inclusive Design: Cultivating

Accountability toward the Intersections of Race, Aging, and Disability,” Age Culture
Humanities no. 2 (2015): 337–46. Portions of chapter 6 were previously published as
“Universal Design and the Problem of Post-Disability Ideology,” Design and Culture 8,
no. 3 (2016): 285–309.

Copyright 2017 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying,
recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Hamraie, Aimi, author.
Title: Building access : universal design and the politics of disability / Aimi Hamraie.
Description: Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, 2017. |
Includes bibliographical references and index. |
Identifiers: LCCN 2017005479 (print) | ISBN 978-1-5179-0163-9 (hc) |
ISBN 978-1-5179-0164-6 (pb)
Subjects: LCSH: Universal design—Political aspects—United States. | People with disabilities—
United States.
Classification: LCC NA2547.H36 2017 (print) | DDC 720.87—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017005479

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 For the misfits

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 UNIVERSAL DESIGN

QUESTIONS DESIGNERS SHOULD ASK

Why design something that can’t be used?
Why say something that can’t be heard?
Why write something that can’t be understood?
Why draw something that can’t be seen?
Why build something that is inaccessible?
Why construct something that can’t be climbed?
Why paint something that is invisible?
Why sculpt something that can’t be felt?
Why bridge something that can’t be crossed?
Who are designers designing for?
What are designers designing?
When are designers designing?
How are designers designing?
Are designers making life elegant for everyone?
How do the blind turn off the lights?
How do the deaf listen to music?
How do the mute speak?
How do the paralyzed feel?
How do the tasteless taste?
Whose standards are standard?
Whose norms are normal?
Whose solution is universal?
Whose microcosm is worldly?
Whose exclusivity is inclusive?

BUT DESIGNERS WILL—

Build the Building!
Design the Design!

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 Sculpt the Sculpture!
Etch the Etching!
Draw the Drawing!
Draft the Drafting!
Paint the Painting!
Detail the Details!
Communicate the Communication!
Photograph the Photograph!
Film the Film!
Plan the Plan!
Color the Color!
Structure the Structure!
Texture the Texture!

BUT DESIGNERS SHOULD ASK—

WHO IS THE DESIGN FOR?
WHAT IS THE DESIGN PROBLEM?
WHERE WILL THE DESIGN BE USED?
WHEN WILL THE DESIGN BE USED?
HOW WILL THE DESIGN BE USED?

UNIVERSAL DESIGN IS POSSIBLE IF THE ANSWERS ARE—

EVERYONE
UNIVERSALITY!
EVERYWHERE
ALWAYS!
UNIVERSALLY!

—B ruce H annah , professor emeritus, Pratt Institute, School of

Art and Design. Universal Design Teach-in, Pratt Institute, January 14, 1994

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 Contents

Preface xi

Introduction
Critical Access Studies 1
1 Normate Template
Knowing-Making the Architectural Inhabitant 19
2 Flexible Users
From the Average Body to a Range of Users 41
3 All Americans
Disability, Race, and Segregated Citizenship 65
4 Sloped Technoscience
Curb Cuts, Critical Frictions, and Disability (Maker) Cultures 95
5 Epistemic Activism
Design Expertise as a Site of Intervention 131
6 Barrier Work
Before and After the Americans with Disabilities Act 175
7 Entangled Principles
Crafting a Universal Design Methodology 223
Conclusion
Disability Justice 255

Acknowledgments 263
Notes 265
Index 325

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 Preface

Who belongs where, under what auspices or qualifications, and during what times
or through what particular thresholds?
—­T a n ya T itchko sky, The Question of Access

Let’s begin by traveling.

If you are sighted, if the bus will take you there, and if the altitude suits you,
you can see it from the outside. At the Blusson Spinal Cord Center in Vancouver, a
colorful ramp winds around a glass atrium to three of the upper floors (Figure P.1),
where rehabilitation professionals conduct bench science and people with spinal
cord injuries receive therapy. Some use the ramp as a training space for wheelchair
sports, ascending to increase endurance, speed, and efficiency. A statue of a wheel-
chair basketball player, holding arms upright as if poised to shoot, sits at the ramp’s
base. Amid the statue, the ramp, spacious bathrooms with grab bars, and the elevators
with their large, wheel-­in buttons, the most recognizable visual symbol of disability—­
the International Symbol of Access—­is nowhere to be found.
u
Across the continent, at the Institute for Human Centered Design in Boston, access
is everywhere, both marked and unmarked. A large silver button featuring the Inter-
national Symbol of Access appears on the right side of a glass door (Figure P.2).
Whether you press, kick, or nudge the button, a door opens into an airy, bright space,
speckled with the green of plants enjoying natural light. An attractive retail area
showcasing colorful kitchen products, chic felt tote bags, and toys feeds into a wide
hardwood ramp, a library and comfortable reading space, accessible restrooms with
hands-­free toilets and faucets, a demonstration kitchen, and offices. Visual and Braille
signs on three-­dimensional art displays invite you to touch the work.
u
Just south of Austin, Texas, a crowd of children and adults gathers for admission to
Morgan’s Wonderland, an accessible theme park. Through the gates and past a line of
“family” restrooms (each marked with the access symbol), a large, three-­dimensional

xi

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 xii Preface

Figure P.1.  The glass and steel structure of the Blusson Spinal Cord Center in Vancouver,
British Columbia, discloses a glass atrium with a winding, colorful ramp (2010). Photograph
by author.

tactile map communicates the park’s layout and offerings: wheelchair-­accessible

rides, swings, playgrounds, and a carousel; sensory activities such as fountains and
xylophones; and an amphitheater for live performances. Cardboard cutouts of chil-
dren dressed as superheroes—­some with wheelchairs, crutches, glasses, or service
animals, and others, like Morgan, an autistic girl for whom the park was named,
without—­double as signs directing you throughout the space. Follow the signs, feel
free to play, and notice what happens when bodies that rarely access public space do
so together.
u
In a dark hotel ballroom, two screens and two American Sign Language interpreters
flank a table of presenters. On one screen, a speaker shows slides, and on another, a
transcriber documents their words. “Would anyone benefit from a printed copy?” the
moderator asks before each talk. “I have twelve-­and eighteen-­point font.” Many raise

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 Preface xiii

Figure P.2.  A view of the library and seating area at the Institute for Human Centered Design,
Boston, Massachusetts (2010). Photograph by author.

hands or canes, wave, or call out. The event is a plenary session on race, disability, and
literature, but across the Society for Disability Studies conference, similar affordances
and very different bodies appear in nearly every room.
u
Each of these spaces illustrates at least some elements of Universal Design, a late
twentieth-­century design philosophy aimed at creating built environments that are
accessible for both disabled and nondisabled users. But each space also embodies a
very different way of understanding the concept of disability, whether as a medical
category in need of correction, a category of identity and shared experience, a con-
sumer designation, or an inevitable aspect of human community, which societies
should anticipate and value.1 Nearly a decade ago, when I began traveling to these and
other spaces, I thought that I understood Universal Design. It was common sense,
really: the world should be designed with all of us in mind. But as my bodymind came
to inhabit some ways of sensing, perceiving, and moving through the world that are
called “disability,” traveling and taking up space came to mean very different things:

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 xiv Preface

not easy passage, but frictioned negotiations of access and privilege.2 As I traveled,
sensed, and inhabited these spaces, it became clear that the concept of Universal
Design was not common sense at all. Rather, what designers, users, and advocates
mean by this term can be as varied as their conceptions of and relations to the idea
of disability. In each space, promises of Universal Design for “everyone” materialized
in relation to particular types of users, and whether I (or anyone else) was part of that
“everyone” depended on whether our presence had been anticipated, in what ways,
and for what purposes.
Building Access explores these conditions of knowing, making, and relating. When
the goal is to design for “everyone,” I ask, who counts as everyone and how do de-
signers know?

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 Introduction

Critical Access Studies

The difficult intersectional, interdisciplinary work to be done includes within one
frame the spaces of the political economic and the ontological, the battles of the
activist and the epistemologist, the tracings of the historian and the artist.
—­B e at r iz da Costa and Kavi ta P hillip,
Tactical Biopolitics

ADA NOW! ADA NOW! ADA NOW!

One hundred stairs divide a gathering crowd from the U.S. Capitol Building
above. Numbering in the hundreds, they chant and hold signs. A group breaks off,
leaving behind wheelchairs and crutches to lay flesh on stairs and crawl to the top.
Framed against the building’s steps, the bodies are clearly misfits: unanticipated, non-
compliant, and taking up space.1 Walking to their offices, irritated lawmakers step
over and around misfit bodies; onlookers snap photographs; news anchors interview
activists as they crawl to the top. Framed by the stairs in a striking image, these public
bodies communicate what signs and chants alone cannot: this building, a symbol of
governance and democratic citizenship for all—­an embodiment of the nation itself—­
was not designed with disabled people in mind.2
The event was the “Capitol Crawl,” a disability rights protest demanding that
Congress pass the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) of 1990, landmark anti­
discrimination legislation that identified a civil right to accessible buildings, public
transportation, and workplaces for disabled citizens. Widely credited as the final push
that resolved congressional deadlock, the Capitol Crawl demonstrated the power
of disabled people as resourceful agents whose novel tactics showed visible evidence
of disability discrimination, rather than patients in need of medical cure (Figure I.1).3
But the critical work of these visible tactics went far beyond the ADA itself. The dem-
onstration professed a particular disability theory of architecture: that built forms
convey material rhetorics, which reveal cultural assignments of knowledge and power.
In the Capitol Crawl, disabled people spoke back against the steps by deploying em-
bodied speech and lived knowledge as architectural critique.
At the twenty-­fifth-­anniversary celebration of the ADA in 2015, a temporary mural
appeared on the steps of the Carnegie Library in Washington, D.C., bearing Presi-
dent George H. W. Bush’s historic remarks: “With today’s signing of the landmark

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 Figure I.1.  Disability protesters at the “Capitol Crawl,” leaving behind wheelchairs, power
chairs, and crutches to crawl up the steps of the U.S. Capitol Building in Washington, D.C.
(March 12, 1990). Photograph by Tom Olin. Courtesy of Tom Olin Photographs Collection,
MSS-­294, Ward M. Canaday Center for Special Collections, University of Toledo Libraries.

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 Introduction 3

Americans [with] Disabilities Act, every man, woman, and child with a disability can
now pass through once-­closed doors into a bright new era of equality, independence,
and freedom.” Google’s charity organization Impact Challenge commissioned the
mural and others like it on staircases near the National Mall, each featuring a disa­
bility rights leader who (in the organization’s words) had “asked, ‘What if we could
create a more inclusive world for everyone?’” For those celebrating the anniversary,
the murals (and their corporate donor) signaled the secure place of disabled Ameri-
cans in U.S. culture and life. Bush’s words confirmed the post-­ADA narrative that the
time for disability rights had finally arrived. But working in concert with post-­racial
narratives, which insist that American racism ended along with state-­sanctioned seg-
regation, the post-­ADA narrative uses the formal guarantee of disability equality to
elide the existence of material inequalities.4 By painting Bush’s promise of universal
access on the built form of a staircase—­the same structure that was the Capitol
Crawl’s focal point—­the murals hid in plain sight (and without a hint of irony) the
persistent architectural, attitudinal, and economic barriers that disabled people con-
tinue to face in the post-­ADA world.5
Despite the optics of disability rights, the causes of discrimination are often in-
visible and illegible. Disability law scholars and policymakers have documented the
ADA’s failures to improve access to employment, housing, and public spaces, attrib-
uting these limitations to the law’s limited provisions and inability to address struc-
tural, systemic, and attitudinal discriminations that disabled people face.6 Disabled
people continue to leave evidence that the ADA has not resulted in a postdiscrimi­
nation world, emphasizing that normal, taken-­for-­granted aspects of built environ-
ments, such as the prevalence of stairs, work in tandem with discriminatory attitudes.
Disabled painter Sunaura Taylor’s Thinking Stairs illustrates this argument through a
series of comic book–­style frames, showing a grayscale sidewalk flanked with cartoon­
ish red stairs emitting empty speech bubbles (Figure I.2). “When I go out,” Taylor
writes, “it’s as if the stairs are all bright red. It’s as if they are all talking about me.
But I don’t know what they are saying. . . . They are manifestations of something
more sinister: discrimination.” The landscape appears disembodied, impartial, until
the final frame, in which Taylor herself appears as a black-­and-­white figure driving
her power chair amid staring pedestrians. Wordlessly, the stairs communicate what
the people—­and their stares—­appear to think: that Taylor is out of place; the world
was not designed with her in mind.7
The post-­ADA narrative thus misses a crucial point offered by disabled users,
designers, and activists: that the built world is inseparable from social attitudes, dis-
criminatory systems, and knowledge about which users designers must keep in mind.
Put another way, how we structure knowledge, interact with material things, and
tell stories about the users of built environments matter for belonging and justice.
When these stories embrace as common sense such values as freedom, access, and
“a more inclusive world for everyone,” it becomes all the more important to heed the

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 Figure I.2.  Art animates the unspoken discriminatory effects of built environments. Thinking
Stairs suggests that buildings communicate what people do not. Courtesy of Sunaura Taylor.
Previously published in Modern Painters (October 2014).

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 Introduction 5

critical lessons of the Capitol Crawl protestors, whose embodied architectural cri-
tique raised critical, material, and epistemological questions: who counts as every-
one and how can we know? These questions—­how they arose and what impact they
had on new approaches to environmental design since the twentieth century—­are
the focus of this book.
Building Access has three primary aims: first, to provide a more critical and his-
torical account of accessibility and Universal Design than currently exists; second,
to conceptualize the historical project of knowing and making access (or what I
call “access-­knowledge”) through critical disability, race, and feminist perspectives
(and to develop a Universal Design theory that is attentive to issues of power and
privilege); and third, to elucidate in broad strokes how the shifting figure of the user,
particularly the disabled user, has shaped justifications for and material practices of
Universal Design in the present. My focus is not to evaluate specific designed prod-
ucts or to endorse certain principles of design. Rather, I am concerned with the impli-
cations of how we imagine the figure of the user, justify design for particular users,
and tell stories about the value of such design for broader questions of difference and
belonging in the contemporary United States. Building Access, then, offers scholars,
activists, designers, and others who support the project of accessible world-­building
a map of our paths to the present.
In the early twenty-­first century, the term “Universal Design” gained popularity
as an easy reference to the idea that inclusive design benefits everyone, regardless of
disability or age. Its global circulation and reach into a number of disciplines beyond
architecture, however, make it easy to forget that Universal Design is a very recent
discourse, and that how this phenomenon is named, defined, and justified is a prod-
uct of the post-­ADA era. The post-­ADA narrative dictates that accessible design, like
freedom, is a self-­evident, commonsense good. But how the built world materializes
is inseparable from the value-­laden politics of knowing. “All too often,” wrote dis-
abled architect and accessibility expert Ronald Mace, “designers don’t take the needs
of disabled and elderly people into account when they are designing a building.”8
Focused on accessible design as a site of meaning-­making and world-­building, Build-
ing Access argues that since the twentieth century, the project of designing a more
inclusive world for everyone has taken shape through specific arrangements of know-
ing and making: the phenomenon that I am calling access-­knowledge.
Access-­knowledge, a regime of legibility and illegibility, emerged from inter­
disciplinary concerns with what users need, how their bodies function, how they
interact with space, and what kinds of people are likely to be in the world.9 While
twentieth-­century U.S. rehabilitation experts, ergonomists, social scientists, archi-
tects, product designers, and policymakers claimed expertise about accessibility as
an objective, functional practice, disabled users positioned themselves as experts cre-
dentialed by their lived experiences to remake the world. How designers negotiated

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 6 Introduction

the politics of knowing-­making, in turn, implicated their strategies and interventions.

Behind the scenes of legible public events, such as the Capitol Crawl or the passage
of legislation, Universal Design proponents conducted more subtle forms of activism,
using research, technical guidance, and design education as spheres in which to chal-
lenge designers’ dominant conceptions of users.
At its core, this book is about the material ramifications of stories, ideas, and
representations as they coalesce into broader discourses of disability, knowledge,
and nation. But it is also about knowledge and ignorance as material arrangements.
To offer a more critical and theoretical understanding of Universal Design than cur-
rently exists, Building Access investigates how access-­knowledge has animated the rela-
tionships between scientific, architectural, industrial, national, and embodied ways
of “knowing” disability. Drawing on an expansive archive of ephemera, oral histories,
design documents, handbooks, publications, marketing materials, physical objects
and spaces, and personal papers from Universal Design’s founders, Building Access
places the claim that “designers do not design with disability in mind” in historical,
theoretical, and cultural perspective. The emergence of access cannot be reduced to
common sense, good will, or the affordances of the state. Nor is access simply a mat-
ter of keeping disabled users “in mind.” Since the mid-­nineteenth century, specific
relations of knowing-­making—­situated histories of embodiment, ideology, science,
technology, and design—­have shaped the possibilities for and the politics of acces-
sible world-­building.

LOCATING ACCESS-­K NOWLEDGE

“Like a bean sprout that emerges only after its root is deep and strong,” wrote Molly
Story, James Mueller, and Ronald Mace, “universal design has its beginnings in demo-
graphic, legislative, economic, and social changes among older adults and people
with disabilities throughout the twentieth century.”10 In 1985 Mace coined the term
“Universal Design” to describe the idea that many people, whether disabled or non-
disabled, benefit from a more accessible built environment.11 Mace concluded that
architects and product designers should make all environments accessible, rather
than requiring disabled people to request “retrofits” (or alterations) after a building
has already been constructed. Although these ideas had circulated for decades, Mace’s
term propelled the concept into the ADA era.
While Mace’s term preceded the ADA by five years, the dominant narrative about
Universal Design is a post-­ADA phenomenon. Since the late 1990s, Universal Design
proponents have debated the concept’s relationship to the ADA and, by extension, to
the notion of disability itself.12 These debates are at an impasse, however, because the
term is used to describe a wide range of approaches, from design that begins from a
focus on disability (and has added value to others) to design that begins by focusing
on a range of users to design that is just intuitive, common sense, and usable. Building

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 Introduction 7

Access resolves this impasse by historicizing the debates themselves in relation to

shifting understandings of disability rights, good design, and human variation. By
treating Universal Design as a shifting historical discourse, a tool for making dis­
tinctions to create meaning and shape material realities, rather than a stable idea or
practice, this book disentangles the aspiration for a more accessible world from the
ideologies and values used to promote it.
Although the ADA popularized the discourse of Universal Design, the meanings
of this term soon proliferated. Builders’ magazines, newspapers, textbooks, and confer­
ence workshops began to tell a new story about Universal Design: that this approach
was not about accessibility for disabled users at all but rather about a commonsense
approach to “good design” for everyone.13 Even prominent disabled people, such as
journalist John Hockenberry, a wheelchair user, adopted the post-­ADA narrative.
Describing accessibility renovations to his home kitchen, Hockenberry wrote,

In the end there was nothing “special” or “handicapped” about it. This kitchen was
merely made to work with the real people who lived there. Its universality came not
from abstract specifications but from the lives of real people, creating spaces for their
daily lives. No detailing or style or luxury could possibly be more precious than this
simple quality. Universal design is perhaps just an overly clinical name for something
we think we know but perhaps we don’t—­good design.14

This new story, a crucial part of the post-­ADA narrative, implied that accessible
design was easy to achieve and simple to practice. It was good business as the popula-
tion aged. It had little to do with disability. It was commonsense, good design.
Despite Universal Design’s origins in the work of disability activists and in dis-
ability rights efforts preceding the ADA, the term has become a popular discourse
in the post-­ADA world—­not by centering disability as a category of marginalization
but by disavowing it. But how did Mace’s concept come to signify a disability-­neutral
approach? In 1997 the Center for Universal Design at North Carolina State University
in Raleigh, North Carolina, released “The Principles of Universal Design,” a guide for
inclusive and flexible design (Figure I.3).15 Since 1997 the “Principles” have become
the most-­often-­cited reference to Universal Design, shaping public perceptions of
its theory. Although the “Principles” used terms such as “equitable” and “flexible,”
references to specific users, such as disabled people, do not appear in the text. Con-
sequently, the public perception of Universal Design since the late 1990s has been
shaped by what I term “barrier work,” or claims that Universal Design is not about
disability at all but rather about good design for everyone.
Widely cited as a representation of Universal Design writ large, the “Principles of
Universal Design” has spread beyond architecture and industrial design into Web de-
sign, education, and even critical humanistic scholarship. As it spreads, however, Uni-
versal Design claims are largely taken as common sense. The concept remains largely

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 8 Introduction

THE PRINCIPLES OF UNIVERSAL DESIGN

Principle 1: Equitable Use
The design is useful and marketable to people with diverse abilities.

Principle 2: Flexibility in Use

The design accommodates a wide range of individual preferences and
abilities.

Principle 3: Simple and Intuitive Use

Use of the design is easy to understand, regardless of the user’s experience,
knowledge, language skills, or current concentration level.

Principle 4: Perceptible Information

The design communicates necessary information effectively to the user,
regardless of ambient conditions or the user’s sensory abilities.

Principle 5: Tolerance for Error

The design minimizes hazards and the adverse consequences of accidental
or unintended actions.

Principle 6: Low Physical Effort

The design can be used efficiently and comfortably and with a minimum of
fatigue.

Principle 7: Size and Space for Approach and Use

Appropriate size and space is provided for approach, reach, manipulation,
and use regardless of user’s body size, posture, or mobility.

Figure I.3.  “The Principles of Universal Design,” Version 2.0 (4/1/97). Courtesy of the Center
for Universal Design, North Carolina State University.

ahistorical and undertheorized as a result. With few exceptions, critical methodologies

from the humanities and social sciences have not been applied to exploring Universal
Design’s interventions, possibilities, and strategies. Building Access reaches below the
surface of post-­ADA narratives to parse Universal Design’s barrier work, marketing
discourses, and public circulation from its more critical, material, and epistemologi-
cal contributions, unearthing a range of heterogeneous justifications, material prac-
tices, and finely graded interventions into dominant modes of knowing and making.

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 Introduction 9

Global attention to Universal Design has heightened since the late 1990s. Trans-
lated into at least eleven languages, including Dutch, French, German, Bahasa Indone­
sia, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norsk (Norwegian), Portuguese, Spanish, and Swedish,
the “Principles of Universal Design” and the concept they elucidate appear as man-
dates in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Disabled Persons.16 Inter-
national conferences attract networks of experts, designers, and researchers from
Japan, Norway, and India, among other countries, to explore Universal Design along-
side approaches termed “Inclusive Design,” “Design for All,” and “Design for the Life­
span.” Advocates claim that these terms provide nonuniversalist alternatives for the
philosophy that Universal Design describes. But like the barrier work of distinguish-
ing between Universal Design and the ADA, the purported equivalency of these terms
presupposes an ideal concept and approach that simply awaits a better title. Signifi-
cant empirical questions remain, however, about whether these terms are constant in
their meaning, scope, and practice as they circulate globally.
While all these approaches may aspire toward a more accessible world, their jus-
tifications, strategies, and conceptions of users transform across historical and geo-
graphic contexts. Building Access argues instead that the very notions of accessibility,
inclusion, all, and lifespan are as contested, historically contingent, and value-­laden
as the design processes that materialize and dematerialize built worlds. Situating these
concepts within the historical evolution of access-­knowledge, I show that Western
and often distinctly U.S. American ideas have shaped how experts, lawmakers, and
designers understand the figure of the user. To mark the unmarked, I use the capital-
ized form “Universal Design” to designate a specific discourse, which congealed from
U.S. material cultures, medical and scientific discourses, civil rights laws, racialized
patterns of spatial planning, consumer ideologies, class relations, and gender systems.
When I discuss Universal Design, then, I am referring not to an abstract ideal but
to a specific phenomenon and the networks of social relations, expertise, and design
experimentation that produced it. By focusing on the United States, Building Access
excavates a geographically and historically specific range of hegemonies and resis-
tances, enabling future research that decenters the U.S. American narrative about this
phenomenon.
Building Access investigates the regime of legibility and illegibility at the heart
of the U.S. liberal democratic project. That access to public space is a variety of free-
dom is hardly a contemporary idea, but in the twentieth-­century United States,
movements for race, economic, gender, sexuality, and disability rights focused their
efforts on desegregating public space. While the segregationist causes they opposed
were often distinct, these movements shared a demand for meaningful spatial citizen-
ship: the right to occupy homes, workplaces, universities, restrooms, courthouses,
and cities. Tactics of taking up space, such as marches and sit-­ins, made these move-
ments publicly legible. But when it came to legislating civil rights to housing, employ-
ment, and education, lawmakers and designers tended to treat the categories of race,

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 10 Introduction

class, gender, sexuality, and disability as discrete. Although the idea of “intersection­
ality” came after the passage of major civil rights legislation in the 1960s and ’70s,
there is another reason that laws and environmental design did not consider that
people at the intersections of systems of oppression face unique barriers to exercising
rights. The reason had to do with the systems of knowledge and expertise that policy­
makers enrolled in defining human variation and prescribing ways of containing it.
This book shows that the liberal project of including an ever-­widening range of
human variation was inseparable from processes of objectification, surveillance, and
standardization. As race, gender, class, and especially disability became objects of
expert study, scientific legibility shaped the political legibility of architectural inhabit-
ants, users, and citizens.
Across twentieth-­century social justice movements, however, another type of poli­
tics, often illegible and below the surface of public perception, focused on knowledge
as a site of engagement and transformation. It may appear odd to characterize knowl-
edge as a “site,” implying that it is a place. As we typically understand it, knowledge is
abstract, immaterial; knowledge describes the world rather than being within it. But
what activists knew, and what many academic disciplines eventually came to under-
stand, was that knowledge is social, relational, material, and spatially situated. Know-
ing both reflects and shapes the world. Knowledge, in other words, is a kind of design.
Treating knowledge as a contested domain for shaping the world, twentieth-­century
activists pushed against scientific and liberal conceptions of legible personhood, chal-
lenging the neutral, disinterested objectivity of Cold War–­era science and asserting
alternative ways of knowing, which tethered accounts of lived marginalization and
analyses of historical, political, and cultural systems.17 These strategies, which I term
“epistemic activism,” rematerialized not only the built arrangements of segregated
space but also the structures of knowledge production itself.
Access-­knowledge challenged the norms of embodiment around which architec-
tural design coheres. In the post–­World War II era, proponents of barrier-­free design
argued that the world had been designed with an average user in mind, but the chang-
ing nature of human embodiment through war, industrial accidents, and medical
advances demanded a new strategy. Unlike High Modernist architects, who defined
“good design” in terms of standardization and uniformity, proponents of barrier-­
free design argued that if architects design a world with disability in mind, this built-
­in access would benefit “all” people, even adding value for nondisabled users. Building
Access traces these concepts of anticipatory access, broad accessibility, and added value
as they shaped the regime of access-­knowledge.
Despite claims that accessibility benefits all users, however, barrier-­free design
was firmly situated in twentieth-­century notions of productive citizenship, which
defined liberal belonging through the capacity for productive labor, as well as through
the evident fruits of that labor: wealth accumulation, homeownership, and consum-
erism. Midcentury advocates for barrier-­free design claimed that accessible built

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 Introduction 11

environments would help to rehabilitate injured soldiers and workers, contributing

to the common good, public safety, and national capital. Public universities and the
private, single-­family home—­two sites of pervasive racial segregation, gendered divi-
sions of labor, and economic accumulation—­served as the primary foci of barrier-­
free design research.
The post-­ADA narrative about Universal Design tells a different story, however.
Contemporary advocates distinguish Universal Design from barrier-­removal, argu-
ing that the former is a broad, creative, extralegal approach to design for everyone,
while the latter is situated in legal codes and standards and focused only on disabled
users. Before barrier-­free design became a bureaucratic term for codes and standards,
its discourses and claims were nearly identical to those of contemporary Universal
Design. It was only in the post–­civil rights era, when laws such as the ADA emerged
to mandate and enforce barrier-­free design, that it became possible to frame it as nar-
row and bureaucratic. Building Access proposes that Universal Design did not emerge
as an alternative to barrier-­free design. These mutually constitutive approaches and
their shared proponents, experts, and knowledge bases were instead part of a broader
experiment with how to frame, negotiate, and deploy the project of design with dis-
abled users in mind. But is Universal Design a critical project, and if so, what is its
intervention? Building Access explores this question through several lines of thought,
considering Universal Design’s relationship to norms, the concept of disability, and
the entangled dimensions of race, class, and gender, which intersect the politics of
environmental design.

CRIPPING UNIVERSAL DESIGN

How does Universal Design relate to the concept of disability? Post-­ADA narra-
tives insist that Universal Design is disability-­neutral: the focus is not on disability
but rather on everyone.18 This claim is confusing, however, because it does not clarify
what “everyone” means in a world that devalues particular bodies. Similar to the idea
that we live in a post-­racial society, wherein race is a fiction and civil rights laws have
mandated equality, rendering oppression immaterial, terms such as “everyone” give
the impression that legible belonging in a population is unmediated by historical,
political, or social ways of knowing. Accordingly, it is often taken as common sense
that because aging is a form of impairment, everyone is or will be disabled at some
point. It follows that better design will benefit not only our present, youthful, able-­
bodied selves but also the bodies that we will be in the accessible future.
But for those of us whose bodies do not follow these smooth, predictable tem­
poralities, whose ways of being and moving find friction with our social and built
environments, and whose present and future belonging has been shaped by past
conditions of inequality, the idea of universal disability is perplexing at best. For
scholarly fields, such as disability studies, this idea and its prominence in Universal

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 12 Introduction

Design discourse calls into question foundational models, epistemologies, and ethi-
cal positions.
The history of access-­knowledge, of which Universal Design is a part, is also the
history of the field of disability studies. Around the time that Mace first wrote of Uni-
versal Design in the mid-­1980s, the field emerged as a kind of epistemic activism, work-
ing within academia to challenge dominant medical and rehabilitation models of im-
pairment and pathology. The generative intervention of disability studies paralleled
(and later allied with) the rise of critical race, feminist, and queer studies from social
movements.19 At the core of disability studies, the field’s foundational “social model”
translated the insights of U.S. and UK disability activists into an academic theory.20
As the social model is often described, disability is a construct of built and social
environments rather than pathology requiring cure or functional limitation demand-
ing rehabilitation. Two decades earlier, however, rehabilitation experts developed a
similar understanding of disability as an environmentally produced phenomenon,
arguing that inaccessible built environments exclude disabled people from access-
ing necessary services, work, and public participation.21 These experts emerged from
within the rehabilitation profession, used established research methods in their field,
and worked with architects and builders to produce the first U.S. accessibility stan-
dard, ANSI A117.1. Barrier-­free design was a rehabilitation project, aimed at engineer-
ing more productive workers and citizens. In the 1970s, disability activists pushed
back against rehabilitation researchers and their assumptions that disability is a fail-
ure of human performance, and thus a problem in need of elimination. While they
agreed that disability is a socially and architecturally produced disadvantage, activists
asserted that their lived experiences made them better experts on the subject of dis-
ability and challenged the rehabilitation norm of compulsory productive citizenship.
What distinguished the social model from rehabilitation, then, was not its focus
on environmental precipitants of inequality but rather a new disability epistemology.
Disability studies grew around this epistemology, deemphasizing medical and sci­en­
tific knowledge in favor of critical theory, qualitative data, and humanistic texts. But
in the early twenty-­first century, around the time that Universal Design became a
predominantly disability-­neutral discourse, critical and crip theories of disability
emerged to challenge the social model for overemphasizing the environmental con-
struction of disability oppression over embodied experiences of disablement.22 “Crip,”
a reclamation of the term “cripple” dating to the 1970s independent living move-
ment, resists imperatives for normalization and assimilation.23 Crip theories con­
tribute that disability is a valuable cultural identity, a source of knowledge, and a basis
for relationality.24
Rather than focusing exclusively on environmental inequality, the critical dis­
ability turn addresses ideology, political economy, and cultural systems responsible
for characterizing disability as disqualification.25 Building Access approaches Universal
Design through the framework of crip and critical disability knowing-­making. Unlike

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 Introduction 13

crip theories, disability-­neutral Universal Design discourses often reference rehabili-

tation notions of human performance and functional limitation, taking for granted
that restoring function improves productivity and is thus a self-­evident good. But by
framing Universal Design as a productivity-­enhancing feature of built environments,
these discourses reduce the critical project of access-­knowledge to the status of a
rehabilitation technology for disabled users and an enhancement for nondisabled
people. Accordingly, constructs such as limitation and enhancement, far from neutral
or self-­evident, produce a “depoliticized” perception of disability, which, Alison Kafer
explains, treats as common sense the notion that disability is a “problem to be eradi-
cated.”26 Paradoxically, depoliticized and neutralized approaches to disability make
it possible to imagine a world without disability in it. Shifting toward a more value-­
explicit, intentional, and crip understanding of disability, Building Access situates
access-­knowledge in relation to the liberal project of normalizing public space, assim-
ilating misfit bodies into public life, creating reserves of productive labor, segregating
the unproductive, and, as in the case of eugenics, eliminating the physical presence of
disability in the world.27
Crip theory, too, requires a more robust account of the politics of knowing-­making.
A core assumption persists that accessibility and rehabilitation are epistemologically
discrete.28 Well-­rehearsed arguments—­that the problem is not unrehabilitated bod-
ies but the lack of access—­have reproduced the social model as a kind of common
sense and Universal Design as a metaphor for meaningful access. In one sense, these
arguments demand accountable knowing-­making. As Jay Dolmage has productively
explored it, meaningful access should go beyond piecemeal efforts at “retrofit” and
“accommodation,” addressing knowledge, values, ideologies, and systems.29 This idea
resonates with the generative notion of “collective access,” offered by contemporary
organizers in the disability justice movement, which is led by disabled people of
color.30 Universal Design’s open-­ended, creative promise, its unfinished qualities and
“ongoing negotiation[s]” inspire projects of both individual and collective access,
in the sense of going beyond the technical aspects of inclusion to address broader
systems and ideas.31 The sticking point here, however, is that the material world and
the social arrangements within it are not just abstract ideals. Working toward mean-
ingful inclusion does not make the conditions of its materialization any less reliant on
the politics of knowing. The social model, along with crip theories that treat acces-
sibility as an alternative to medical knowing, offered a first wave of disability theo­
rizing that I call “access studies.” Building Access extends this work into what I term
“critical access studies,” a relatively new field that challenges the treatment of access
as a “self-­evident good.”32
Black disability scholar Chris Bell argues that disability studies fails to “engage
issues of race and ethnicity in a substantive capacity, thereby entrenching whiteness
as its constitutive underpinning.”33 Bell’s critique applies to both access studies and
critical access studies in their current formations. Despite unsettling medical norms

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 14 Introduction

of embodiment, access studies frequently centers liberal disability rights perspec-

tives toward race, class, and gender oppression, and critical access studies has largely
failed to address issues of whiteness, gender normativity, or class privilege, despite
rejecting the mandates of able-­bodiedness. Building Access centers the intersections of
disability with race, gender, class, and aging in its historical study of how concepts
of spatial access materialized in the twentieth-­century United States. Although access-­
knowledge was a critical project aimed at unsettling norms of the user, I argue that
our contemporary understanding of access has been shaped by historical perceptions
of the user as a white, middle-­class, productive citizen. Pushing crip theory toward a
more robust account of the politics of knowing-­making, Building Access argues for
accountability toward these histories and their manifestations in contemporary post-­
disability and post-­racial narratives.

MAPPING ACCESS-­K NOWLEDGE

Building Access traces the work of knowledge and ignorance, legibility and illegibility,
transparency and opacity in the phenomenon of access-­knowledge. At the core of
the commonsense refrain that “the world was not designed with disability in mind”
is the notion that making built environments is an exercise of power entangled with
the politics of knowing. But what kinds of knowing would make it possible to design
a world with disability in mind? The twentieth-­century regime of access-­knowledge
emerged to answer this question. In the quest to make a diverse range of users beyond
the average legible to architects and designers, this regime of legibility and illegibility
often defined the user in relation to productive work, recognizable citizenship, and
political agency.

The User and the Norm

Building Access contributes to a growing field of inquiry that historicizes and theorizes
the figure of the user as a site of architectural, technoscientific, and cultural meaning-­
making. Science and technology studies (STS) scholars and architectural historians
propose that in the twentieth century, the user was both a subject and an object of
knowledge.34 Since antiquity, architects imagined the inhabitant as an ideal or univer-
sal body reflecting cultural ideals of beauty and proportion. Unlike the universal
architectural inhabitant, the nineteenth-­and twentieth-­century figure of the user sig-
nified a range of variation. Statisticians, industrial scientists, and engineers identified
this wide-­ranging variation, termed the “human factor,” as an unpredictable threat
to industrial, military, and other technological systems. Studying this threat would
enable its smooth assimilation into the machinery of production. As a scientific
understanding of human diversity enabled the design of increasingly productive, effi-
cient systems, flexible design for a range of users became the stuff of standardization
and normalization.

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 Introduction 15

Concepts of human variation, disability, and injury configured the user as a site of
human engineering and rehabilitation. Scientific managers such as Frank and Lillian
Gilbreth turned their attention to the injured soldier as a body amenable to produc-
tive citizenship, a unit of nation, industry, and war carried from one engineered sys-
tem to another. Human factors research followed the disabled veteran into postwar
civilian life. Before the twentieth century, the need for accessible design as a matter
of public policy was unthinkable because disabled people were segregated from public
space by eugenicist “ugly laws” (as historian Susan Schweik has shown), confined in
institutions, and hence illegible as public citizens.35 Access-­knowledge bridged human
factors research, ergonomics, and postwar rehabilitation cultures, which brought par-
ticular disabled bodies—­often white, male, physically disabled soldiers rather than
people of color, women, or mentally disabled people—­into public legibility as both
users and citizens. As Anna Carden-­Coyne, David Serlin, and Beth Linker have
argued, rehabilitation brought the disabled user into public view by marrying bodily
reconstruction to postwar efforts to rebuild the nation.36
Access-­knowledge was an experimental project. At every phase, experts and users
engaged in new types of research, experimented with design features, and debated
standards of practice that could shape mainstream design discourses. In the mid-­
twentieth century, U.S. industrial engineer Henry Dreyfuss ushered in a new paradigm
of “human engineering,” borrowing human statistics gathered by military sources,
physical anthropologists, and eugenicists to offer designers data as a tool for design.
But as Building Access reveals, flexible design for a range of users always referred to
standardized forms of knowledge and conceptions of a vulnerable and manipulable
body, whose disabilities required elimination through better environmental design.
As a postwar intervention, barrier-­free design challenged the idea that physical able-­
bodiedness is a prerequisite to occupying built space, but proponents did not chal-
lenge the imperatives of normalization. This was evident in the experts enlisted to
create accessibility guidelines: architects and builders worked with rehabilitation sci-
entists, industrial designers, and scientific managers in tandem to produce barrier-­free
environments that would enhance productivity and human performance. Disabled
soldiers entering universities as students under the G.I. Bill, most of whom were white
disabled men, became natural objects of research for early accessibility guidelines. A
rehabilitation program for students at the University of Illinois at Urbana-­Champaign
served as the testing ground for these guidelines. A second prototypical user, the
white, disabled housewife, followed, as rehabilitation research turned to the home as
a domain of engineerable labor.
Midcentury access-­knowledge tethered the project of inclusive public space to
the objectification of disabled people in scientific research. But soon, users began to
push back. In the 1960s, the independent living movement challenged the authority
of nondisabled experts to know and design for disabled people. But rather than reject
rehabilitation or architecture outright, activists worked within these fields to position

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 16 Introduction

users as experts, experiment with new technologies of access, and reject productivity
as a requirement of citizenship. Where the independent living movement intervened
into rehabilitation practice, a new field of environmental design research (EDR) in-
jected the architecture profession with more critical approaches to the user. Although
these strategies of epistemic activism took place below the surface of legible protests
and sit-­ins, their tactics, frames, and design practices redesigned the normative basis
of access-­knowledge. Building Access shows that Ronald Mace’s notion of Universal
Design emerged from critical access-­knowledge, particularly efforts in the 1970s and
’80s to challenge the prototypical white male and white female wheelchair users as
emblems of barrier-­free design.
As this brief history shows, the user is a value-­laden figure with significant history
and politics. Commonsense claims that Universal Design is simply a form of good
design tend to ignore that the legibility of disabled people as users has been contin-
gent on their historic legibility as scientific objects, citizens, and workers, whose
white, middle-­class privileges remained unmarked. These claims also tell us very little
about the entangled experiments and reiterations through which Universal Design
materialized, or how these sedimentations made it a seemingly coherent, static, and
namable practice in the late twentieth century.37 This history matters not only for
disability studies but also for the broader fields of American studies, science and tech-
nology studies, and design studies because the figure of the user has been a node
around which normalcy, fitting, productivity, and national belonging are articulated.

The Politics of Knowing-­Making

Science, argues feminist philosopher Sandra Harding, is “politics by other means.”38
Building Access develops the concepts of “crip technoscience” and “epistemic activ-
ism” as analytics for understanding the ambivalent relationships between disabil-
ity activism, scientific research about disabled users, and liberal political discourses
in the project of creating a more accessible world.39 These concepts extend the
work of feminist science and technology studies to histories of disability and design.
Because disability studies emerged from activists’ critiques of medical expertise, the
field on the whole has not explored technoscience as an arena of world-­building and
meaning-­making. In addition to studying the normative dimensions of science, how-
ever, Building Access provides an account of knowing and making as social and politi-
cal practices. Refusing the terms of productive citizenship, disability activists of the
1960s and ’70s turned to research and design as politics by other means. If liberal
citizenship demanded smooth belonging and rehabilitation, crip technoscience
involved strategies of friction, disorientation, and nonconformity. Activists engaged
in self-­taught design practices, creating their own tools, curb cuts, and ramps with
repurposed materials, learning to code and hack computers, and tinkering with the
structures of everyday life. For crip technoscientists, disability was the basis of shared

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 Introduction 17

culture and identity, a valuable resource for environmental retooling, and hence not
a de facto disqualified condition.
Crip technoscience thus took shape as a politicized, world-­altering practice with
overt and subtle manifestations. In this sense, crip knowing-­making redesigned the
terms of legibility and illegibility in relation to liberal inclusion or economic citizen-
ship. In public, disability protests such as the Capitol Crawl represented the struggles
of illegible users to become legible. But for others, including Ronald Mace, illegibility
served as a productive resource for challenging norms of the user. In tactical but
imperceptible ways and within mainstream domains of power, epistemic activists like
Mace chose scientific research, architectural education, accessibility code develop-
ment, disability policy, and other seemingly mundane, often bureaucratic domains as
arenas of political contestation.
Building Access unearths this epistemic activism as Universal Design’s politics by
other means. Examining legal documents, technical guidance, handbooks, media
publications, design curricula, and user research methods, I show that Universal
Design’s interventions and critical practices have been largely illegible to scholars and
contemporary advocates. But Universal Design is not a uniform practice. As a flexible
discourse, it holds in tension the disability activist and the rehabilitation scientist, the
human engineer and the noncompliant body, the accessibility standard and the resis-
tant designer. It is within these entangled arrangements of knowing and making that
Universal Design materializes, both in the sense of the built forms of curb cuts, auto-
matic lights, and lever-­style door handles and in the sense of appearing to cohere as
a practice that we can reproduce, negotiate, and remake.

A USER’S MANUAL

This book begins a critical historical discussion about Universal Design, but it is not
meant to serve as a conclusive, all-­encompassing narrative of this history-­in-­the-­
making. The story told in this book is still materializing. Examining the very recent
past presents many challenges and opportunities. In our digital age, the vast archive
of Universal Design history can enrich our understanding of this phenomenon, but
there are limits to what a single book can include. Many of the people, designs, and
encounters that were part of this story are not included here.
For context and critical distance, I have designed this book to convey a long-­term
history of access-­knowledge. Although organized chronologically, each chapter offers
a genealogy of a key idea, claim, or refrain of Universal Design: equity (chapter 1),
flexibility (chapter 2), design for “everyone” or “all” (chapter 3), the curb cut (chap-
ter 4), design with users in mind (chapter 5), the term “Universal Design” (chapter 6),
and the “Principles of Universal Design” (chapter 7). While my focus is on the history
of ideas and discourses, this book is also a study of material culture, including how

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 18 Introduction

objects, advertisements, photographs, design documents, and ephemera coalesce to

shape our understanding of Universal Design, as well as the questions that we are
willing to ask about it.
Part of the material culture of accessibility and user-­centered design has been an
emphasis on the primacy of the wheelchair user as an embodiment of disability.40
Another part of this material culture has been an emphasis on visual rhetorics. Images
throughout the book tell a story about the optical material culture of access-­knowledge,
particularly regarding the shifting figure of the user. But there are many ways to engage
with these illustrations, whether as evidence, landmarks, or guides to the narrative.
Working with them on their own without the text tells a story, but engaging with the
details and descriptions embedded in the narrative text does the same.
Building Access spans the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-­first centuries. End-
ing at the “Principles of Universal Design,” the arc of the book spans the rise of design
for users, first normate (chapter 1) and later more particular (chapter 2). The middle
chapters offer a prehistory of the concepts, strategies, and epistemic communities
through which the Universal Design principles materialized, from barrier-­free design
(chapter 3) to crip technoscience (chapter 4) to epistemic activism (chapter 5). The
final two chapters focus on Universal Design since 1985, tracing its rise in relation
to the ADA (chapter 6) and its primary document, the “Principles of Universal
Design” (chapter 7). Finally, the conclusion examines the present and future trajecto-
ries of Universal Design, given contemporary trends in urban development, popula-
tion change, and disability politics. While Building Access is a history of the Universal
Design movement, it is perhaps even more importantly understood as a critical his-
tory of epistemology, politics, and the built world as mutually enacted.

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 Chapter 1

Normate Template
Knowing-Making the
Architectural Inhabitant
Until universal/inclusive design is infused in pre-professional and continuing
education, the attitudes of designers will limit their understanding and
appreciation of diversity. They will continue to shape their designs for a
mythic average norm, creating barriers that exclude the contributions and
participation of people all over the world.
—El a in e Ost roff, “Universal Design: An Evolving Paradigm”

Ask an architect about their work, and you may learn more about the style, form,
materials, structure, and cost of a building than the bodies or minds meant to in-
habit it. Examine any doorway, window, toilet, chair, or desk in that building, how-
ever, and you will find the outline of the body meant to use it. From a doorframe’s
negative space to the height of shelves and cabinets, inhabitants’ bodies are simul-
taneously imagined, hidden, and produced by the design of built worlds. Since the
mid-twentieth century, supporters of more accessible, inclusive, and user-centered
design have contended that design for the “mythic average user” shapes architects’
default practices. For any of us who have failed to fit, even temporarily, into the ready-
made structures of clothing, furniture, workplaces, homes, and other designed things,
this point is rather unsurprising. The related idea that “the world was not designed
with disability in mind” is, in one sense, a statement about omission and ignorance
as ways of knowing and thinking. In another sense, however, it is a statement about
omission and ignorance as material arrangements, ways of making and unmaking the
world’s inhabitants through unintentional but accumulated practices.
Although it is easy to claim that the world was designed with an average user,
rather than a disabled one, in mind, this claim tells us very little about the norms,
habits, and practices that have shaped our historical and current built environments.
To understand the projects of accessible and inclusive design, we must understand
the world into which these projects were born. This chapter considers how archi-
tectural design for an unmarked, normate inhabitant materialized from historical
habits of perception and practice. I offer the concept of the “normate template” as a

19

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 20 Normate Template

useful abbreviation for the complex, critical notion that the world was designed with
normate inhabitants in mind. Despite historical shifts in scientific understandings of
the valued body and aesthetic standards of good design, I argue, the normate tem-
plate has served as a historical pattern language for Western traditions of architectural
design since antiquity, and it was these patterns that the twentieth-­century phenom-
enon of access-­knowledge emerged to unsettle.

HISTORICAL NORMATES

A universal body has served as a template for the architectural user for centuries.1
This “mythic average norm” is not a neutral body but rather a particular white, Euro-
pean, nondisabled, youthful, and often masculine figure whose features remain un-
marked.2 But to understand how the mythic average norm or normate became an
unmarked template for good design, we have to engage more closely with histories of
knowledge. Disability studies scholars and historians of science have argued that the
concepts of “normal” and “average” are relatively recent phenomena, appearing in the
nineteenth century with the birth of statistics to produce modern forms of power.3
As Lennard Davis concludes, the norm has a prescriptive function, which stems from
its reference to real population data, unlike the earlier, classical notion of the “ideal”
body, which referenced mythic figures divine in form.4 For Davis, this is what makes
the figure of the norm insidious: when norms purport to represent “real” populations,
it becomes possible to attempt to align those populations with the average, conse-
quently making normates appear as natural or neutral.
In other words, norms do not simply reflect probabilities within populations. In
shaping the “real” population, norms become prescriptions for normalcy. For archi-
tectural design, however, these distinctions between the impossible ideal, the descrip-
tive average, and the prescriptive norm are not as salient. Because architecture is a
world-­building practice, references to ideal and average inhabitants have shared a
prescriptive function. These prescriptions, I will show, have been central to ideas
about architects as knowers and makers.

Classical Normates
In the first century BC, Roman military architect Vitruvius prescribed an ideal body
as the template for beautiful architecture.5 In apparent reference to Greek mathemati-
cian Protagoras’s precept that “man is the measure of all things,” Vitruvius declared
that as within the body (“designed by nature”), “there is a kind of symmetrical har-
mony between forearm, foot, palm, finger, and other small parts; and so it is with
perfect buildings.”6 The evidence of this natural harmony appeared in the body’s
internal and external proportions: parts of the body, such as the palms, corresponded
to other measures, such as height, and by extending its appendages into space, the
ideal body would have its naval at the center of a circle, leaving the head, arms, and

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 Normate Template 21

toes to create a perfect square.7 Vitruvius naturalized a classical, ideal body by locating
the human body in relation to nature and the cosmos but also prescribed this body
as the template for beautiful architecture.
Ideal embodied proportions were not merely the stuff of imagination, how-
ever. These proportions materialized in classical architecture modeled after the ideal
body.8 Buildings likewise materialized the existence of certain bodies—­presumably
white, masculine, nondisabled citizens—­as the most likely inhabitant of public space.
Knowledge of such a body and its proportions further defined architectural work
itself: authoritative architects, for Vitruvius, were those who had mastered knowledge
of human life, culture, and embodiment, and not just the geometries or functions
of built and engineered forms.9 Classical models of body-­knowing thus engendered
normative, authoritative knowing-­making.

Scientific Normates
Vitruvius’s account of the universal body, eclipsed in the Middle Ages, reappeared in
the Renaissance, alongside the birth of modern science.10 In 1490 Leonardo da Vinci
depicted the “Vitruvian Man” as a white, youthful, masculine, muscled, and standing
body, arms and legs extended into space, with a flowing mane of hair (Figure 1.1).
While Da Vinci retained Vitruvius’s interest in the body as an instrument of measure-
ment, its specificities were obscured by its transcendent appearance.11 The drawing
soon became a new, shared iconography for both medicine and architecture, which
referenced antiquated truth claims about bodily proportions.
The Vitruvian Man’s status as a scientific object was short-­lived, however. In the
nineteenth century, positivist standards of knowledge, premised upon the validity
of statistical data, gained traction within architecture. Modeling itself after scientific
disciplines, the discipline of architecture established standards of practice and percep­
tion, which distinguished the creative work of artists and the technical labor of draft-
ers and builders from the architect’s professional authority regarding style and form.12
Architects discredited the Vitruvian Man as a depiction of classical proportions, and
historians criticized Vitruvius for conflating ideal bodies with material realities, chal-
lenging the accounts of mathematical proportionality that da Vinci had illustrated.13
In its visual, material manifestation, the Vitruvian Man’s proportions were thus revealed
as myth and illusion. As a misfit, the figure became an untruth.
Yet representations of bodies resembling the Vitruvian Man became new epistemic
objects in the nineteenth century. Positivist statisticians, criminologists, physical an-
thropologists, and early eugenicists reproduced similar figures in the new material
culture of anthropometry, or the measurement of human populations with calipers
and rulers for statistical calculation (Figure 1.2). Although claiming to be distinct from
practices such as phrenology, anthropometry deployed similar representations and
truth claims (Figure 1.3). In this sense, the practice was engaged in what Foucault calls
“games of truth,” trained at producing new arrangements of knowing-­making.14 Its

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 Figure 1.1.  Leonardo da Vinci, Vitruvian Man (ca. 1490). Courtesy of Luc Viatour / www
.Lucnix.be.

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 Normate Template 23

initial, direct application was a new racial science, which sought to provide conclusive
and comparative evidence of the supposed degeneracy of nonwhite, disabled, poor,
and “feeble-­minded” people.15 Anthropometric data made it possible to calculate pop-
ulation averages (or norms), as well as standard deviations (or ranges of difference
from the norm).
A positivist practice par excellence, anthropometry rendered the Vitruvian Man
as fully normate: calculable, legible, a standard against which difference could be
measured, and frequently, as in criminological and eugenic discourses, evidence of
the supposed moral and aesthetic truths of normate bodies.16 Despite claiming to
be a new science, anthropometry shared many of the aesthetic and epistemological
conventions of the classic, universal body. Vitruvius had claimed, for instance, that
the body was a reflection of proportions of the universe. Although astronomical sci-
ence had shifted, anthropometrists such as Adolphe Quetelet borrowed astronomers’
methods of plotting data about cosmic events (such as planetary movements) to
measure, model, and depict human bodies at the population scale.17 The Gaussian
curve, or “bell curve,” thus became a well-­known technology of demarcation between
average and deviation, normate and misfit. At the curve’s center, Quetelet’s “average
man,” the most statistically probable body, resembled da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, a

Figure 1.2.  Charles Roberts, anthropometrical chart, Manual of Anthropometry (1878).

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 Figure 1.3.  Phrenologists claimed the truth of their practice to establish
authority. L. E. Huggins, “Phrenology is True” (ca. 1870). Courtesy of
Warshaw Collection of Business Americana, Archives Center, National
Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institute.

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 Normate Template 25

former depiction of universal nature and harmonic proportionality: white, youthful,

masculine, and able-­bodied.18 The bell curve, like Vitruvius’s prescriptions for archi-
tecture, married description with prescription, rendering the most statistically prob-
able bodies (i.e., the average or norm) as natural.19

Modernist Normates
While on its own, a statistical average may be an object of knowledge, a fact reflecting
evidence of a population, normative prescription (or standardization) involves align-
ing a population or practice with norms of embodiment or behavior. If the normate
template came into contact with standards of “good knowledge” in the nineteenth
century, in the twentieth, it became an instrument for prescribing particular forms of
knowledge in relation to Modernist architects’ standards of “good design.” An unmarked
subtext for these standards was the “ideology of ability,” which disability theorist Tobin
Siebers defines as the societal “preference for able-­bodiedness.”20 Modernists recapitu-
lated earlier notions of geometric harmony and beauty through the new language of
positivism, emphasizing an objective view of good design as premised upon the stan-
dardization of production. Design historian Stephen Hayward argues that while deter-
minations of good design are often couched in seemingly neutral, descriptive terms,
frequently in relation to generic values such as “common sense,” they produce new
arrangements of space, power, and knowledge.21 Working as an instrument of what
Foucault terms “games of truth” and sociologists of science describe as “boundary
work,” the normate template played an essential role in delineating “good design” from
“poor design” in reference to dominant political, economic, and aesthetic interests.22
“A standard,” wrote Le Corbusier (Charles-­Édouard Jeanneret) in 1923, “is neces-
sary for order in human effort. A standard is established on sure bases, not capriciously
but with the surety of something intentional and of a logic controlled by analysis and
experiment. All men have the same organism, the same functions. All men have the
same needs.”23 Le Corbusier’s figure of the “Modulor” followed the Vitruvian Man in
conflating classical and scientific conceptions of the body and depicted the “harmo-
nious measure” of the spatial inhabitant deemed “universally applicable to architec-
ture and mechanics.”24 Similar to the apparent impartiality of Western science, figures
like the Modulor portrayed a particular body, arranged from historical and contem-
porary ways of knowing-­making, as a universal, impartial “view from nowhere.”25 In
one sense, Modulor appeared to conflate (and thus misunderstand the distinction
between) the ideal and the norm. In another, the figure complied with a long tradi-
tion of conflating real and ideal bodies to realize universal geometric harmonies in
material form.
To claim authority and advance particular social, aesthetic, and industrial projects,
Modernists appealed to the normate template’s “scientificity,” or what Foucault de-
scribes as the perceivable qualities of contemporary standards of what counts as sci-
ence.26 Put simply, describing something as scientific grants it the power and authority

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 26 Normate Template

of supposed truth and objectivity. In Modernist games of truth, highly rationalized,

standard forms served as currencies for determining the aesthetics and function of
so-­called good design. In 1932, for instance, Buckminster Fuller calculated that good
design was premised upon the integration of aesthetics with standardizing modes of
knowing-­making, or as he put it, “Science + Art + Industry = Universal Architecture.”27
This technoscientific standard (centered on what could be knowable, beautiful, and
efficient) was purported to have the timeless quality of universality. Scientificity, in
this case, appended references to nature, harmonic geometries, and the cosmos as a
source of authority.
While Modernist notions of good design referred to early twentieth-­century prac-
tices of industrial efficiency, they combined references to classical concepts of univer-
sality and modern notions of standardization to solidify the architects’ role as a design
authority. Echoing Vitruvius, the modernist Congrès internationaux d’architecture
moderne (CIAM) wrote in 1933 that architecture should be “placed at the service of
man,” “facilitate all of [man’s] actions,” and be produced by architects possessing “per-
fect knowledge of man.”28 Modernist architecture fulfilled the expectation of “per-
fect” knowledge by positioning architects as experts on both design and universal
human needs.29
The expectation of a universal white, male, nondisabled body continued to rep­
resent the default, normate inhabitant, with severe consequences for nonnormate
populations. In the United States, where the overlapping demographics of people of
color, women, and disabled people faced discrimination and segregation, the nor-
mate template reinforced the effects of Jim Crow laws, immigration policies, gender
discrimination, and institutionalization.30 The social project of eugenics, which was
determined to cull supposedly defective bodies from the population, also changed
the nature of spatial inhabitation: public space, often associated with freedom, became
a site of management, surveillance, and control for vulnerable populations. Disability
and design historians Christina Cogdell, Susan Schweik, David Mitchell, and Sharon
Snyder have documented wide-­ranging mechanisms of eugenic environmental design:
early twentieth-­century “ugly laws” prohibited people with atypical bodies from enter-
ing public space, eugenicists measured the traits of “feeble-­mindedness” according
to an individual’s ability to cope with urban environments, and eugenic ideologies of
“streamlining” influenced the aesthetics of industrial and product design of the 1930s.31
Denying nonnormates access to public space created the illusion of their nonexis-
tence, which consequently resulted in less-­accessible environments.
The standardization of architectural inhabitants both resulted from and produced
twentieth-­century standards of professional architectural knowing-­making. Normate
bodies became legible to architects through professional handbooks, such as Ernst
Neufert’s Architect’s Data in Europe and Charles Ramsey and George Sleeper’s Archi-
tectural Graphic Standards in the United States (first published in 1936 and 1932, re-
spectively), which offered standard “orthographic” conventions for depicting features

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 Normate Template 27

such as doorways, windowsills, stairs, and roofs.32 Orthographic drawing, a con­

vention of architectural drafting, sought the ordered representation of architectural
space. But the Latin “ortho-­,” meaning upright or correct, also captures the dual func-
tion of architectural standards: orthographic drawings both defined and prescribed
the typical features of built environments.33 Alongside standard doorways or roofs,
depictions of the standard inhabitant, decorated with notations of measurement and
size, staged the legibility of normate spatial users.
Representations of normate bodies followed the Modernist synthesis of classical
representations and concepts with contemporary scientific standards.34 Beginning
with the third edition (1941) of Graphic Standards and persisting until its seventh
edition in 1981, a set of black-­and-­white drawings titled The Dimensions of the Human
Figure (Figure 1.4) appeared near the end of the book. The drawings referenced the
conventions of da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, with arms extended into space and unmarked
race, gender, and disability status, which together communicated their intended use
as universal figures. The abstract, shaded bodies stood, sat, climbed, and crawled,
while dimensional lines and numbers around their periphery provided what appeared
to be average measurements.
The Dimensions of the Human Figure was a reproduction of an earlier set of iden­
tical drawings titled The Geometry of the Human Figure, which appeared in 1934
in American Architect and Architecture magazine.35 On the surface, the function of
these depictions appears translational: for architects without advanced mathematical
training, the drawings seemed to provide a quick reference to average spatial dimen-
sions. But while artist Ernest Irving Freese noted that the dimensions provided were
“based on an average or normal adult” (implying the addition of statistics), architec-
tural historians such as Hyungmin Pai have pointed out that the numerical values did
not match any anthropometric data available at the time.36 What, then, was the func-
tion of Freese’s drawings, if not to serve as data-­delivery devices for architects?
Combined with supposed dimensional data, the figures and their classical pro­
portions were performing other material-­epistemic work. One indication is the dis-
cursive shift from “geometry” to “dimensions” in the drawings’ title, which suggests
an equivalence of ideal and normate bodies, a conflation of seemingly historically
distinct concepts that found easy relation due to their shared prescriptive status. The
numerical dimensions added a hint of scientificity, creating the illusion that these
figures were grounded in anthropometric data. But scientificity here is an aesthetic
element with a persuasive function, lending architectural practice the appearance of
standardization and order.
It would be easy to characterize Freese’s dimensional notations, and the anthro­
pometric data that they appeared to reference (however fictively), as pseudoscience.
After all, averages are mathematical calculations, not representations of existing, liv-
ing bodies. This suggestion presumes, however, that there is a real, objective truth
about bodily size and proportion awaiting discovery by superior methods and proper

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 Figure 1.4.  Ernest Irving Freese, The Dimensions of the Human Figure, American Architect
and Architecture 145 (July 1934): 57–­60.

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 Normate Template 29

notations. A different possibility is that architectural knowledge, like laboratory sci-

ence, is inherently partial, historical, and mediated, whether through tools, repre­
sentations, sociopolitical contexts, or aesthetic choices. In the case of the normate
template, Freese’s drawings in Graphic Standards highlight the ways that claims about
the “truth” of the inhabitants’ body are also exercises of power that convey the desir-
ability of particular bodies (and their being-­in-­the-­world) over others, and conse-
quently materialize a world built with an aesthetic ideal in mind.

THE NEW NORMATES

The universal, the objective, and the scientific are all concepts that work as persua-
sive devices, even when material forms cannot meet their impossible standards.
Freese’s figures materialized an early twentieth-­century reclamation of classical aes-
thetics and representations of the body in U.S. culture. Consider that just a year after
Freese’s figures appeared in Graphic Standards, eugenicist Robert Dickinson com­
missioned sculptor Abram Belskie to create two white, marble sculptures of human
figures derived from average anthropometric data. He called these figures Normman
and Norma. The classical ideal of the white, masculine, able-­bodied citizen material-
ized in Normman’s sculpted form.37 But Norma’s seemingly progressive inclusion re-
veals shifting norms of the ideal citizen, namely the introduction of the figure of the
white, presumably reproductively fit woman as a standard-­bearer of the nation, an
acceptable prototype of embodiment in an era of racial anxieties about immigrant
populations. A 1945 eugenics competition in Cleveland, Ohio, used the Norma sculp-
ture as a reference when it called for a woman whose measurements most closely ap-
proximated the average American woman. Although none of the contestants matched
Norma’s chest, waist, hip, and height measurements, the winner (who most closely
approximated the statistical average) was also one who manifested the cultural and
aesthetic figure of ideal, white womanhood.38 The competition, Belskie’s statues, and
the broader eugenic project served as a normate template for human populations—­a
kind of “eugenic world building,” as feminist disability theorist Rosemarie Garland-­
Thomson describes it—­revealing the close proximity between imagined architectural
users and cultural requirements for standardized citizens.39
The normate template for architecture defined valuable citizens through more
subtle relations of knowing and making. Regimes of legibility and illegibility, in par-
ticular, shaped how architects came to create buildings and public spaces with partic­
ular inhabitants in mind. Like the process of defining legible citizens under law, the
project of making architectural inhabitants legible to designers entailed defining the
center and margins of the population, often through visual representations of at
least some of these bodies. While these public, nation-­shaping practices shaped the
normate template’s public face, the standardization of normate world-­building often
hid them in plain view. The typical understanding that architects only understand

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 30 Normate Template

and anticipate the most legible, public bodies requires qualification, however, because
the normate template also imbued particular forms of invisibility and illegibility
with power.
The unmarked normate and its purported neutrality resembled the unmarked
harmonic body and its purported relations to a fundamental nature.40 Freese’s figures,
for instance, appear unremarkable: they stand, sit, and crawl using two arms and two
legs; their dark shade does not appear legible as a racial category; their gender is
largely unannounced.
Adjacent to one normate figure, who stands with arms extended forward in profile,
Freese depicts a single, high-­heeled shoe (see Figure 1.4). Architectural critic Lance
Hosey argues that the shoe, with its higher heel and smaller dimensions, is meant to
represent female embodiment as simultaneously an object of knowledge and a devia-
tion from male norms.41 To make the female inhabitant legible, Freese engages in an
act of seemingly benign differentiation, achieving a marginal gain in diversity while
reinforcing the standard, normate body as the template for architecture.
Read another way, however, the shoe illustrates the trappings of normate legibil-
ity modeled on aesthetic visibility, scientific calculability, or political citizenship. The
high-­heeled shoe is easy to miss. But it alone raises questions about the presumed
universality and objectivity of the other figures. If we take Freese’s drawings as a his-
torical artifact, rather than an objective prescription of good design, the shoe offers
a subtle hint of ways of being, moving, making, and knowing that standard architec-
tural representations fail to provide.

ACCESS-­K NOWLEDGE

The high-­heeled shoe is a marginal, imperfect crack in a broader artifice of the “mythic
average user.” But if it scores the normate template’s smooth surface to reveal other
possibilities of knowing-­making, we might wonder, what were these possibilities,
where were they located, and what new worlds did they configure? In the twentieth
century, a new regime of legibility and illegibility began to take shape in the normate
template’s shadows. This regime, which I call access-­knowledge, was at first undetect-
able. By design, it worked below the surface of material forms, such as buildings,
streets, or cities. Its purpose was to disrupt the normate order of things. And its pub-
lic face, its most visible elements, appeared to be integrated into, rather than in dis­
ruption of, this order.

Legible Users
In 1981 Freese’s drawings disappeared from Graphic Standards, where for forty years
they had resided at the back of the book, between entries for “Metal Gauges,” “Abbre-
viations,” and “Modular Coordination.” The handbook’s seventh edition replaced
Dimensions of the Human Figure with new anthropometric drawings of a man and a

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 Normate Template 31

woman (Figure 1.5).42 By appearance, the two figures closely resembled Norma and
Normman in their white, standing, rigid, dimensional bodies. Their names were Joe
and Josephine and the dimensional data attached to their bodies represented decades
of research on human engineering and performance, culled by Henry Dreyfuss Asso-
ciates, specifically industrial designer Niels Diffrient and human factors researcher
Alvin Tilley.43 Two other figures appeared on adjacent pages, representing a wheel-
chair user and a person using crutches—­both without other identifying character­
istics. The accompanying text offered suggestions for designing for blind, deaf, and
hard-­of-­hearing people (Figure 1.6). For all these figures, dimensional data indicated
upper and lower percentiles, in addition to the average.
Following the civil rights era, the figures appeared to represent social progress
toward a greater diversification of architectural inhabitants—­a new design approach
directing architects away from the normate template and toward diverse ways of
knowing-­making. Printed at the handbook’s beginning, the new figures seemed to

Figure 1.5.  Anthropometric figures, such as Joe and Josephine, offer dimensional figures with
added statistical data. Charles Ramsey and Harold Sleeper, Architectural Graphic Standards,
7th ed. (New York: Wiley, 1981). Courtesy of Judy A. Crookes, Henry Dreyfuss Associates.

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 Figure 1.6.  Anthropometric figures representing disability often depict a wheelchair user and,
to a lesser extent, figures using canes or crutches. Charles Ramsey and Harold Sleeper,
Architectural Graphic Standards, 7th ed. (New York: Wiley, 1981). Courtesy of Judy A.
Crookes, Henry Dreyfuss Associates.

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 Normate Template 33

suggest that architects could finally design with a range of users in mind, not as an
afterthought but throughout the entire design process. But these figures did not
appear from thin air. They were not an indication that well-­intentioned architects had
simply sought out better information about users. Nor did they unseat the normate
template. What happened, then, between 1941 and 1981 to produce such a significant
shift in the representation of the architectural user? To understand this shift and its
relation to access-­knowledge, we must consider how these new figures materialized,
what they represented, and why they appeared in Graphic Standards at this particular
moment.
In the early twentieth century, the U.S. military employed industrial designers
to create machines, vehicles, and uniforms, which they designed by drawing on the
military’s vast collections of anthropometric data about male soldiers’ bodies. Influ-
ential American industrial designer Henry Dreyfuss continued to work in this capac-
ity in the post–­World War II era, bridging military and civilian applications of data
with “human engineering,” a new paradigm for creating products and tools by “de-
signing for people.”44 This practice, later termed “ergonomics,” merged the evidence
base of military “human factors” research with the aesthetic and functional practices
of industrial design.
While human engineering aimed to enable designers to create with users in mind,
the practice was also, as its name suggests, involved in “configuring” the prototypical
users of products and technologies.45 Dreyfuss’s development of human engineering
reveals the surprising parallels between the projects of solidifying the normate tem-
plate, in one sense, and unsettling it, in another. He recalls, for instance, the process
of developing the first anthropometric drawings for use by industrial designers fol-
lowing World War II.

Our office was working on the interior of a heavy tank for the Army. We had tacked a
huge, life-­size drawing of the tank driver’s compartment on the wall. The driver’s fig-
ure had been indicated with a thick black pencil line and we had been jotting odds and
ends of dimensional data on him as we dug the data out of our files. Surrounded by
arcs and rectangles, he looked something like one of the famous dimensional studies
of Leonardo. Suddenly, it dawned on us that the drawing on the wall was more than a
study of the tank driver’s compartment: without being aware of it, we had been putting
together a dimensional chart of the average adult American male.46

As this narrative unfolds, the user’s body appears to materialize as if by magic. But the
final form, an early prototype for the figure of “Joe,” shares with Freese’s figures its
appearance of harmonic geometry, appended with dimensional notations. Dreyfuss
invites the reader into this scene of discovery but quickly qualifies it by laying bare
the firm’s ad hoc research process. “Here and there,” writes Dreyfuss,

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 34 Normate Template

we found a book or article with some data we could use. . . . Many were old, out of
print and probably inaccurate. . . . Over the years, our pile of books, pamphlets, clip-
pings, and dog-­eared index cards grew higher and more jumbled. When World War II
came, the pile grew even faster. The armed forces and their suppliers undertook some
very ambitious human engineering and published their findings. But still no one
assembled these data into a single package that a designer could refer to and save
spending days wading through his library and files.47

By scientific standards of the time, these research methods would have appeared dis-
organized, riddled with epistemological leaps, unlikely to yield a truthful represen­
tation of the user. But, as Dreyfuss illustrates, compiling research was an experiment
in new ways of knowing-­making: the process did not adopt a designerly view from
nowhere or seek a one-­to-­one translation of data into form but rather injected a con-
cept of “evidence” into fields of practice that were not necessarily wedded to an ob-
jective standard of truth. This position relative to more established sciences made
human engineering a “switchpoint” at which new concepts, truth claims, and exer-
cises of power could infiltrate the norms of design practice.48 Dreyfuss’s publication
of The Measure of Man and its laying bare of the messiness of knowing-­making ani-
mate the work of access-­knowledge. Behind the scenes of major design projects and
their final built form, access-­knowledge was at work reconfiguring how designers
make and know.
Joe came first, followed by Josephine.49 The pair were intended as tools for “Tai-
loring the Product to Fit.”50 Alvin Tilley, a human factors specialist employed at Henry
Dreyfuss Associates, completed the first iteration of the drawings in 1959 (Figure 1.7).
They appeared the next year in a special issue of the journal Industrial Design, for
which Dreyfuss wrote the introduction, and were followed that same year by The
Measure of Man, a portfolio-­style packet of dimensional drawings completed by two
life-­sized posters of Joe and Josephine.51 Despite the portfolio’s specialized use, how-
ever, Joe and Josephine were meant to appeal to a broader audience than industrial
designers alone. In 1961 Dreyfuss appeared on television to promote the portfolio.52
The images and data, though borrowed from military researchers and rehabilitation
engineers, entered the mainstream. Joe and Josephine circulated as material-­epistemic
hybrids: generalized data, abstracted from other bodies, appeared alongside these
line-­drawn figures, who were in turn rendered as fleshy bodies through their appear-
ance as life-­sized drawings. This conflation of data and flesh took shape again when
the portfolio was reprinted as a revised and expanded hardcover book in 1967. At
Dreyfuss’s insistence, the reprint displayed a “split human figure”: half anthropomet-
ric normate diagram, half fleshy but normate man (Figure 1.8).
Dreyfuss’s tank driver, and later Joe and Josephine, were objects, tools for design-
ers to use. But they were also enacted through the ways that industrial designers syn-
thesized various ways of knowing how bodies stand, sit, crawl, work, breathe, and feel.

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 Normate Template 35

Figure 1.7.  Real and imagined bodies: researcher Alvin Tilley stands before life-­sized
drawings of Joe and Josephine (ca. 1973). Courtesy of Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design
Museum / Art Resource, NY.

Joe and Josephine joined the scientific efforts of industry, medicine, and war into
singular, legible configurations—­arrangements that industrial designers could imag-
ine as (and use to predict) an enfleshed, living user and employ as points of depar-
ture for investigating more particular users. Dreyfuss’s accounts of these enactments,
quoted above, were laid out in the introduction to the second edition of The Measure
of Man, published in 1967.
Data provided inside the portfolio reflects several decades of ergonomics and
human factors research in military design, factory engineering, fashion, psychology,
and other fields for which statistical data could provide useful population-­scale gen-
eralizations in an era of mass production.53 Compared to Modernists touting standard­
ization, however, the human engineering approach to industrial design emphasized
the dynamic nature of human users and consumers. This was exemplified in Henry
Dreyfuss Associates’ firm motto: “We bear in mind that the object being worked
on is going to be ridden in, sat upon, looked at, talked into, activated, operated, or in

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 Figure 1.8.  Revised edition cover of Henry Dreyfuss, The Measure of Man: Human Factors
in Design (1967).

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 Normate Template 37

some other way used by people.”54 Designing for users was thus contingent upon
knowing and predicting a multiplicity of uses, even for a single product. Far more
than a data repository, The Measure of Man shaped user-­centered design as a formal
methodology—­a tangible integration of knowing-­making—­that designers could
employ in the service of more usable products. The imperative to design with users
in mind served as a material and methodological critique of Modernist design prin-
ciples, particularly their flattening of human users and failures to address human use.
A discourse arose within the design professions, likely in converse with the rise
of social protest movements in the 1960s, to challenge the primacy of singular nor-
mate representations of the user. In the revised Measure of Man (1967), published
amid the passage of major civil rights legislation for disabled people and people of
color, Dreyfuss’s description of Joe and Josephine addressed the normate template as
a habit of perception.

The published drawings included the dimensions of the small, average and large
men, but only the average man was drawn. We found that people referred to the charts
as “Dreyfuss’ average man,” which indicated that many people had misunderstood
the diagrams and probably misused them. A good design must “fit” not only the theo-
retical average, but his large and small brothers. We had thought this was obvious in
the charts, but we seemed to be wrong.55

Dreyfuss was aware that normate figures representing statistical averages were often
taken as real bodies. Despite shifts in the content of statistical data, designers had
continued to imagine the average body through a default habit of perception. But
for Dreyfuss, the standard of the prototypical user was moving in another direction:
away from the normate body and toward one that appears (in his description) non-
normate, even disabled.
Joe and Josephine, Dreyfuss claimed, have “numerous allergies, inhibitions, and
obsessions. They react strongly to touch that is uncomfortable or unnatural; they are
disturbed by glaring or insufficient light and by offensive coloring; they are sensi-
tive to noise, and they shrink from disagreeable odor.”56 By Dreyfuss’s account, Joe
and Josephine’s ways of being resemble symptoms of certain types of cognitive dis-
abilities, such as autism or sensory processing disorders. These diagnostic categories,
however, would not exist until the 1990s.57 Nor was Dreyfuss apparently aware of
the deinstitutionalization movement, which sought to transition mentally disabled
people from institutions to community-­based care. Although Dreyfuss appeared to
understand Joe and Josephine’s traits as statistically atypical, his attribution of these
standards of human cognition for designers was central to devising a theory of good
design as premised on the most nonnormate, misfit, and vulnerable bodies.
Yet Joe and Josephine’s “allergies, inhibitions, and obsessions” were not necessar-
ily atypical to the population, nor were they born of disability rights or social justice

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 38 Normate Template

discourses. Instead, Joe and Josephine’s described sensory characteristics reflected

industrial designers’ preoccupations with mechanical danger, chemical and thermal
vulnerability, and sensory overwhelm in an era of Cold War science. Because Drey-
fuss drew on available data from military and industrial sources and had begun his
inquiries into body-­environment interactions through military contracts, he had at
his disposal a set of practices relating to engineering the user’s safety, limiting expo-
sures to mechanical vibrations, sounds, lights, and chemical exposures. A diagram
of “Environmental Tolerance Zones” in The Measure of Man showed a human body
viewed from above, at the center of concentric circles delineating degrees of envi­
ronmental comfort in relation to atomic radiation, atmospheric pressure, heat, accel-
eration, carbon monoxide, and shock waves.58 Notions of interface safety, in turn,
informed human engineering as a vulnerability-­mitigating method and set the base-
line of good design according to military-­industrial notions of the body.59
Despite attention to these sensorial dimensions of the human body, however, the
primacy of dimensions and scale endured in the firm’s new projects. Beginning in
1974, two years after Dreyfuss’s death, Henry Dreyfuss Associates’ Niels Diffrient,
Alvin Tilley, and Joan Bardagjy published a series of portfolios titled Humanscale
that incorporated newly available anthropometric, anthropological, human factors,
and medical data on women, children, elders, and wheelchair users.60 Although
apparently marketed toward industrial designers, the new data and diagrams began to
cross into the realm of architecture. In the early 1980s, legal requirements for acces-
sible architectural design, particularly wheelchair users, had become enforceable in
the design of federal buildings, increasing the urgency of a more inclusive knowledge
base for architects.61 Accessibility standards defined specific desirable outcomes in
the built environment, such as the ideal slope of a wheelchair ramp. Disabled archi-
tect Ronald Mace had developed illustrated depictions of such codes.62 Yet Graphic
Standards turned to Humanscale 4/5/6 (published in 1981) for its new diagrams of
the human user, including the disabled user.63 Although the new accessibility codes
focused on disability (and not explicitly gender or age), the 1981 (seventh) edition of
Graphic Standards replaced Freese’s dimensional figures of the universal man and
feminine shoe with an array of newly legible figures, including Joe, Josephine, a child,
a wheelchair user, and a person using crutches—­all depicted as white, featureless
figures (see Figures 1.5 and 1.6).
These intertextualities suggest that in the twentieth-­century project of access-­
knowledge, designing with particular types of users in mind entailed intersecting
disciplinary and professional approaches to knowing, as well as making. One detail
deserves reiterating: the legal impetus for disability access (code-­based requirements
that took hold in 1980) led to a wholesale diversification in Graphic Standards of the
figures of the architectural inhabitant, an expansion of gender representation, as well
as disability inclusion. Disability inclusion, in other words, enabled inclusion for a
wide range of bodies. This was not because accessible features for wheelchair users,

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 Normate Template 39

for instance, would be beneficial to the other users depicted but because the legibil-
ity of disability in the twentieth century was fundamentally entangled with the struc-
tures of knowledge governing legible human variation. Why the legal impetus for
disability access led to such an expansion of representation, and how this relates to
the growing intersections of industrial, scientific, and architectural knowledge, are
explored in the next two chapters.

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 Chapter 2

Flexible Users
From the Average Body to a
Range of Users
“Work” . . . is purposive human activity. It includes not only labouring for
monetary gain but all similarly demanding activities such as war, sport,
games, hobbies, and housework.
—W. T. Sing l eton, The Body at Work: Biological Ergonomics

Universal Design . . . defines the user as all people, not specifically disabled
people. Ron Mace emphasized that we will all have disabilities at some point
in our lives, whether from an illness, a temporary disability from an accident
or just aging. If designers would take this into consideration, it could
influence their designing for the full range of human variations over a
lifespan. This perspective is much wider and more flexible by considering a
broad range of possibilities.
—K ryst y na G ol on ka , “Ronald Mace and His Philosophy of
Universal Design”

Examine any device labeled “ergonomic” and you are likely to find at least one feature
that adapts to its user. From ergonomic desk chairs and standing desks with hydraulic
lifts and tilt-inducing levers to modular workstations with insertable shelves, flexible
design is a quality of products made to anticipate a broad range of users rather than a
singular normate. Advocates for social diversity and inclusion often cast the concept
of flexibility as openness to nonnormate ways of inhabiting built worlds.1 Proponents
of accessible and Universal Design, for example, offer “Flexibility in Use” as a method
for eliminating frictions, signaling openness, and integrating misfitting bodies more
seamlessly into designed environments.2 There is another way to understand flexi-
bility, however: as an instrument of standardization, normalization, and fit. In our
late-capitalist moment, flexible products appear in specific spaces: sites of labor at all
scales, from factories to office buildings, adopt flexible design to prevent injuries and
discomfort related to repetitive motion, posture, and energy expenditures that arise
when bodies meet machines. The successful ergonomic object reduces these frictions,
blending the body and machine seamlessly to enable efficient and comfortable work.

41

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 42 Flexible Users

This chapter traces the rise of “flexibility” as a multivalent concept, arguing that
in military, scientific, and industrial discourses, this concept has been entangled with
related ideas of the “user,” the “human factor,” and, most importantly, with disability.
In ergonomics and human engineering, flexibility has been a design strategy aligned
with preventing injury and disability, in one sense, and enhancing human perfor-
mance, in another. Once rendered calculable in scientific, military, and industrial
systems, human variation was understood as a threat necessary to contain. In the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a belief that human variation places inevitable
constraints upon engineered systems yielded flexible making (or design that consid-
ers a range of embodiments beyond the norm) as well as flexible knowing (or ways
of keeping the range of embodiments in mind). Flexible knowing-­making, in turn,
shaped the twentieth-­century phenomenon of access-­knowledge.

KNOWING-­M AKING FLEXIBILITY

Design for users, by most accounts, is a twentieth-­century preoccupation. Histori-

ans locate the rise of the “user”—­its legibility to designers—­in Cold War–­era efforts
toward human factors research, ergonomics, human engineering, and spatial plan-
ning.3 These methods of knowing-­making combined the insights of new human
sciences (such as psychology); new forms of rehabilitation, architecture, and indus-
trial design expertise; and earlier natural, biological, anatomical, and physiological
sciences.4 The resulting ways of knowing the user’s needs, behaviors, and embodi-
ments appeared to materialize in the twentieth century. Yet the methods and epis­
temologies enabling user-­centered design coalesced a century earlier in scientific,
military, and industrial regimes concerned with disability. Even prior to Dreyfuss’s
human engineering or British aviation scientist K. F. H. Murrell’s work on ergonom-
ics, perceptions of supposedly deficient humans (termed “cripples,” “feeble-­minded,”
“injured,” “handicapped,” or, more recently, “disabled”) shaped the figure of the user
and methods of designing carried out in its name.5

The User and the Human Factor

Before federal laws could mandate accessibility for disabled users in all public build-
ings, before manufacturers could produce and market products to offset the effects
of aging, before industrial designers could employ terms such as “ergonomics” and
“human engineering” to address human vulnerabilities, and before designers could
imagine the user as multiple—­beyond the average, a range rather than a norm—
­the figure of the user was understood as a wildcard, a vulnerability-­producing instru-
ment that must be studied and controlled. For the nineteenth-­century science of
work, the “user” and the “human factor” were terms that described inevitable human
vulnerability—­and therefore the uncertainties and complications that workers would
invariably introduce into systems. Fears of the user’s vulnerability were entangled

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 Flexible Users 43

with concerns about industrial efficiency. As early as 1818, European engineers dis-
cussed the role of the “human factor” in promoting national “industrial supremacy”
through standardization.6 Whereas the “user” implied the individual-­scale material
relationships between bodies and technologies, the “human factor” represented
uncertainty at the systems scale.7 In The Human Motor, historian Anson Rabinbach
argues that in the mid- to late nineteenth century, physiologists, industrial engineers,
and physicists alike began to understand machines, bodies, and societies as analogous
systems, modeled around the structures of nature and driven by energy.8 Accordingly,
in 1857 Polish botanist and inventor Wojciech Jastrzębowski introduced the term
“ergonomics,” describing it as the “Science of Work.”9 For Jastrzębowski, “work” en-
compassed the human imposition of force, whether “physical, kinetic, or motory,” on
natural resources, which would in turn translate human efforts into the “common
good.”10 He clarified that in a broader sense, work also included “physical, aesthetic,
rational, and moral” labor—­ways of knowing, making, and relating to the world.11
The inevitable outcome of work, as Jastrzębowski termed it, was “ability”: the more
one labors, in other words, the easier and more satisfying work becomes.12 As an
instrument of labor, the able, working body was thus understood as a machine that
produces and consumes energy.
As the concepts of the user and the human factor came into circulation for in-
dustrial science, they also began to influence architecture. In the mid-­nineteenth cen-
tury, mechanical and functionalist metaphors for architecture emerged to describe
buildings as bodies, the organs of which worked via mechanical relations.13 Ref­
erences to the user and the human factor rendered both machines and buildings as
sites for engineering and studying efficiency. For the most part, the architectural
user remained an undifferentiated figure. Before architects could mark distinctions
between users, they required an understanding of design as a functional, rather than
only aesthetic or formal, practice. Surprisingly, industrial engineers sought to influ-
ence architects’ understandings of the user. In 1864, for instance, Scottish steam engi-
neer Robert Scott Burn called for architects to think about how clients use buildings
throughout the design process rather than after the design has been set in stone.
Architects must know, he wrote in his book The Grammar of House Planning,

how much of his time a man has to spend in his house, and how often, therefore, he
is to be pleased with its comforts or annoyed by its defects, it does not seem odd that
he should rarely know whether he has to enjoy the one or endure the other until he
takes possession, when knowledge comes too late for remedy. For it should never be
forgotten, that the mistakes made in the planning of a house cannot be rectified when
the plan is perpetuated in stone or brick and mortar.14

Although steam engineering and architecture are apparently distinct areas of exper-
tise, the two fields of knowledge shared conceptions of energy, structure, and use.

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 44 Flexible Users

Particularly in “house planning” and other vernacular architectures, Burn argued that
foresight and attention to users were as crucial as solid structural engineering. Con-
sequently, when the terms “user” and “human factor” began to appear together in
nineteenth-­century texts, they appeared in reference to industrial energy pro­duction,
notably steam.15 A decade before writing The Grammar of House Planning, in the
1850s, Burn developed his work on architecture and the user, which included texts
on architectural geometry and applied ventilation for architectural structures, at the
same time that he penned his major work The Steam Engine.16 By the 1890s, Burn and
other steam engineers were applying the term “user” to laboring bodies, whose work
produced energy in steam plants, similar to the way that scientific managers such
as Frederick Winslow Taylor conceived of workers as productive units expending
energy.17 Viewed by industrial managers as extensions of factory machinery, users’
bodies became manipulable and engineerable. Body, energy, and labor were entan-
gled in the possibility of a compliant and malleable user, who would be responsible
for the smooth functioning of the industrial system.

Flexibility and Standardization

Although the human factor was a confounding factor in industrial production, mid-­
nineteenth-­century engineers took the user’s uniformity for granted. All users were
potential disruptions to engineer and standardize, but specific types of users had not
yet come to matter in the discourse of the user or the human factor. One project of
human differentiation, the nineteenth-­century science of anthropometry, made the
variety of human forms legible. Recalling the last chapter, the practice of anthro­
pometry had been integral to projects of scientific racism, colonialism, and positivist
science.18 Physical anthropologists, criminologists, and statisticians collected anthro-
pometric data and differentiated populations based on race, physical impairment,
and other factors. But anthropometrists also debated the usefulness of this data,
particularly as a representation of populations.
War, like industry, draws upon bodies as resources for certain types of labor
but also produces these bodies through repetitive training, arrangement, and rational
ordering. Military anthropometric studies made use of large, available populations,
and the studies resulting from military data consequently shaped how designers and
engineers could know and apply the “human factor.” In 1861 the U.S. Congress estab-
lished the Sanitary Commission, an agency akin to the Red Cross supporting injured
Union soldiers fighting in the Civil War.19 Although tending to injured soldiers was
the commission’s primary purpose, it also gathered statistical data about U.S. soldiers
fighting for both the Union and the Confederacy. At the time, statistics was a relatively
new science and Sanitary Commission officials debated its strategic uses for mili-
tary knowledge. One issue was whether data gathered from particular populations
of soldiers’ bodies could be generalized for application beyond the war machine.
Charles Stillé, a historian and employee of the Sanitary Commission, explained that

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 Flexible Users 45

with statistical data, “the experience of thousands or hundreds of thousands of men

may be substituted for that of one man, and the accuracy of numerical computa-
tion may thus supply the place of the rude estimate of personal opinion.”20 These
claims embodied nineteenth-­century positivism and its emphasis on the primacy of
statistical data.
It was not just that military statistics would enable more accurate representations
of the soldier population, however. Nor was it primarily in the name of general knowl-
edge or scientific advancement that the commission’s Bureau of Vital Statistics
amassed data on soldiers. New anthropometric tools and methods, coupled with
census data collection, were strategic for the military because they could help distin-
guish—­at the population level—­between the most robust, successful fighters and
those whose bodies were less likely to successfully win in armed combat. Making
distinctions along lines of ability and impairment rendered particular categories of
human variation legible as features of the “human factor” in military systems. The
Bureau of Vital Statistics claimed to lead the cutting edge of statistical research in the
United States with its plentiful data about the “character, number, and health,” as well
as “physical peculiarities,” of Union Soldiers.21 Demographic and anthropometric data
differentiated soldiers by nationality, race, “birth-­places, ages, strength, capacity of
lungs, statures, dimensions of chest, bodily proportions, pulse, [and] respiration,” with
“those in good health being distinguished from those not in their usual vigor.”22 Regard-
ing this evidence, Stillé wrote, “It would be difficult to say whether their value in a
medical, military, or physiological point of view should be regarded as the greatest.”23
Differentiation between health and sickness, whiteness and racial otherness, and all
manners of bodily function and size thus became central to military statistical research.
This was not simply a research endeavor. By allowing researchers to cross-­reference
data on physical disability, race, and age with character, number, and health, the data-
base enabled statistical calculations of valuable users on the basis of specific traits.
A foundational study of the human factors field differentiated Civil War soldiers
based on race and bodily ability. The focus of Benjamin Apthorp Gould’s Investiga-
tions in the Military and Anthropological Statistics of American Soldiers was to catalog
the presence of physical impairments that could potentially disqualify soldiers from
service.24 The analysis covered large-­scale user surveys of Civil War enlistees. Draw-
ing upon census catalogs of soldiers’ bodies, Gould calculated their physical fitness,
health, lung capacity, morphologies, and dimensions, and merged statistical science
with medical categories. Variations in stature across geographic regions, for instance,
served as evidence for the comparative fitness of soldiers from these regions.25 On
the whole, Gould’s research was entrenched in the tradition of scientific racism.26 It
relied on and produced stable categories of difference to assess the impacts of race,
disability, and class on soldiers’ war-­fighting capabilities. The soldiers’ bodies under
analysis—­all male—­were both normate and nonnormate, citizens and noncitizens,
white and nonwhite bodies.

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 46 Flexible Users

Making differences legible across these categories required calculations of proba-

ble human types, but the study’s research design also produced such types. Even their
tools of measurement reflected military anthropometrists’ normate ideals of the
upright, male soldier. Physical anthropologists had used tools such as the “androm-
eter” to study the Mi’kmaq First Nations people (whom Gould pejoratively labeled
the “Savage Natives of New Holland”), who were colonized by the French and the
Dutch in present-­day Quebec.27 Gould’s study appropriated this tool to measure sol-
diers. Subjects were required to stand in an upright posture as if at attention (Figure 2.1).
But unlike Stillé, Gould was skeptical that such measurements could provide relia-
ble data, given that “the absence of rigidity of the flesh” and “the real fluctuations of
the dimensions in consequences of respiration and other involuntary motions” would
increase the “magnitude of errors” in measurement, with only a sufficiently large pop-
ulation sample producing accuracy.28 Any averages calculated in the study, Gould fol-
lowed, were not to be applied to predictions of actual people: “though correct for the
type or the mean of all, they are by no means necessarily correct for individual cases.”29
Likewise, the categories to which statistics were assigned, Gould noted, were no more
than rough calculations. The conditions under which soldiers were measured, “under
circumstances sufficiently varied, upon a significant number of subjects,” only pro-
duced knowledge “of the form to which all individuals are approximations, although
no one of them may ever have attained, or hope to attain, its accurate imperson-
ation.”30 Although Gould’s studies were embedded in scientific racism, these were
hardly the claims of a positivist devoted to the unerring truth of statistical reduction.31
Like architects’ professional expertise, scientific authority often emerges from
experimental knowing-­making. Many of the nineteenth-­century researchers we have
learned of so far had broad, nonspecialized expertise. They dabbled in new, seemingly
unrelated fields. Their credentials derived from experience rather than formal degrees.
Gould, too, qualified his nonexpertise as an astronomer in the relatively new field of
human statistics, reporting that the results of the study were “offered with the diffi-
dence and distrust which must necessarily accompany the results of investigations
in a field entirely new to the inquirer, and regarding subjects with which the tenor of
his previous pursuits had left him completely unacquainted.”32 These disclaimers
illustrate epistemic flexibility, an acknowledgment that scientific knowledge refuses
standardization and generalization as universal truth but may be useful for particular,
applied purposes nonetheless. Gould’s comments also highlight another point: that
describing human differences through statistical calculations often requires distilling
variation into predictable but imperfect categories, which in turn produce new ways
of being.33
Whereas nineteenth-­century anthropometrists were involved with epistemologi-
cal experimentation, efforts to formalize the method in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries yielded conflicting imperatives toward difference and standard-
ization. Anthropometry became formalized as a research discipline in the 1870s, with

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 Figure 2.1.  Purpose-­built “andrometer,” an early anthropometric instrument created for the
U.S. Sanitary Commission. Benjamin Gould, Investigations in the Military and Anthropological
Statistics of American Soldiers (1869).

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 48 Flexible Users

international committees working to standardize statistical concepts, as well as an-

thropometric tools and methods.34 The precision of measurement was the central
concern of anthropometric practice at a time when international measurements,
such as the meter, were only recently standardized and access to precise instruments
of measurement was still limited.35 Stadiometers, craniometers, skinfold calipers,
measuring tables, and anthropometers standardized the spatial distance between
body parts at increasingly sensitive scales: meter, centimeter, and millimeter, carefully
marked on manufactured instruments.36 Statisticians such as Quetelet and Galton
developed “purpose-­built” instruments according to needs as varied as measuring
small children or skeletons.37 These instruments of measurement, in turn, confirmed
long-­held beliefs about valuable embodiments.
Specific anthropometric measurements and tools demanded specific types of
bodies and thus constrained research to particular “epistemic objects.”38 Standardized
tools, in turn, naturalized the “military position” as the most reliable posture for linear
anthropometric measurement (Figure 2.2).39 The upright military position served
as a tool of reliable measurement but also disciplined pliable and fleshy bodies into
standardized anthropometric instruments.40 This scope of military anthropometrics
produced an evidence base that was entirely populated by male bodies that could
stand, appear soldierly, and be amenable to discipline.
As anthropometry became increasingly scientific and professionalized in the early
twentieth century, experts debated whether scientists could accurately measure non-
normate bodies. Physical anthropologists and eugenicists—­experts studying com-
parative racial anatomies—­became professionalized as anthropometric experts due
to their institutional and scientific legibility as dealers of precision and accuracy.
Eugenicist statisticians, particularly Charles Davenport, found employment perform-
ing army anthropometrics.41 Several studies in the early 1920s catalogued one mil-
lion World War I army soldiers—­“the first million drafted men sent to mobilization
camps”—­along with a study of “Defects Found in Drafted Men” numbering 2,510,591.42
They documented conditions as varied as mental deficiency, astigmatism, deafness,
tuberculosis, venereal disease, and pronated feet, combining the methods of military
anthropometry and medico-­physical examination to catalog the range of variations
among soldiers, including those rejected for service.43 Although the physical examin-
ers at mobilization camps had not indicated soldiers’ racial identification, Davenport
and Love made explicitly racialized connections between the geographic distributions
of certain measurements or conditions and the supposedly defective racial popula-
tions comprising those locales.44 In the coming decades, the military hired teams
of physical anthropologists from Harvard University and elsewhere to aid human
factors researchers in establishing new types of measurement with functional uses for
military equipment and machinery.45
Physical anthropologists believed that as a matter of scientific methodology, reli-
able anthropometry must use linear measurement of certain landmarks on the body,

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 Figure 2.2.  Anthropometric measurements of a solider in upright military position. Harry
Laughlin, The Second International Exhibition of Eugenics Held September 22 to
October 22, 1921 (Baltimore: William & Wilkins, 1923). Wikimedia Commons.

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 50 Flexible Users

such as the tip of the elbow or the heel of the foot. But in their estimation, bodies that
did not stand, remain upright, or have these standard landmarks were not measurable
with available tools or of interest for more generalizable data. Unlike military anthro-
pometrists seeking to cull the weakest soldiers, prominent physical anthropologist
Aleš Hrdlička argued that physically disabled bodies with “pathological condition[s]”
and “defective constitution[s],” such as syphilis, giantism, dwarfism, microcephaly,
arthritis, or other conditions affecting posture, size, and gait, would skew the mea-
surement results and should not be anthropometric objects at all.46 In statistical cal-
culations of civilian populations, this omission reinforced the notion that disabled
bodies simply did not exist as users.
Late twentieth- and early twenty-­first-­century anthropometry served as an evi-
dence base for the emerging fields of human engineering, ergonomics, and human
factors research. The more anthropometric data could reveal about variations within
specific human populations, the more those populations were subject to standardiza-
tion. Like industries that sought to control the unpredictable “human factor,” military
engineers designed weapons, armor, and uniforms that would fit specific soldiers’
bodies (often by approximation) and thus reduce human error in war-­fighting.47 Flex-
ible knowing (knowledge of a range of embodiments) and flexible design (designing
for those embodiments) produced the foundations of access-­knowledge.

REHABILITATING THE USER

Before exploring access-­knowledge further, I want to return to the mid-­nineteenth

century, when another way of thinking about the user was taking hold beyond mili-
tary statistical research. Nineteenth-­century human sciences such as statistics, sociol-
ogy, criminology, anthropology, and psychology are often understood in relation to
normalization and objectification.48 By taking statistical averages for granted as polemi­
cal norms, these fields appeared to prescribe against disability, racial otherness, and
other devalued, nonnormate ways of being in the population as a whole. Another
notion of the norm, which took the individual as its metric, circulated in the nine-
teenth century, particularly in relation to health and disability. Georges Canguilhem,
in The Normal and the Pathological, describes this norm as concerned with the indi-
vidual organism’s homeostatic state.49 Whereas statistical norms sought to align users
with population standards, individual norms were more flexible, seeking only each
person’s return to an individual state of health. If medical diagnosis and cure enforced
population norms, a return to individual homeostasis approximated the practice of
rehabilitation.
When the two norms were conflated, however, returning the body to a state of
normalcy would make flexibility a practice of normalization. Just before and dur-
ing the U.S. Civil War, medical advancements such as antiseptics and anesthesia

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 Flexible Users 51

were increasing survival rates for bodies injured in war or work.50 Human variation in
the form of physical disability gained widespread legibility. A rehabilitation regime
emerged in response, employing flexible knowledge in service of standardization.
In the 1850s the rehabilitation regime focused on assistive technologies, such as
artificial limbs, which could help injured workers return to productive labor. Where
simple technologies, such as peg legs, had existed before, the new artificial limbs
normalized amputees’ appearances with mechanical parts and aesthetic elements.51
These new technologies also drew on emerging mechanical conceptions of human
physiology, which understood bodies as energy-­producing and energy-­consuming
machines and as objects of knowledge that experts could know in increasingly stan-
dard ways.52 The U.S. Orthopedic Institute proclaimed in 1851 that it was “fully pre-
pared to invent and adapt machinery to every variety of deformity,” suggesting that
prosthetics could be functional and mechanical extensions of the working body.53
Some inventors, such as surgeon Douglas Bly, criticized mechanical knowledge as
inferior to anatomical replications. Bly, who was not himself an amputee, asserted
that his medical knowledge (acquired by “frequent dissections” and study of the
“principles of the natural leg”) made his “Bly leg” (Figure 2.3) a superior replica of the
fleshy leg’s natural anatomy than competing prosthetics produced by “common
mechanics, and those who have undergone amputation.”54 The key was not in his
medical knowledge, per se, but in the materials: rubber, ivory, cords, and an enamel
finish replaced the cold, metallic interiors of other legs.
Following the Civil War, the U.S. federal government offered subsidies for the
invention and manufacture of artificial limbs for injured soldiers, creating a market-
place for new innovations in prosthetics.55 As the new technologies proliferated,
inventors advertised their products by claiming their authority to know and make
these devices. A primary marketing strategy emphasized the inventor’s skill and
knowledge of human bodily function rather than knowledge of comfort and usability
(two concepts that would dominate twentieth-­century user-­centered design). In
advertisements for artificial limbs directed at civilians reentering work as well as
social life, assertions about mechanical knowledge and skill were common. Promi-
nent New York City prosthetics manufacturer A. A. Marks advertised its artificial
limbs as tools for amputees to pass as nondisabled, showing in advertisements that
amputees could use prosthetics to conceal their bodies and instead convey middle-­
class status (Figure 2.4).56 Before the company rose to prominence, it first developed
standards for measurement and functional fit based on emerging human factors and
rehabilitation principles. In an 1867 pamphlet directed at users of its “India rubber
hands and feet,” the company explained that well-­fitting limbs required precise and
standard measurements. “Persons cannot be too careful in taking measures,” the com-
pany warned, “and they cannot well make mistakes if they adhere STRICTLY to the
directions which are PLAINLY stated upon every blank.”57 With proper measures,

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 Figure 2.3.  A prosthetic leg designed by Douglas Bly is shown worn, bent, standing, and in
section (1858). Courtesy of Warshaw Collection of Business Americana, Archives Center,
National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institute.

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 Flexible Users 53

A. A. Marks could fit artificial limbs to even the most geographically distant users
ordering by post, suggesting that standard measurements enabled bespoke fit without
a user appearing in the flesh.
While nondisabled inventors such as Bly argued that their designs followed
cutting-­edge scientific knowledge, and whereas A. A. Marks encouraged amputees to
fit into standardized increments of size and shape, amputees also invented artificial
limbs, appealing to their own experiential knowledge with amputation as evidence
that their designs were superior to those of competitors. These inventors identified
disability as a resource rather than a deficit. Disabled inventor James Foster wrote:

I claim to be the only PATENTEE and MANUFACTURER in America (perhaps in

the world) who wears a full length artificial leg and who was a practical mechanician

Figure 2.4.  Upright citizenship: “Before” and “after” illustrations of a white man, a double
amputee displaying his prosthetic legs and then concealing them beneath a three-­piece
suit. A. A. Marks, Manual of Artificial Limbs: Copiously Illustrated (New York: A. A. Marks,
1905), 112.

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 54 Flexible Users

at the time of amputation, and that no other manufacturer has had the same facilities
for experimenting with and improving artificial limbs that I have had, for I served a
regular apprenticeship and was a practical mechanic before I lost my limb (which was
amputated in February, 1860), and since which time I have had a thorough practical
experience with other manufacturers of artificial limbs.58

Responding to the sentiments of Bly and others, Foster argued that disability creden-
tialed him in mechanical knowledge, as well as the lived experience of being a pros-
thetics user. Disabled people, in other words, were not mere objects for inventors
and physicians to study; they were also inventors with superior knowledge of the
body. Foster’s counterknowledge to the dominance of anatomical paradigms, mea-
surement practices, and biomedical expert cultures reveal the fine gradations of med-
ical, functional, and social knowledge in the rehabilitation regime. These were subtle
but powerful distinctions that carried forth in the twentieth century as knowledge
about the disabled body would become contested terrain in human factors research,
industrial design practice, and the rise of the disability rights movement.
A shift came at the beginning of the twentieth century, when manufacturers used
social and aesthetic appeals to market artificial limbs as consumer objects. The legi-
bility of single categories of users (such as soldiers, workers, or amputees) gave way
to an expansive understanding of difference as the rehabilitation regime merged with
civilian life. A. A. Marks’ prosthetic devices had been an early example of flexible
designs without direct military or industrial application. As mentioned above, in pre-
vious decades, the company worked to standardize ranges of measurement for mail
order prosthetics sent primarily to Civil War veterans, its early clients. From this
data, the company designed prosthetics fitting ranges of stump sizes and locations.
Data on disabled veterans’ stumps consequently informed their late nineteenth-­and
early twentieth-­century designs, which were personalized to individual users based
on approximation to these standard measurements.
While prosthetics functioned mechanically and required fitting to individual
users, they also performed other kinds of social and aesthetic work. By 1905 A. A.
Marks claimed to be the nation’s largest manufacturer and mail order supplier of
artificial limbs. In its Manual of Artificial Limbs: Copiously Illustrated, a book-­length,
“exhaustive exposition of prosthesis,” the company advertised “artificial toes, feet,
legs, fingers, hands, arms for amputations and deformities,” and “appliances for exci-
sions, fractures, and other disabilities of lower and upper extremities.”59 User testi-
mony, coupled with lifelike drawings (often from photographs) of both actual clients
and imagined users, comprised the bulk of the catalog. Many of A. A. Marks’ ad-
vertisements claimed that rehabilitation devices could render amputees as upright
citizens of “polite society,” as Stephen Mihm has shown (see Figure 2.4).60 Disability
technology consequently became a form of fashion and a desirable marker of social
status—­in other words, a lifestyle brand. This branding took for granted, however,

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 Flexible Users 55

that disability is a deficit in need of correction. Its advertisements suggested that

a fashionable prosthetic could remedy the supposed deficit of disability by offering
enhancement beyond a user’s prior socioeconomic coordinates.
Despite reaffirming norms of able-­bodiedness and middle-­class status, however,
the A. A. Marks catalog exploded the representation of normate white, male, and
previously able-­bodied types, as if to suggest that there was a prosthetic device for
everyone. Promotional illustrations suggested that every type of person—­not just
male soldiers—­could benefit from A. A. Marks’ designs by regaining access to pub-
lic life and recreation. For instance, young men could ride bicycles and ice skate
and women could regain access to preparing food (Figure 2.5). But the catalog relied
on typecast legibility and reductive, often stereotypical depictions of race, gender,
and class. Wearing A. A. Marks, it promised, would enable white women to enact the
supposedly gender-­appropriate activities of cooking and letter-­writing. The growing
legibility of disabled (white) women as users of assistive technologies thus married
the cultural understanding of women as homemakers and consumers, nearly always
depicted using kitchens.61 Likewise, (white) men were depicted as engaging in stereo-
typically masculine activities, such as chopping wood with axes, rowing boats, serv-
ing drinks, bicycling, ice skating, and playing cards.62 As A. A. Marks’ depictions of
amputees extended the reach of rehabilitation into social life, they simultaneously
reinforced cultural dynamics of power and privilege.
Particularly vexing are the Manual’s representations of race. While most of the
amputees depicted appear white, the catalog’s most conspicuous image shows Ceca
Yammi, a Sioux Indian man, wearing an A. A. Marks leg on his left side (Figure 2.6).
The line-­drawn portrait depicts Yammi in a full headdress, holding both a tomahawk
and a pistol. The accompanying testimony, attributed to Yammi, celebrates the arti­
ficial leg as “an example of what the ‘White Medicine Man’ can do for [the Sioux]
people.”63 This striking image of racial diversity, however, likely reinforced white
audiences’ expectations of indigenous people as both inherently warlike and (when
assimilated) thankful for the “White Medicine Man.” While every other testimony in
the Manual was written directly by its user, Yammi is spoken for by his physician, the
“White Medicine Man,” in a double-­imposition of medical and racial authority. Given
that practices such as anthropometry and comparative racial science were still preva-
lent during this time, Yammi’s status as an object of description by a self-­identified
white male medical expert reveals that hierarchies of race and ability influenced assis-
tive technologies and their marketing, despite their attention to individuals rather
than populations.

DESIGNING PRODUCTIVE CITIZENS

Early twentieth-­century technologies of mass production relied on knowledge of

users as a diverse range rather than an average. This reliance was as much material as

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 Figure 2.5.  Male prosthetics users are depicted as engaged in leisure, such as
cycling, and women, such as Mrs. E. E. Abel, are shown cooking food on the
stove while wearing an artificial leg. A. A. Marks, Manual of Artificial Limbs:
Copiously Illustrated (New York: A. A. Marks, 1905), 109, 258.

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 Figure 2.6.  Ceca Yammi, a Sioux Indian man, wears a headdress and an artificial leg. A. A.
Marks, Manual of Artificial Limbs: Copiously Illustrated (New York: A. A. Marks, 1905), 289.

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 58 Flexible Users

it was epistemological. A. A. Marks disclosed its production processes via a section
drawing of its factory, which proclaims, through a quote from the Scientific American,
the company’s international industrial leadership (Figure 2.7). A potential disabled
consumer—­an amputee on crutches—­stands on a sidewalk peering into the factory’s
ground-­floor shop window. The building appears in section, cut down the middle,
revealing seven floors of other users: workers, along with machines, in the complex
choreography of efficient labor. Whether engaged in productive labor or dutiful con-
sumption, A. A. Marks’ depiction of bodies, machines, and architectural space makes
legible the relations of knowing-­making at play within the “black box” of the factory.
While the factory produces technologies for a diverse range of users, the drawing
also illustrates the entangled work of other late nineteenth-­and early twentieth-­century
regimes of standardization: architectural functionalism, mechanical and biomedical
conceptions of the body, and scientific management. Built to return disabled soldiers
to productive labor, many early twentieth-­century prosthetics were “industrial tool
holder[s],” which plugged workers’ bodies directly into factory machines.64 These
devices also symbolized the place of the worker (as itself a machine) in the design
of industrial labor. Scientific managers and industrial engineers, such as Frederick
Winslow Taylor, believed that more effectively designed systems of labor could over-
come differences between workers and create more standardized products. Taylor,
a mechanical engineer, described the practice of efficient industrial production as
“true science, resting upon clearly defined laws, rules, and principles” and “applicable
to all kinds of human activities.”65 Like their eugenicist contemporaries, Taylor and
his followers were disinterested in the average person or worker, who they consid-
ered to be slow-­moving and lazy. Instead, they sought to transform environmental
contexts and systems to create more efficient, productive workers.66 Knowing such a
worker would require quantifying labor itself.
Early twentieth-­century mechanical engineers considered the human factor and
flexible design for users as necessary points of intervention in industrial systems.67 In
the 1910s, James Hartness (president of the American Society of Mechanical Engi-
neers and Taylor’s contemporary) called for attention to the “human factor” in order
to guarantee “success of the organization, or industry, or nation”; scientific manage-
ment, he believed, could achieve these goals through “proper use of the human being,
especially as regards modes of employment of mind and body.”68 Hartness considered
users’ bodies as engineerable tools (similar to machines). But human factors engi-
neering was not an unfeeling practice of inserting cogs into a system. The human
user’s “welfare” and “relationship to other men and his environment in general,” Hart-
ness emphasized, were necessary for the efficient operation of productive machines.69
The “human factor” thus became synonymous with the effective mobilization of
social and built environments to produce more efficient users.
But what does it mean to “engineer” human needs and their differences? For Hart-
ness, users were not an undifferentiated mass of bodies, nor was their standardization

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 Figure 2.7.  Section diagram of the “Interior of the Largest Artificial Limb Manufactory
in the World,” showing various stages of the production process across seven floors.
A. A. Marks, Manual of Artificial Limbs: Copiously Illustrated (New York: A. A. Marks,
1905), 431.

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 60 Flexible Users

necessarily desirable. In response to Taylor, who mechanized labor and increased the
speed of work, Hartness believed that users operated on inherently different tempo-
ralities. They had their own normal states. “We know,” he argued, “that there are all
kinds of minds and all kinds of bodies. . . . Both the so-­called lazy and energetic are
alike following nature’s law. . . . Both extremes are on the earth, and there should be
a way by which each might be placed where his peculiar characteristics will render
the best results to himself.”70 The answer to such divergence was not to invest in the
average or typical “set of habits of users” but to allow users to “get back to [their own]
nature” through design that is better attuned to users’ perception and cognition.71
Harkness was apparently in the minority, however. As World War I began, time
and motion became concepts through which users’ bodies could be studied and engi-
neered. Industrial engineers Frank and Lillian Gilbreth employed time-­motion stud-
ies of workers that documented the temporalities of tasks to propose “methods of
least waste”—­a middle ground between Taylor and Hartness.72 Standardizing move-
ments across all bodies was not the goal. Rather, methods of least waste produced
efficiency according to individual norms.73 Lillian Gilbreth proposed that the unit
of measurement for scientific management should be “the individual and his work”;
she noted that “functionalization is based upon utilizing the particular powers and
special abilities of each man. Measurement is of the individual and his work.”74 But
flexibility toward a worker’s peculiarities also relied on standardization. The Gilbreths
understood the user’s body as “a subject for scientific study and for scientific admin-
istration,” with individual “idiosyncrasies” serving as legible categories of “efficient
deviations,” which managers repurpose into other parts of the system.75
Toward the end of World War I, scientific management extended its flexible ori-
entation regarding individual workers toward the changing face of human embodi-
ment, particularly disability.76 The “war cripple” and the “industrial cripple,” Frank
Gilbreth argued, “constitute elements seriously to be considered in the great problem
of [military and industrial] preparedness.”77 Scientific managers adopted elements of
both flexibility and standardization to transform disabled people (whom they under-
stood as ready and malleable bodies) into more productive workers through practices
of vocational rehabilitation,78 or what Henri-­Jacques Stiker calls “vocational redeploy­
ment.”79 Consequently, assistive devices, such as prosthetics, were employed in the
service of standard mechanical labor.80 If disabled veterans could access these tech-
nologies and have fewer barriers in their work environments, Frank Gilbreth argued,
they would be become full citizens and participants in society.81
In the interwar period, scientific management, military human factors research,
and rehabilitation were nearly indistinguishable.82 The Gilbreths led the push for
integrating disabled users into human factors research, which they believed would
enable home-­front industrial production for the war machine.83 As they described
it, “No definite and permanent advance is made with any kind of work, whether
with materials or men, until use is made of measurement. This is especially true of

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 Flexible Users 61

the advancement of the human factor in industry.”84 In their Motion Study for the
Handicapped, the Gilbreths’ concepts of the “One Best Way” and “methods of least
waste” espoused the values of standardized work and uniformity.85 But rather than
frame a single, normate body as the ideal laborer, the “One Best Way” sought enhanced
human performance for disabled and nondisabled people.86 The Gilbreths argued
that the best methods of vocational and industrial efficiency “were similar for all
handicapped—­soldiers and civilians alike. They apply equally well to the maimed
and the blinded. They involve determining the One Best Way to do work and teach-
ing it through the most efficient learning process.”87 Disabled workers could use adap-
tations, such as those described in a “Simultaneous Motion Cycle Chart,” to align
their productivity with the “One Best Way.”88 These acknowledgments of the in-
evitability of human variation recalled earlier notions of the “human factor” as an
unpredictable element of industrial systems, as well as rehabilitation practices of
using adaptive technologies to fit the user to the system. While the Gilbreths por-
trayed these concepts as objective and scientific, standard methods of production
were closely linked to the political and cultural goals of assimilating disabled veterans
and civilians into mainstream life, an agenda driven by the imperative to overcome
the supposed deficits of disabled embodiment and not by acceptance of difference.89
Citizenship became contingent on productive labor, as determined by the science
of work, in the early twentieth century. At the intersection of human factors, rehabili­
tation, and scientific management, early disability rights discourses were entrenched
in notions of productive citizenship, as defined by a person’s amenability to both
rehabilitation and enhancement. The worker, the machine operator, the soldier, the
consumer, and the citizen of leisure shared this status as engineered, malleable sites.
And many experts in scientific management, rehabilitation, and human factors came
to understand themselves as disability rights advocates. When the rehabilitation re-
gime introduced new preferred terminology for impairment, the Gilbreths promoted
the (now-­defunct) term “handicapped” in place of (the Civil War–­era term) “crip-
pled.”90 The difference between “cripples” and the “handicapped,” they explained,
was that the latter “ha[d] become a recognized part of the industrial community,—­
welcomed and admired, an element that stands for both progress and maintenance.”91
The price of belonging was mere productivity.
In liberal democracies, citizens often receive qualification based on their demon-
strated independence and autonomy. Disqualified citizens are often those whose
perceived dependency and simultaneous failure to assimilate cast them as nonpro-
ductive and therefore failing to uphold the duties of citizenship.92 Near the end of
World War II, Lillian Gilbreth expanded the insights of the “One Best Way” by col-
laborating with others to write self-­help texts for disabled civilians and emphasiz-
ing employment access as crucial to disability rights and equality.93 Rehabilitation
specialists, such as Howard Rusk and Eugene Taylor, echoed the Gilbreths’ insistence
on the citizenship of populations framed as “war cripples” and “industry cripples,”

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 62 Flexible Users

arguing that “comprehensive rehabilitation programs have been established in the

armed forces and the veterans administration. The disabled civilian, in a democracy,
deserves the same opportunity.”94 In the discourse of self-­help, citizenship involves
taking advantage of the opportunities one is provided, particularly medical therapies
and vocational rehabilitation. National belonging, in other words, is the right to be
rehabilitated.

DESIGNING FOR USERS

If rehabilitation is, as disability historians David Serlin and Anna Carden-­Coyne sug-
gest, a project of postwar economic and spatial construction, premised on returning
the body to a supposed state of normalcy in order to “restore,” “rebuild,” and “recon-
struct” the nation, then what cultural preferences did this regime inject into U.S. envi-
ronments and political economies? How did these preferences relate to established
ways of knowing human variation and making in response to it? And what role have
those preferences had in shaping twentieth-­century discourses of disability rights and
user-­centered design?95
By the post–­World War II era, the discourse of the “user,” the “human factor,” and
“ergonomics” had existed for over a century in U.S. and European industrial, scien-
tific, and military contexts. Wars had introduced new types of embodiment and
funded new research in increasingly specialized areas of expert study, and the results
of this research had shaped not only the engineered systems of work but also the
social relations of liberal belonging. Users could now be workers, consumers, house-
wives, men of leisure, and citizens, but the price they paid was flexibility toward
regimes of human engineering.
The two world wars, like the Civil War, produced new fields of scientific exper-
tise in relation to the body and disability. “Human performance” experts, including
the Gilbreths, served as consultants for research on the operational management
of military bodies.96 Along with its preference for able-­bodied and able-­minded sol-
diers, the military adopted an industrial emphasis on efficiency and productivity.97
Bridging military, industry, and civilian consumption, human factors researchers
drew on a wide range of disciplinary knowledge before the field formalized in the
1950s. In the 1930s, for instance, “the functional specifications for the first pressure-­
cabin aircraft were written by a flight surgeon.”98 But as the effects of aviation tech-
nologies on the body, particularly in relation to gravity, acceleration, and altitude,
became measurable, new fields of expertise emerged to study these effects on specific
bodies, generalize them to wider populations, and devise better practices for design
and engineering.99
Although human factors research apparently sought the greater good, the fields’
ties to eugenics—­a project of culling so-­called defectives from the population—­
remained close. Industrial managers and eugenicists alike influenced the development

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 Flexible Users 63

of human factors as a science, which laid claim to users’ bodies as sources of evidence
about human variation.100 In the 1920s, military-­funded university laboratories led by
Charles Davenport and Albert Love aided in the collection of human factors data
about soldiers’ bodily dimensions, data that extended Gould’s studies to one hundred
thousand twentieth-­century users.101 Population-­level knowing, in turn, enabled flex-
ible, user-­centered design. Military anthropometrics translated, for instance, into a
flexible range of twenty-­two clothing sizes for soldiers based on height, chest, and
waist measurements but also enabled the army to fully standardize equipment, uni-
forms, and training environments across users.102 By the late twentieth century, human
factors research would expand into all U.S. military branches, each proliferating efforts
to harness the human factor for maximum efficiency and warfighting capability.103
Donning bellicose names such as the army’s “MANPRINT,” the air force’s “IMPACTS,”
and the navy’s “HARDMAN,” new research programs would require that contractors
“increase their staffs to include [human factors] specialists.”104 The boundaries be-
tween military and civilian human factors research, blurred in previous decades by
the involvement of eugenicists and rehabilitation researchers, would become further
entangled with the introduction of research into civilian commercial uses, such as
aircraft design.105 In effect, the project of knowing users for the purpose of engineering
efficient systems would become its own expert industry.
Similar to nineteenth-­century industrial research, twentieth-­century human fac-
tors research was entangled with industrial trends (namely the rise of consumerism).
Civilian-­focused industrial designers in the interwar period called for a “broad con-
ception of consumer desire” and argued that designers ought to “know who the ulti-
mate consumer is likely to be.”106 Consequently, anthropometric measurements of
women’s bodies determined clothing sizes based on standard deviations.107 World
War II anthropometrics had an even more potent effect on civilian design, however.
In the late 1940s, data on soldiers’ aptitudes and uses of technology were published
for general civilian application.108 American industrial designer Henry Dreyfuss used
this data to craft a new approach for user-­centered design in The Measure of Man
(1960), a portfolio that translated statistics into diagrams of the human figure, first Joe
and then Josephine.109 Just five years later, in 1965, U.S. audiences gained access to
K. F. H. Murrell’s “human performance in industry,” which detailed ergonomics as
design for the “range of the population for which the equipment is intended,” including
design that considers particularities such as the “sex of the user.”110 Murrell understood
the user as flexible and adaptive. “Unlike a machine,” he wrote, “a person can change
his role rapidly and frequently.”111 This was the hallmark of “man’s flexibility” to the
environment, a flexibility that put the onus of change on the body rather than the
environment itself.112 While Murrell’s view of flexibility appeared to contrast with flex-
ible consumer-­oriented designs, such as ready-­made clothing, these perspectives were
two sides of the same coin: efforts to know the range of diverse users in turn standard-
ized the knowable universe and yielded multiple, but standard, user-­centered designs.

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 Chapter 3

All Americans
Disability, Race, and
Segregated Citizenship
All standards which will be recommended to benefit the permanently
handicapped will be of benefit to everyone.
—T im ot hy Nug en t, “Design of Buildings to Permit Their Use
by the Physically Handicapped”

What has changed since the collapse of Jim Crow has less to do with the
basic structure of our society than with the language we use to justify it. . . .
We have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it.
—M ichel l e A l e xa nde r , The New Jim Crow

On February 12, 1946, Isaac Woodward, an African American World War II veteran
on his way home to Goldsboro, North Carolina, was arrested for disorderly conduct.
His crime was asking a bus driver to stop for a restroom in the Jim Crow South. As
police officers transported Woodward to the rural South Carolina jail, they beat him
so severely that he became blind.1 National attention to the beating of Isaac Wood-
ward framed the racist violence of Jim Crow laws through the tragedy of incapacita-
tion. The consequence of racism, in other words, was disability. Following pressure
from the NAACP, President Harry S. Truman delivered a public address supporting
civil rights for African Americans. “It is more important today than ever before,”
he said, “to insure that all Americans enjoy these rights. When I say all Americans
I mean all Americans.”2 Truman’s words referenced the tensions between “separate
but equal” citizenship and the foundational premise of the U.S. liberal rights regime:
that “all men are created equal.” But while his rhetoric acknowledged a divided nation,
Truman’s “all” appeared to reference Woodward’s race as a category of identity and
citizenship but not his disability.
In 1948 the University of Illinois at Galesburg established a vocational rehabilita-
tion and education program for injured soldiers, funded by the G.I. Bill.3 Thirteen
white, disabled students lived in a barely used, one-story army rehabilitation center for
one school year, until plans to establish a medical institution for “the aged and infirm”

65

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 66 All Americans

threatened to close the program (Figure 3.1).4 In response, the students organized a
march at the Illinois state capitol.
The march utilized symbols of disabled veterans’ belonging in normal, U.S. con-
sumer and civilian life: “twenty-­plus paraplegic-­driven cars,” accompanied by prom­
inent disabled veterans’ organizations, approached the capitol building with their
demands.5 A police motorcade guided the protestors, stopping to “salute” the cars at
every block.6 Upon their arrival, most of the students could not access the building’s
staired entrance and had to use a side door to attend meetings with state officials.7
Considered by some as one of the first public disability protests in the United States,
just two years after police brutality against Isaac Woodward, the protest hid in plain
view the racially divided consequences of demanding access to public space.
Although the protesters’ demands were not immediately met, the Galesburg
program, and the Rehabilitation Education Center at the University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign that followed, were part of the postwar reorganization of dis-
abled belonging in built environments, a national project of expanding citizenship for
some in the name of access for all. Initially, access-­knowledge produced through
fields such as rehabilitation and gerontology pinpointed disabled users as objects
of research. In the late 1940s, rehabilitation experts at the University of Michigan’s
Institute for Human Adjustment began holding national conferences on rehabilita-
tion and labor for the “Handicapped Worker over Forty” and “Housing the Aging.”8
Rehabilitation and gerontology extended the regime of the flexible user into civilian
life, joining disability and aging into a category of “functional limitation,” which ref-
erenced the body’s misfitting relationship to its milieu as a deficit. The new category
and the field of rehabilitation research enabled a new practice of barrier-­free architec-
tural design. But while “functional limitation” appeared to be a very specific category,
advocates for barrier-­free design argued that “all Americans” would benefit from more
inclusive environments.
This chapter traces the rise of barrier-­free design in the mid-­twentieth-­century
United States. Approaching this phenomenon through histories of systemic racism,
the human sciences, and architecture, I argue that in the civil rights era, the growing
political legibility of particular nonnormate users was contingent upon their scientific
legibility as productive, white spatial citizens. Histories of barrier-­free design tend to
address the rise of accessibility codes and standards, laws, or examples of designed
products and spaces. Instead, I address material rhetorics, or how words, claims, doc-
uments, research practices, and images accumulate in (what appear to be) static laws
and hegemonic standards. Using the idea that barrier-­free design benefits “all Ameri-
cans” as a touchstone, I examine how the term “all” shaped the figure of the disabled
user in relation to norms of race, gender, class, and age.9
A contemporary narrative insists that barrier-­free design revolves around a limited
population of users with “functional limitations,” often through “narrow code compli-
ance to meet the specialized needs of a few [disabled people],” while Universal Design

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 Figure 3.1.  Cover of the Galesburg Illini reporting that the program for disabled students is
to close. Pictured at bottom right are students and faculty from the University of Illinois at
Galesburg waiting outside the governor’s mansion. Galesburg Illini, March 25, 1949.
Courtesy of the University of Illinois Archives.

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 68 All Americans

offers “a more inclusive design process for everybody.”10 These claims presume the
historical stability and internal coherence of both approaches, while also treating the
question of antinormative design as racially neutral. Terms such as “all” and “every-
one” are not mere mathematical calculations or conditions of thoughtless ignorance,
however. They are material rhetorics that appeal to ideas of valuable scale and pop­
ulation. From design for a “broad” range of human variation to calls for eschewing
“narrow” or “singular” approaches to accessibility, these scalar distinctions define
who counts as a user and through what forms of evidence designers purport to know.

THE PARTICULARITIES OF “ALL”

A common understanding of racism in the late twentieth and early twenty-­first centu­
ries dictates that oppression is a bias—­something in the mind—­that greater awareness
and education can alleviate. But historians have shown that racism, often attributed
to attitudes, is also a material arrangement, a pattern of “racial making,” as Elizabeth
Hale puts it, which produces whiteness as a neutral, unmarked default through a “cul-
ture of segregation,” two key aspects of which have been rules and symbols in the
built environment, such as Jim Crow–­era “whites only” signs.11 Integrated with racial
making, however, is racial knowing. As Chris Bell and other scholars of race and dis-
ability have pointed out, default, neutralized, and unmarked presumptions of white-
ness often characterize how disability and its history are known.12 How we think about
and study disability, in other words, often takes for granted that disabled people are
white and that whiteness is a neutral condition of contemporary life.
As a reference to included or potentially includable populations in the twenti-
eth century, the term “all” was entwined with racialized ways of knowing-­making. In
Truman’s example, we find that the term “all” unsettles a presumed norm, and thus
serves a critical purpose. In this sense, “all” is an epistemological category, a term
that shapes a population to be known as more than singular. As a category describing
populations, the term almost always appears in reference to either political popula-
tions (such as citizens and nations) or embodied populations (characterized through
shared biological or physical traits). In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, for
instance, proponents of scientific racism positioned race as an indelible biological
category, understood as nature, but geneticists and anthropologists in the 1940s chal-
lenged these biologically essentialist views of race by proposing that “All Mankind Is
One Family.”13 Here, “all” served as a neutralizing term, which sought to smooth out
the effects of historical differentiation, but in doing so imposed a more universal cat-
egory of sameness. The scientists’ responses embodied what critical race scholars
such as Michelle Alexander characterize as post-­racial ideologies, often termed “race-­
neutral” or “color-­blind.”14 In their insistence upon biological sameness as evidence
that race is a myth, these ideologies often elide the historical, material, and socio­
cultural frictions of racialized experience, particularly as they manifest in unequal

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 All Americans 69

accumulations of wealth and power. Whether racial difference can be measured in

biological terms, racial inequality has materialized through systems of colonialism,
slavery, and segregation, which produce racial difference as a mechanism to control
and exploit nonwhite bodies.15 The use of the term “all” to describe genetic same-
ness, then, is a way of knowing-­making a certain understanding of race. Similar to
what Charles Mills terms an “epistemology of ignorance,” the term “all” is a materially
arranged condition of knowing that renders the privileged status of whiteness as
smooth, neutral, illegible, and unmarked.16 In its nonspecificity, the limitations of
“all” appear as mere omission or forgetting rather than as a tactic within a regime of
illegibility shaped by systemic racism.
Inseparable from the marked racialization of U.S. citizenship, the term “all” has
a history and set of meanings that require unpacking. In the twentieth century, “all”
frequently referenced shifting understandings of human community that nonetheless
maintained whiteness as a norm. This was especially true in nationalist discourses.
The early twentieth-­century discovery that blood types do not correspond to racial
phenotype made blood donation possible and, as Sarah Chinn narrates it, framed
national discourses of blood banking in the 1940s through the language of “all.”17
Blood drives called for “all” people, regardless of race, gender, age, or class, to donate
blood in the name of democracy. The “universal donor” took shape as a patriotic and
democratic body, whose sacrifice of fluids and tissues could save and rehabilitate the
nation’s soldiers.18 But blood banking simultaneously became a project of racializa-
tion, which constructed whiteness as a neutral category and blackness as deviance.
Although the Red Cross and other organizations called for all citizens to donate
blood, Chinn writes, “blood donated by whites . . . was unlabeled, unmarked. Only
the blood given by blacks was labeled as such,” leading to disparities in access to blood
banks that in turn precipitated protests by African Americans declaring “I Am an
American, Too!”19 These protests reveal that African American struggles to count as
full U.S. citizens were both political and epistemic: holding the state and white citi-
zens accountable for false promises of universal equality involved contesting the pre-
sumed boundaries of “all” and “American.” While the term “all” treated whiteness
as an unmarked category of smooth belonging, however, proclamations of universal
equality redesigned the language and methods of demarcation rather than neutralizing
the frictioned material vestiges of racial difference.20
In response to the overtly racist beating of Isaac Woodward, Truman’s use of
“all” gestured toward correcting historical disenfranchisement and legally mandated
inequality. But his repetition (“When I say all Americans I mean all Americans”) also
suggests the ambivalences of the term “all” as an instrument of legibility in liberal rights
regimes. A basic presumption of such regimes is that legal legibility (or nominal citizen­
ship) sets in motion progress toward substantial inclusion, often by smoothly envel-
oping each new, legible identity into the community of citizens. But as postcolonial
disability theorist Nirmala Erevelles argues, liberal citizenship is a historical-­material

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 70 All Americans

arrangement produced through political economies, not a pregiven or natural cate-

gory.21 Because slavery, for instance, built the nation and its industries, liberal indi-
vidualist values of citizenship, defined by “productivity, efficiency, and autonomy,”
are intimately wedded to histories of white property ownership, the “racial division
of labor,” and other material arrangements that, in turn, rely upon norms of able-­
bodiedness (and able-­mindedness) to “decide who could or could not be a citizen.”22
Much like the insistence that “All Mankind Is One Family,” liberal rights regimes dic-
tate that once marked as formal citizens, rights recipients can assimilate smoothly,
become neutral and normate, if they prove their worth as productive citizens. By this
logic, any remaining inequalities that communities of color face, particularly those
resulting from the legacies of slavery, historical patterns of racial segregation, or on-
going state violence, are not caused by systemic racism but rather problems inherent
to those communities. The assumptions of U.S. liberalism (and the individualized sys-
tem of capitalism on which they are based) reveal the connections between the dis-
course of “all” and the regime of the flexible user, which approached the citizen as a
labor unit within broader systems of management and control. Within those systems,
the category of the productive citizen shaped imperatives for users to become effi-
cient, rehabilitated workers and soldiers. But as the examples above illustrate, when
“all” are called to sacrifice bodies for the nation, those with unmarked racial and eco-
nomic privileges as citizens often benefit at the expense of those whose racialized,
disabled, and otherwise “misfit” bodies are treated as extractable labor.

PRODUCTIVE SPATIAL CITIZENS IN THE JIM CROW ERA

Design for a range of human variation was the goal of the access-­knowledge regime,
and yet legible variations and determinations of valuable difference were frequently
racialized, gendered, and classed. Where the legibility (and illegibility) of categories of
race, class, and gender intersected with disability in barrier-­free design, the twentieth-­
century discourse of “all” aligned with the figure of the productive spatial citizen, a
flexible user whose right to public and private space is contingent upon its amena­
bility to productive labor.23 Barrier-­free design was enmeshed with state projects of
granting inclusion to disabled people who proved themselves as good workers and
citizens deserving of rights in a liberal democratic, capitalist order, and whose mem-
bership in this order entitled them to spatial access as a condition of belonging. Since
the 1910s, industrial managers had argued that removing environmental barriers for
men injured in war and industry would promote the goals of vocational rehabilita-
tion.24 Similarly, following World War II, proponents of barrier-­free design argued
against the widespread institutionalization of disabled people, not as a matter of civil
rights or economic equality but because institutionalization was a loss of “human
resources,” preventing the nation from absorbing citizens’ labor; likewise, once made
productive and provided environments that support their rehabilitation, disabled

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 All Americans 71

people would no longer be costly “burdens” to society.25 As architect Leon Chatelain

noted, “They may truly be a burden but frequently it is not their fault. It is the lack of
awareness of the general public which has created this difficulty.”26 Typically, such
comments regarding disability as deficit would be associated with rehabilitation, not
accessible design. But as Chatelain and others imagined it, an accessible future would
supply productive spatial citizens.

Most important is the day when we can use the tremendous power of the rehabilitated
physically handicapped that is now going to waste, for instead of being dependent on
public assistance they will be gainfully employed in buildings which are freely acces-
sible. The economic potential is enormous but more important we will have people
who are happy because they are at work in productive, useful occupations.27

Productive spatial citizenship was thus the dominant discourse of rehabilitation,

conceived in spatial terms. The rise of barrier-­free design between the 1940s and ’60s
took place at the nexus of rehabilitation and architectural knowing-­making, with
close connections to regimes of scientific management. Because these regimes were
all concerned with smoothing out the relations between laboring bodies and envi­
ronments, the scientific legibility of the functional, productive user shaped the iden-
tification of citizens.
The imperative for productivity is central to liberalism, which defines citizenship
through spatial conceptions of resourcefulness, whether in the case of colonialist
geographies that designate land and bodies as standing reserves or in the treatment
of racialized and disabled bodies as what philosopher Ally Day refers to as “labor-­
producing” sites.28 The other side of this coin is that those deemed unproductive
or incapable of navigating spaces of productivity were often subject to segregation
from the population. In the eugenics era, particularly between the mid-­nineteenth
century and the end of World War II, spatial segregation was used to separate so-­
called defectives from the mainstream population, often through institutionaliza-
tion.29 These conditions, which disabled lawyer Harriet McBryde Johnson referred
to as the “disability gulag,” were particularly severe for black and indigenous disabled
women of color, who were subject to both segregation and sterilization.30
Born from the combined effects of scientific racism, white supremacist ideologies,
and state power, legally mandated racial segregation in homes, schools, and other
public places was a project of knowing-­making. Segregation took shape through the
isolation of black communities in cities, controls on immigration, the isolation of
indigenous people in reservations, and the internment of Japanese people, which fed-
eral policies and courts upheld as consistent with the spirit of national goals.31 Taking
up space (and the wrong kinds of space) under segregated conditions had grave con-
sequences. White police officers’ perceptions that Isaac Woodward was out of place,
and therefore justifiably violable, had brutal consequences. Unlike white, war-­injured

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 72 All Americans

soldiers, Woodward’s disablement as a result of police brutality did not make him a
prototype of national identity, nor were there programs of national rehabilitation
fashioned in his name. While black soldiers like Woodward were called to sacrifice
their bodies for the good of “all” citizens, they did not receive the racial, economic,
and political privileges of admission to the category of “everyone.”
Disability and race are hardly discrete categories. As historians such as Douglas
Baynton have argued, racial difference is often marked by perceptions of disability
and defect, and markers of infirmity or poor health have been used to justify racism
against communities of color.32 It is important not to discount, however, the race and
class privileges of white, middle-­class disabled citizens, who were the focus of barrier-­
free design. A “sharp intensification” of the polio epidemic in the United States after
World War II produced a significant population of civilian disabled children and
adults.33 Like institutionalization and residential segregation, the response to polio
was racialized. As historian Naomi Rogers argues, rehabilitation centers for polio
survivors, such as Franklin Roosevelt’s Warm Springs, were “whites only” facilities,
and the relatively low incidences of polio in the U.S. South created a presumption that
black populations were not susceptible to the disease.34 Rather than intensify institu-
tionalization, however, legible polio outbreaks in predominantly white communities
led to the creation of new architectural and urban spaces, premised upon the rights
of (white) citizens to access public space.
In a similar fashion, barrier-­free design and its attention to specific (though un-
marked) disabled people—­white, middle-­class, injured veterans or elderly disabled
women—­was entangled with nationalist discourses, as well as the funding sources
and social agendas that consolidated racial hierarchy in the post–­World War II era.
The G.I. Bill, for instance, was to provide soldiers funding for access to housing, edu-
cation, and services that would enable their integration into postwar life. But as
numerous historians have documented, the bill’s benefits were often extended to
white, male veterans in heterosexual couplings and denied to veterans of color and
unmarried civilian women.35 Consequently, the wealth-­generating privileges of access
to state-­funded education, labor, mortgages, and suburban homes in planned com-
munities were afforded to predominantly white populations. These conditions, along
with the rehabilitation imperative to smooth out the frictions between disabled bod-
ies and their environments, contributed to an illusion of disability as a race-­neutral
phenomenon.

Access-­Knowledge in the U.S. University

It was against the backdrop of systemic racial exclusion and violence in the Jim Crow
era that rehabilitation experts began developing barrier-­free design in the late 1940s.
Barrier-­free design took shape at the intersections of post–­World War II rehabili­
tation, architecture, and industrial design. Its central premise was that built environ-
ments, including products, buildings, and even cities, constituted a major barrier to

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 All Americans 73

vocational rehabilitation for disabled people, who (once rehabilitated) could resume
other practices of citizenship. Other barriers, such as social attitudes limiting access
to housing and employment, manifested in the choices that architects, industrial
designers, engineers, and builders made as they fashioned the world.
The rise of barrier-­free design responded, in part, to pervasive institutionaliza-
tion.36 But its primary impetus was the rehabilitation of the World War II soldier.
In 1947 Congress established the President’s Committee on Employment of the
Handicapped to investigate and make recommendations for disabled veterans’ voca-
tional rehabilitation.37 The subcommittee on barrier-­free design worked with the
Veterans Administration and a rehabilitation program at the University of Illinois to
conduct human factors research toward the first accessibility guidelines in the United
States. This research enlisted hundreds of (mostly white and male) disabled students,
many of whom attended the university through funding from the G.I. Bill, who
engaged in experiments with accessibility technologies and building features.
Despite being located in the Midwest, rather than the South, the University of
Illinois at Urbana-Champaign was a site of severe racial segregation. In 1948 only 0.01
percent of its thirty thousand students were African American.38 Not only were these
students denied access to campus housing, but efforts toward so-­called urban renewal
were also increasing segregation in the surrounding community; in 1948 restricted
covenants increased, despite the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Shelley v. Kraemer,
which found these segregationist housing agreements to be unconstitutional.39 Some
students of color gained admission to the rehabilitation program in later years, but
it is important to point out that each experimental accessibility feature and site of
access, such as campus housing, Greyhound buses, and basketball teams, was likely
either racially segregated or majority white.40
The legibility of disabled people such as wheelchair users within these spaces
required using research methods, such as anthropometry, which had been (and con-
tinued to be) used for the sciences of racial differentiation and military-­industrial
efficiency. Accessibility research at the University of Illinois culminated in the first
attempt at defining best practices for accessibility through a set of voluntary guide-
lines: American National Standard A117.1 (ANSI A117.1), a six-­page document first
published in 1961 to describe basic features of accessible built environments.41 The
guidelines included considerations for public sidewalks, parking lots, entrances, ramps,
doorways, floors, restrooms, water fountains, public telephones, elevators, and tech-
nological features (such as sounds and flashing lights to communicate to visually
and/or hearing-­impaired people).42 The committees devising the guidelines initially
addressed disability, understood as physical impairment, but later in the process added
considerations of aging.43 They omitted “modifications to old buildings,” known as
retrofits, focusing instead on “minimal performance standards” for the “design and
construction of new buildings.”44 Private homes were also excluded by virtue of not
being public spaces.45

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 74 All Americans

Born of an interdisciplinary process, the standards reflected advocates’ belief that

accessible design was not solely a task of rehabilitation professionals but “rather the
responsibility of the architect, engineer, designer, builder, manufacturer, and also
legislators, municipal leaders, and community planners.”46 While rehabilitation pro-
fessionals remained experts regarding the concept of disability, the concept also
opened up an interdisciplinary field in which other professionals could also claim
access-­knowledge. Among the experts who devised these guidelines were architects,
builders, civil engineers, rehabilitation scientists, and even representatives of the tele-
communications industry, who offered guidance on accessible public telephones.47
Deciding that it would “add strength and dignity to the standards,” the committee
members listed their fields of expertise in the final document.48
From the beginning, the A117.1 standard was portrayed as accessible to all users.
Throughout the process of crafting the A117.1 standard, Timothy Nugent, director
of the University of Illinois Rehabilitation Education Center, emphasized that acces-
sibility would benefit “all,” regardless of disability.49 He reinforced this message in
public talks about the standard, stating, “All standards which will be recommended
to benefit the permanently physically handicapped will be of benefit to everyone.”50
Likewise, he called upon rehabilitation professionals, designers, and builders to con-
tribute more accountable and accessible built environments to the project of postwar
reconstruction.51 Other advocates of A117.1, including prominent Philadelphia builder
William Lotz, reiterated that while builders are often “thoughtless in our regard for
the one out of every seven persons who is physically handicapped,” “we should all
benefit” from barrier-­free design.52 These claims prefigured the discourse of Uni­
versal Design, which would arise in the 1980s, by situating accessibility as beneficial
for “everyone” from the outset. These were not neutral claims, however. In portraying
accessibility as broadly beneficial, barrier-­free design supporters treated access to pub-
lic space as a reward for being a productive citizen.
Barrier-­free design aspired to become inconspicuous in built environments. Like
the figure of the productive citizen, once it began to “work,” access would become
unmarked, assimilated, part of the norm rather than opposed to it. The flexibility of
designs was crucial to achieving this smooth integration. Echoing the notion of dis-
ability as a resource that could contribute to the value and usability of design, Nugent
noted that broad accessibility could occur “without the loss of space or function to
the general public” and “without extra cost.”53 Moreover, disabled and nondisabled
people alike would be able to use accessible public buildings and spaces “indepen-
dently and without distinction.”54 The spirit of such claims was that barrier-­free
design had something to offer to all users, but beneath them was an appeal to count
disabled people as productive citizens and workers, the omission of whose “human
resources” from the national economy was of “considerable significance.”55 To maxi-
mize and capture these resources, Nugent’s basic research at the University of Illinois
addressed a range of disabilities, including those related to mobility, sight, hearing,

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 All Americans 75

nervous systems, aging, and heart disease.56 The smooth integration of built-­in acces-
sibility features, or accessibility by-­design, for a broad range of users was therefore a
project in service of vocational and social integration.
A surprising early discovery of accessibility research was that features created with
disabled people in mind sometimes unintentionally improved usability for nondis-
abled people—­a discovery that also supported the claim that designing for the aver-
age user decreased usability for everyone. In the university’s dormitories, for instance,
accessible folding shower seats had been “expected to last several years” but quickly
“wore out in less than six months” because the majority of nondisabled students
were using them with such regularity that they exhausted the hinges and materials.57
“Able-­bodied students,” Nugent reported, “preferred to use the showers with the seats
down.”58 Stories like these provided powerful narratives for justifying accessibility
according to its added value for mainstream consumers.
The empirical finding that wheelchair ramps or shower seats with certain techni-
cal specifications benefit nondisabled students justified the claim that such features
benefit “everyone.” By “everyone,” Nugent appeared to mean the average white post-
war U.S. consumer, student, or worker. It was unclear that barrier-­free design would
be available for someone like Isaac Woodward, whose race would likely have excluded
him from attending the University of Illinois and whose disability had served as a
tragic representation of police brutality but had not elevated him to the status of a
war hero or productive spatial citizen.
The characterization of shower seats as accessible to “everyone” presumed (but
did not name) the norm of the white student-­as-­user. Barrier-­free design research
began at the height of the black civil rights movement, in the midst of the Supreme
Court’s hearings on Brown v. Board of Education (1954), the Montgomery Bus Boy-
cott (1955), and the desegregation of Little Rock, Arkansas (1957)—­all major events
in the politics of desegregation, inclusive design, and urban planning alike. These
events made public spaces such as schools, restrooms, and public transit into material
and symbolic sites of protest. ANSI A117.1 was thus inseparable from the privileges
of white citizenship, including (but not limited to) access to safe and comfortable
housing, suffrage, elementary and secondary education, healthcare, and transporta-
tion. These privileges were the material conditions that allowed white able-­bodied
normates access to the University of Illinois, its dormitory restrooms, and its shower
seats. As feminist architectural historian Barbara Penner points out, however, ANSI
A117.1 offered guidance for wheelchair-­accessible public spaces at a time when rest-
rooms, schools, and public transit remained racially segregated.59 The premise that
accessibility should be available to all citizens thus failed to distinguish between the
relative degrees of power and privilege between members of the population in an era
of explicit racial segregation.
A relic of the rehabilitation regime and its treatment of disability as a discrete,
embodied phenomenon, the presumed white user was also youthful and strong.

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 76 All Americans

While barrier-­free design later addressed both aging and disability, two conditions that
gerontologists, rehabilitation researchers, and even architects were understanding as
medical problems, the initial research assumed that young, white, wheelchair-­using
college students at the University of Illinois were representative of the broader popu-
lation of disabled people. In 1963 British architect Selwyn Goldsmith noted, “The
disabled people whose characteristics and capabilities had helped inform the design
prescriptions were translated into the world beyond the University of Illinois.”60
These particular bodies set accessibility standards that were replicated in other states,
eventually instituted in U.S. federal law, and served as an international model.

Engineering Access in the Suburban Home

Few spatial domains were closer to the epicenter of mid-­twentieth-­century construc-
tions of whiteness as normal and blackness as difference than the suburban home.
In the late 1940s, the G.I. Bill and Federal Housing Authority loan processes (such
as “redlining” and restricted covenants) enabled white U.S. citizens to migrate from
urban areas to middle-­class suburbs.61 This process consolidated the spatial patterns
known as “white flight” and entrenched the racial and economic segregation of Afri-
can Americans through a disinvestment in cities and an accumulation of white sub-
urban wealth. Segregation was not simply a problem in southern states. In Levittown,
New York, a model community for new suburban architectures, redlining policies
formally excluded African American, Latino, and other people of color from buying
homes beginning in 1948, initiating decades of legal battles for protection from hous-
ing discrimination.62 Consequently, the consolidation of wealth and privilege in white
suburban populations produced a tendency to market barrier-­free design toward
these populations as consumers. Although ANSI A117.1 did not provide guidelines for
domestic space, advocates promoted the guidelines by appealing to the racialized,
gendered, and classed norms of suburban, white, middle-­class society. One article
by two ANSI A117.1 committee members, architect Leon Chatelain and social worker
Donald Fearn, focused on accessibility in churches, spaces that were arguably even
more strictly segregated than suburban neighborhoods.63 A ladies’ tea event, they
wrote, lost nearly half of its attendees because it was held in a second-­floor room.
“Those not attending the Tea felt it was too difficult, not safe, or just impossible for
them to climb and descend this staircase because of age, physical disability, or a med-
ical condition.”64 Consequently, the planning committee had decided to adopt the
ANSI A117.1 guidelines. “In the future,” they noted, “the Tea will be held in churches
that all may enter.”65 For churches considering modifications to their buildings,
Chatelain and Fearn assured that accessibility for “the handicapped and the aged will
accrue benefits to all who attend. The specifications which eliminate architectural
barriers for them will increase the safety, comfort, and ease in use for everyone. Plan
for the future now. Look forward to the day when everyone—­the able-­bodied, the
aged and the handicapped—­can use your church to attend worship services and to

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 All Americans 77

participate in the total church program.”66 These assurances and repeated emphases
on the term “all” were polite, nonaccusatory strategies for encouraging more acces-
sible church spaces. But like the segregated home and university, they were insepa-
rable from the context of segregated churches.
Appeals to “safety” and freedom from risk also justified the benefits of accessibil-
ity for “all.” Ronald Junius, assistant director of the A117.1 project, described the risk.

By 1980, for every able-­bodied citizen, there will be one person with chronic disease,
one person with a physical disability or one person over sixty-­five whom the able-­
bodied will have to support unless they are given an opportunity to be productive.67

Other advocates emphasized safety by describing ANSI A117.1 as a “boon to insur-

ance,” a benefit to worker’s rehabilitation that decreases workers’ compensation claims,
reduces “public liability,” promotes health, and reduces fire risks.68 Jayne Shover, chair
of the National Safety Council’s Committee on the Safety of the Aging, wrote in 1962
that ANSI A1171.1 would allow “greater independent safe use of public facilities by
the crippled, the aged, and the infirm” and compared it to practices of “safety engi-
neering.”69 Unlike Chatelain and Fearns, Shrover adopted a more urgent political
tone: unless the guidelines were adopted, Shrover warned,

workers in the field of accident prevention will be faced with a distasteful choice.
Either they can seek to prevent injuries among the elderly and disabled by advocating
that they adopt a mode of existence which would exclude them from independent
participation in community life; or they can continue to total the accidental injuries
incurred by these brave souls who endeavor to surmount the architectural barriers in
public buildings in order to live rather than exist.70

These civil rights imperatives begged the question, however, of who could reliably
expect to access public life without fear of, for instance, racially motivated violence.
The very notion of safety was a privileged concept associated with white, middle-­
class, suburban existence and framed not for the good of disabled people or to advo-
cate for deinstitutionalization but in the name of government and industry.
The social legibility of the suburban home as an arena of safety was also related to
the epistemic legibility of white, disabled women in rehabilitation and gerontology. In
the 1940s and ’50s, the categories of disability, aging, and gender were becoming leg-
ible categories of difference for user-­centered design. As scientific managers expanded
their focus from the factory floor to more diffuse sites of productive labor, econo-
mized and gendered domains such as the private home became sites of economic and
physical rehabilitation, production, and efficiency.71 In the 1950s, architectural exper-
iments in mass-­producing standardized single-­family houses to accommodate these
migrations further entrenched the whiteness of the suburban home, with entire

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 78 All Americans

industries, regimes of knowledge, and manufacturing practices emerging to support

these developments. For instance, architects designed suburban homes as technolo-
gies for white, middle-­class women whose labor they translated into “homemaking,”72
a designation that both identified women’s bodies as sites of efficient, extractable
labor and reinforced the status of white women as model citizens.
The rise of the suburban home and the figure of the white, disabled housewife
as sites of intervention for rehabilitation experts were also inseparable from the mate-
rial arrangements of racially segregated built space (Figure 3.2). Less recognized by
scholars but just as significant were efforts to render the privileged white, subur-
ban, middle-­class, heterosexual home as a disability domain. David Serlin has argued
that in the 1950s, the meaning of rehabilitation and the design of prosthetics shifted
from war-­related injury to masculine norms of labor and productivity.73 Concur-
rently, rehabilitation professionals turned to engineering disabled housewives, spa-
tially bound bodies whose gender roles, perceived inherent weakness, and designated
belonging in suburban homes made them appear as natural sites for scientific man-
agement. The visual and material rhetorics of rehabilitation interventions into the mid-
century home recalled a longer history of depicting assistive technologies and built
environments as enablers of white, middle-­class women’s comfort agency, productiv-
ity, and quality of life. For instance, recalling prosthetics manufacturer A. A. Marks’
display of women wearing prosthetics while cooking in kitchens (see Figure 2.5),
prominent rehabilitation expert Howard Rusk devoted several of his 1950s rehabilita-
tion monographs to accessible and adaptive homemaking for disabled housewives,
particularly white, elderly, physically disabled women.74 For these users, rehabilita-
tion through self-­help entailed becoming autonomous consumers rather than produc­
tive factory workers or independent citizens. Consequently, white women’s aging and
gendered bodies became model organisms for the study of disability as a relationship
between bodies and environments; in coming decades, experts in physical rehabilita-
tion and ergonomics would understand older, white, disabled housewives as the base-
line of standards of physical ability for all people.
While contemporary preoccupations with the access needs of the aging “baby
boomer” generation lend the impression that such concerns are specific to recent
population trends, proponents of barrier-­free design in the 1950s and ’60s (the period
when today’s baby boomers were born) were equally concerned with the growing
population of people over sixty-­five years of age.75 The legibility of aging as rehabili­
tation concern naturalized the extension of scientific experts into the domestic life of
white, middle-­class, aging women. Concerns with women as users began to surface
in barrier-­free design manuals for disabled and elderly people, with particular atten-
tion to wheelchair-­accessible kitchens.76 In 1960 architect and ergonomist Alexander
Kira (who would later become famous for his ergonomic studies of the bathroom)
published guidelines for the “Housing Needs of the Aged,” with emphasis on “Func-
tional Planning for the Elderly and Handicapped.”77 Like Rusk, Kira believed that

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 Figure 3.2. Barrier-­free
design research in the
domain of the home
focused on the figure of
the white, disabled
housewife using the
kitchen (ca. 1961–­74).
Courtesy of the University
of Illinois Archives,
images 4030.tif and
4028.tif.

Hamraie.indd 79 03/08/2017 12:24:33 PM

 80 All Americans

adapted housing could serve a rehabilitative function. But his focus was the structure
and planning of housing itself rather than the use of adaptive and self-­help devices, as
disabled housewives’ manuals promoted. Although individual self-­help devices and
buildings operated at different scales, Rusk and Kira’s efforts toward accessible hous-
ing were simultaneous to Nugent’s development of ANSI A117.1. The project of acces-
sible domestic space reveals the broader reaches of access-­knowledge beyond the
university context, which rehabilitation, human factors research, scientific manage-
ment, and architecture converged to share knowledge for mutual benefit.
The single-­family, white, middle-­class suburban home was thus much more than
a container for private, heterosexual, nuclear family life. For the figure of the white
disabled woman to become legible for rehabilitation practices, the home had to appear
as a public domain amenable to expert manipulation and productive spatial citizen-
ship. When gerontologists and rehabilitation experts explored methods of enhancing
productivity for aging housewives, their attention fell disproportionately upon elderly
white women.78 Rehabilitation experts offered adaptive housework to women who
not only occupied white, suburban spaces but who also had the white privilege of
long life, or access to aging. Epidemiological data from the Jim Crow era shows that
African American people had significantly higher rates of premature death than white
people and were 20 percent more likely to die before the age of sixty-­five in spaces of
Jim Crow segregation, even when accounting for class and income.79 While these
figures may not have been immediately legible to those inhabiting privileged, white
communities, racialized expectations of what kinds of people were likely to be in the
world nevertheless shaped the imagination of the home itself as a privileged domain
of labor and aging.
It was by claiming expertise about the seemingly neutral, objective, biologized,
and often-­conflated categories of disability, aging, and gender that rehabilitation spe-
cialists and architects (workers in predominantly white, nondisabled, cisgender male-­
dominated professions) enacted early barrier-­free design.80 Although the site of the
suburban home shifted these experts’ attention away from the normate male figure,
the legibility of aging, white, disabled women as housewives was not a recognition
of their race, gender, class, or disability as connected to systems of oppression. Nor
was the rehabilitation regime concerned with women of color, whose labor often
took place outside the home, whether in factories or in the homes of others.81 Rather,
the figure of the white, disabled, aging woman fit vocational expectations of the par-
ticular types of users performing labor in private, domestic space, as well as cultural
expectations of white womanhood as representative of the nation.

THE QUESTION OF SEGREGATION

On February 1, 1960, four young African American men sat at a “whites only” Wool-
worth’s lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, and refused to leave.82 Their

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 All Americans 81

sit-­in embodied a notion, central to twentieth-­century social justice activism, that

access to public space is a litmus test of freedom. A national movement of sit-­ins
and protests led by students of color followed, and Greensboro became an epicenter
of civil rights organizing in the South. When widespread arrests of protesters overran
the capacity of local jails, police repurposed the abandoned Central Carolina Reha-
bilitation Hospital, an old polio treatment facility, as a site of incarceration.83
A decade earlier, on August 28, 1950, Ronald Mace, a white, middle-­class, nine-­year-­
old boy from Winston-­Salem, North Carolina, entered the same building (then known
as the Central Carolina Convalescent Hospital) after contracting polio (Figure 3.3).84
Although polio outbreaks were relatively uncommon in the South, Greensboro was
an epicenter of the disease between 1948 and 1950, and the local news reported each
diagnosis, rehabilitation, and death.85 On August 31, 1950, a front-­page story in the
Greensboro Daily News reported Mace as one of several recent cases admitted to the
hospital.86 On the same day and page, the newspaper reported the state of North
Carolina’s strong resistance to admitting four black students to North Carolina State
University’s law school.87 The resistance followed the U.S. Supreme Court’s holdings
in two cases, Sweatt v. Painter and McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents, which pre-
ceded Brown v. Board of Education in challenging the segregationist doctrine of Plessy
v. Ferguson by finding that racially segregated law schools provide unequal services
to students of color. The contrast between these cases—­the polio epidemic and the
rise of the civil rights movement—­on the front page of the local news hinted at two
types of perceived danger in the early 1950s and in the Jim Crow South: the dangers
of legible, medicalized disability and the dangers of legible challenges to white racial
hegemony.
In its heyday, the Central Carolina Convalescent Hospital had been one of the
largest polio rehabilitation facilities in the United States. The local outbreak’s severity
had also given the facility a rare quality: from its staff to its patients, it was racially
integrated (Figure 3.4).88 Like another local disability space, the Guilford Industries
for the Blind broom factory (a sheltered workshop for blind people), there appeared
to be “no color line”: white and black people worked and engaged in rehabilitation
practices together.89 Both the rehabilitation hospital and the sheltered workshop
offered ordered, institutionalized, and efficient spaces for the production of flexible
users, whose bodies were later displayed as inspirational. A 1951 article reporting
on the polio epidemic pictured Mace in crutches and leg braces, held up by a nurse,
with a wheelchair sitting in the background.90 Accompanying the photo, a triumphant
caption read: “He Can Stand Alone.” A belief in disability as tragic deficit, rather than
anti-­racist motivations, integrated the Central Carolina Convalescent Hospital. Con-
sequently, the hospital’s rehabilitation activities shaped its perception as a space that
was neutral of history or politics, such that when the state reused it ten years later to
incarcerate black civil rights activists, the building was not legible as a former space
of institutionalization. Nor was the hospital’s reuse as a jail recognizable as part of a

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 82 All Americans

Figure 3.3.  The entrance to the Central Carolina Convalescent Hospital (1950). Courtesy of
Joy Weeber.

new pattern: the transitioning of institutional spaces such as hospitals and asylums
into prisons. Nevertheless, this pattern began the phenomenon of mass incarceration,
or what Michelle Alexander refers to as the “New Jim Crow.”91 The spatial segregation
of racial minorities and disabled people was clearly linked in these cases, but while
racism and ableism shared spatial dimensions and certain mechanisms, the popula-
tions most vulnerable to these oppressions were not often imagined as related.
At the same time that Supreme Court cases such as Sweatt and McLaurin were
chipping away at the Jim Crow regime, the social and cultural forces surrounding seg­
regation did not disappear with challenges to laws. Resistance to federal civil rights
by states such as North Carolina made achieving racial justice a process of struggle

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 Figure 3.4.  The Central Carolina Convalescent Hospital’s patients and staff were racially
integrated. This image shows a young African American girl in a wheelchair, posed with
two white adult men and other (white) children. A young Ronald Mace appears on the far
right. Greensboro News & Record, May 5, 1951, 9. All Rights Reserved.

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 Figure 3.5. Ronald
Mace returned to his
family home in 1951.
Here, he is depicted
near a wheelchair ramp
and with his brother.
Courtesy of Joy
Weeber.

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 All Americans 85

and labor, and in 1951 the Civil Rights Congress, a U.S. civil rights defense organi­
zation, filed a 237-­page petition with the United Nations detailing evidence of geno-
cide, defined as systematic violence and discrimination, against African Americans
in the United States.92 The same year, Mace reentered life in his family home, de-
spite his doctors’ recommendation of prolonged institutionalization (Figure 3.5).93
Disabled peoples’ resistance to institutionalization was not yet a significant force in
the early 1950s, but the prevalence of polio among white, middle-­class populations
enabled some, like Mace, to access life beyond institutions. The Maces’ home in
Winston-­Salem acquired a wheelchair ramp, and Mace was able to continue his for-
mer hobbies of tinkering with soap box derby cars and model airplanes. His status as
a “polio victim” and apparent prowess with designing model airplanes even won him
an all-­expenses-­paid trip to Detroit, Michigan, which he attended with his father.94
Similar opportunities were unlikely to have been available to lower-­income disabled
people, who did not have the resources to access home life, nor would they have been
available to disabled people of color, such as Isaac Woodward.
It is unlikely that Mace would have been cognizant of these privileges as a young
child, but his early life in the segregated South no doubt shaped his understanding
of space as an instrument of exclusion. He had attended segregated public schools,
which remained white at the time of his high school graduation in 1959, five years after
Brown v. Board of Education.95 Without a doubt, he encountered signs reading “whites
only” and “colored only” in public spaces such as restaurants, where he faced other
types of environmental barriers.96 Mace was also part of a generation that became
disabled in the pre-­ANSI A117.1 world. Staired entrances and inaccessible restrooms
at his schools prevented his regular attendance.97 But with the resources of his family
(for instance, his mother, who carried him up the stairs of his school every day), Mace
navigated inaccessible spaces for most of his life.98 These adaptations were both
resourceful and isolating, however. In 1960 Mace matriculated at North Carolina State
University in Raleigh, North Carolina, where he studied architecture at the School
of Design (despite the reservations of the school’s dean).99 Unlike the University of
Illinois campus where barrier-­free design research was taking place, NC State was
inaccessible. Mace lived and performed his studio exercises from a mobile home,
where his mother also resided. At NC State, he began a lifelong career of researching
housing access for marginalized users. Mace’s senior architectural thesis on housing
design research, which studied Chavis Heights, a segregated black public housing
facility in Raleigh, highlighted what he described as a chasm between the architect
and the user.

Mass housing has placed the architect in the awkward position of having to design for
a statistical person usually ethnic, cultural and economic worlds away from his own
position in society. Thus the planner and the architect must operate with assumptions
about how people live, how they want to live, and how they would live if possible.

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 86 All Americans

Assumptions frequently unfounded based upon middle class values and prejudices
having [sic] little relevance for people of other cultures and economic classes.100

By building for others, in other words, professional architects often failed to under-
stand the cultural (here, indicating racial) and classed lived experiences of their users.
This idea, which activists and scholars in many fields would echo in the 1960s, served
as a driving factor in Mace’s career, which he concentrated on shifting the relations of
knowing-­making for architects and users.
The shifting landscape of disability rights laws in the late 1960s and early ’70s
molded Mace’s career. Following his graduation in 1966, Mace’s social consciousness
about the architecture profession developed around his experiences of employment
discrimination.101 Potential employers often treated his disability as a disqualifica-
tion, pathology, or nuisance. At the time, there was no legal recourse for this discrimi­
nation. ANSI A117.1, which applied only to the design of built environments, remained
a voluntary standard, and according to a 1965 survey of three thousand architects,
most were unaware of its guidance.102 Congress had only passed the Architectural
Barriers Act, the first legislation requiring accessible design in federally funded build-
ings, in 1968. Mace finally found employment at a small firm in Greensboro, North
Carolina, in 1972, and worked on projects such as designing the local civic center.103
The following year, Congress passed major civil rights legislation, Section 504 of
the Federal Rehabilitation Act, which made access to federal buildings and services
a civil right for disabled people, leading Mace to establish his own consultancy, Bar-
rier Free Design.
Mace’s early life in North Carolina, from his time in the Central Carolina Conva-
lescent Hospital to his work at NC State, illustrates the complexities of the concept
of “segregation” in the mid-­twentieth century, when removing structural barriers for
disabled users was slowly becoming legible and black civil rights struggles remained
public and contentious. While Mace faced severe discrimination on the basis of his
disability, it is also important to note that the architecture profession in which he was
trained was almost entirely white and male.104 Although space was a common denom-
inator of both disability and race segregation, Mace’s white middle-­class status gave
him access to resources and opportunities in posthospital life that were denied to
people of color. These complexities would later shape Mace’s work regarding the con-
cept of Universal Design.

Post-­racialism and the Emergence of Disability Access Laws

As a relation of knowing-­making, spatial segregation remained a target for antiracist (as
well as feminist and disability rights) activism in the 1960s and ’70s.105 When Congress
passed major civil rights legislation in the 1960s, including the Civil Rights Act of
1964 and the Fair Housing Act of 1968, the laws both marked a major victory for activ-
ists and initiated intense struggles over enforcement. In response to the post-­racial

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 All Americans 87

position that these laws had solved the problem of racism, however, black intellectu-
als such as Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton argued that racism is a system-­
wide pattern of discrimination that is illegible in mundane, everyday life (even in the
absence of overt malice).106 These ideas made racism legible as something that occurs
beyond the reaches and mandates of the law, within diffuse culture and material
arrangements that must be addressed in order for change to take hold.
By insisting that racism had disappeared, however, an emerging post-­racial nar­
rative elided the differential impacts of oppression on the basis of race, gender, or
disability. It was within a post-­racial framework that it became possible to use racial
segregation as a parallel case or metaphor for disability exclusion.107 In 1965 architect
and ANSI A117.1 committee chair Leon Chatelain wrote, “A little coordinated plan-
ning can open up whole new worlds to millions of people, and all facilities will truly
be open to everyone regardless of race, creed, color or physical handicap,” implying
that ending discrimination in built environments was an issue that cut across race,
religion, or disability.108 A race-­neutral discourse on disability, underscored by an
emphasis on “all” and “everyone,” emerged.

I look forward to the day in the not too distant future when every building and facility
will be usable by everyone, the able-­bodied as well as the physically handicapped. . . .
When all people can truly work, play and live together. . . . When an individual in a
wheelchair can attend the church of his choice. . . . When he may enjoy a football or
baseball game or attend a concert or the opera. . . . When there will be no need to have
specially built schools to be used by physically handicapped children, for all of these
buildings will be open to all who desire to enter.109

Chatelain’s framing of “everyone” highlighted nondisabled users’ privileged access to

choice and agency: the choice to engage in leisure or attend a mainstream school, he
argued, should be available to “all.” Yet it was only after the passage of race-­focused
civil rights laws, such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965,
that advocates like Chatelain drew parallels between race and disability and that
“physical handicap” appeared alongside race as a qualifier of “everyone.” It was also
only after the passage of race-­focused civil rights laws that a “freedom of choice” dis-
course appeared in reference to disability, often in concert with the notion that the
struggle against racism had now ended and that the time for addressing disability
had arrived. While Chatelain replicated the discourse of making facilities open to
“everyone,” the world he imagined consisted of the highly segregated and contested
spaces of schools, churches, and sporting events. That barrier-­free advocates did not
acknowledge racial segregation prior to these laws suggests that it was expedient to
appropriate the momentum and success of black civil rights after Jim Crow but not
to ally accessibility to anti-racism then or thereafter. Two sites of spatial reform in the
1960s highlight the presumed whiteness of barrier removal for “all.”

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 88 All Americans

Knowing-­Making Racial Desegregation

From the 1940s to the 1960s, barrier-­free design attached itself to the tastes and pref-
erences of white, middle-­class consumers in privileged, safe, and seemingly neutral
spaces of the suburban home and the public university, where the design of new prod-
ucts and buildings would enable access to the material practices of normal life. These
white geographies of accessibility contrasted with the stigmatized spaces of inner cit-
ies, which were sites of racial desegregation. In cities, desegregation required a range
of practices, including integrating transit, housing, and urban redesign, but unlike
market-­led interventions and voluntary compliance standards for barrier-­free design,
efforts toward racial desegregation met resistance from law enforcement and the “car-
ceral state.”110
Despite civil rights protections for people of color, access to formal equality and
citizenship through civil rights and antidiscrimination laws failed to produce needed
material changes in built environments, wealth accumulation, or widespread disen-
franchisement, resulting in riots and uprisings in Detroit, Los Angeles, Chicago, and
Newark. Rhetorics of disability and pathology shaped the federal response to these
uprisings and the material conditions upon which they were based. In 1967 President
Lyndon B. Johnson formed the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders—­
the Kerner Commission—­to study the causes of these riots and how they could be
prevented, employing a cadre of expert sociologists, psychologists, and anthropolo-
gists, as well as law enforcement and defense officials, to discover the causes of and
means of preventing expressions of black rage in segregated urban environments.111
The resulting Kerner Report found that the structural and material effects of white
supremacy—­particularly unequal housing, education, and access to work, in addition
to racially targeted police violence—­produced uprisings in U.S. cities and was not
something inherent to black communities themselves.112
The detailed report outlined the historic and current conditions of systematic
racism and poverty in inner cities, particularly mass housing, finding that these con­
ditions drove uprisings (termed as pathological “civil disorders”). It highlighted that
“what white Americans have never fully understood—­but what the Negro can never
forget—­is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions
created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it.”113 The pow-
erful claim that race riots were products of white supremacy (as they took shape in
built environments) located the “problem” of racial inequality in the milieu rather
than individual people or communities. Despite this strong criticism, however, the
report ultimately concentrated on preventing and responding to the violence of race
riots carried out against “white Americans” by the “Negro” (whose American citizen-
ship was unnamable) because these riots constituted threats to the nation.
The Kerner Report used pathologizing understandings of disability to justify
the need for expert surveillance and control in black communities.114 Pathologizing

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 All Americans 89

blackness was a twentieth-­century medical, social scientific, and eugenic project. In

the 1960s, scientists and experts such as sociologists, anthropologists, and psycho­
logists used the language of diagnosis to characterize black rage as a pathological civil
disorder. The role of these experts was to grant an air of scientificity to what was
ostensibly an ideological and historical question.115 The Kerner Report relied upon
representations of black rage as a disease that inflicted the bodies of cities and required
swift treatment and prevention.116 Concluding that racial barriers to economic access
were making the nation vulnerable, the commission wrote, “Our Nation is moving
toward two societies, one black, one white—­separate and unequal. . . . Discrimination
and segregation have long permeated much of American life; they now threaten the
future of every American.”117 These provocative claims seemed to raise the collective
stakes of desegregation through the language of threat and risk, but they also char­
acterized black rage as a pathological threat, a “racial disorder” to the nation’s body,
and particularly its white citizens.118 The response to pathologized black rage was
carceral confinement rather than spatial freedom or greater access. Psychiatrists,
Jonathan Metzl has argued, justified confining black activists in mental institutions
on the basis of their perceived pathological minds and bodies.119 Constructing resis-
tance to racial segregation came to rely, then, on representations of disability, illness,
and pathology as in need of incarceration. Even further, this resistance reinforced for
black people the segregationist arrangements of institutionalization that disability
activists had fought in the post–­World War II era.
With diagnoses of black pathology came prescriptions for cure. Concurrent with
the Kerner Report, the Department of Housing and Urban Development established
a “Model Cities” program as an antipoverty and antiriot measure devoted to creat-
ing comprehensive, federally controlled, and easily surveilled communities in urban
centers, which consequently became laboratories for carceral experimentation.120
Ultimately, Johnson ignored the Kerner Report’s recommendations, which included
“treating” riots with increased economic opportunities, ending housing discrimina-
tion, ordering greater police protections, and training police to avoid using excessive
force against civilian rioters, but the Model Cities program progressed. The institu-
tional and systemic violence of white supremacy, which communities of color felt in
the widespread denial of access to work, housing, and civic belonging, remained just
as potent in the coming decades.

Knowing-­Making All Americans

When strategies for barrier-­free design moved beyond research or accessible homes
to seek legal enforcement in the late 1960s, disability, age, and race became separate
categories of civil (and therefore administrative) rights, government welfare, and
citizenship under President Johnson’s Great Society reforms. The trope of the pro-
ductive spatial citizen continued circulating as barrier-­free design acquired bureau-
cratic and legal backing. Accessibility advocates, such as Edmond Leonard, framed

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 90 All Americans

barrier removal as a saving grace for physically disabled people whom “medicine and
rehabilitation [had] salvaged . . . from an otherwise barren past,” echoing Chatelain

these rehabilitative advances are meaningless when the disabled person is shut out
from the mainstream of public life by the frustration of public barriers. . . . When we
can use the tremendous manpower of the rehabilitated physically handicapped who
will be able to be gainfully employed in buildings which are freely accessible. The
economic potential is enormous, but more important we will have people who are
happy because they are at work in productive, useful occupations.121

In policy discourses, the productive spatial citizen thus acquired legibility as a politi-
cal agent and a citizen. In 1964, the same year that Congress passed the Civil Rights
Act and the Voting Rights Act, it began hearings on the enforcement of barrier-­free
design through an antidiscrimination regime.122 The crux of these hearings was that
disabled citizens required access to government services, such as rehabilitation thera-
pies and employment training (not to the whole of society or public space, as activ-
ists and disabled people themselves demanded). Senators argued, for instance, that
disabled people would be discouraged from practicing basic rites of citizenship in
government-­owned office buildings without barrier removal.123 As disability rights
became institutionalized in law, the concept of disability became somewhat distinct
from aging. In 1965 the Older Americans Act mandated community-­based services for
elders. Simultaneously, Congress amended the Vocational Rehabilitation Act of 1965
to establish a new National Commission on Architectural Barriers to Rehabilitation
of the Handicapped, charged to investigate the efficacy of state-­and local-­level volun-
tary accessibility regimes.124 In rehabilitation discourses, however, disability and aging
remained tethered concepts.
National policy attention to disability rights came to a head within the flurry of
Johnson’s Great Society reforms and civil rights laws, making the whiteness of its pre-
sumptions and rhetorics all the more severe. In 1967, the same year that Johnson com-
missioned the Kerner Report, the National Commission on Architectural Barriers to
Rehabilitation of the Handicapped (established by Congress) released Design for All
Americans, a report arguing that disabled and elderly people qualified as members of
the general public to whom spatial access should be afforded as a right of citizenship.

The modern man-­made environment is designed for the young and healthy. Yet
almost everyone, sooner or later, is handicapped by a chronic or temporary disability
or by the infirmities of old age. By designing for the ideal human body, we bar real
people from getting an education, earning a living, becoming a part of active commu-
nity life. More than 20 million Americans are built out of normal living by unnecessary
barriers: a stairway, a too-­narrow door, a too-­high telephone. At the right moment,

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 All Americans 91

their needs were overlooked. In time, the last vestiges of such thoughtlessness will
disappear from the American scene.125

By this point, barrier-­free design had been forwarded as a project of productive spatial
citizenship for nearly two decades but had not yet received federal attention under
law. Following the report, however, Congress passed the Architectural Barriers Act in
1968 and adopted ANSI A117.1 as the basis of barrier-­free design for all physically dis­
abled people, enforceable in spaces housing federally funded services and programs.
It is clear from the timing of these laws and the hearings supporting them that
spatial access was a legible social justice demand in the legislative consciousness of
the mid-­1960s. Recall that the 1968 Kerner Report characterized black racial upris-
ings in segregated cities as pathologized disabilities threatening “every American.”
In the same political and cultural milieu, barrier-­free design justified itself as “design
for all Americans.” Born from the expert testimonies of white rehabilitation experts
regarding the labor value of disabled bodies, accessible design appeared as a non-
threatening alternative to what rehabilitation experts characterized as the perpetua-
tion of injustice against disabled citizens by mainstream architects and builders. The
crux of Design for All Americans was a 1967 study by the American Institute of Archi-
tects (AIA), which found that architects, manufacturers, and builders were largely
ignorant about issues of disability and access.126 Federal legislation was necessary, the
report argued, because the voluntary nature of ANSI A117.1 did not provide incentives
or requirements to design with disability in mind. The commission recommended
new federal legislation requiring that any new public, federally funded buildings be
“designated to accommodate the elderly and the handicapped,” two categories that
had become legible through white rehabilitation conceptions of space and belonging
since the 1940s.127
A closer examination of Design for All Americans reveals that both its rhetoric and
substantive content explicitly framed disability access through presumptions of white
citizenship. The title referenced the postwar rhetoric of “all,” which called upon all
bodies to make themselves available for productive spatial citizenship, and “Ameri-
cans,” recalling earlier civil rights declarations, such as “I Am an American, Too!,”
which black activists deployed to challenge the whiteness of blood banking and other
somatic nationalist practices. By defining disabled and elderly people as citizens
belonging in the cohort of “all Americans,” the report appeared critical of the nor-
mate template and its false universality.128 For instance, the report framed the segrega-
tion of disabled and elderly people in institutions and nursing homes as “inhumane
and costly.”129 But rather than advocate for closing these institutions, it insisted that
“accessibility [must be] made an integral part of all design” for all citizens without
acknowledging racial and economic structural barriers that constrained the category
of “all Americans” (including the Kerner Report’s failure to name black people as

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 92 All Americans

Americans or citizens).130 The conflation of disability with older age was another un-
marked presumption, as was the association between disability and feminized gender
(as in the case of supposedly feminine housewives and supposedly emasculated,
injured male soldiers).131
While the language of “all” failed to ensure that law, policy, or the built world
included everyone, it nevertheless succeeded at constructing design for some as
design for all and conflating the particular with the universal. Presumptions of white-
ness also appear in apparent references to the Kerner Report and the Model Cities
program.

The pressures for creating a more livable environment have mounted. Not only the
handicapped but all Americans are demanding environmental improvement. Air and
water pollution, slum housing, unsafe streets and highways have become the themes
of countless conferences. The creation of model cities has become a national goal,
backed by Federal legislation and funds. Environmental improvement is indeed “an
idea whose time has come.”132

Here, white-­centered priorities of safe streets, building highways, and ending slum
housing (a euphemism for aggressive urban redevelopment) appear as national goals.
Barrier-­free access (in terms of “environmental improvement”) is presented as a logical
next step in their endorsement of aggressive urban restructuring. These statements
actively materialized “design for all Americans” as a commitment to the unnamed
privileges of whiteness, and hence to an actively post-­racial politics of design.
Neither the Architectural Barriers Act nor the Civil Rights Act addressed the dis-
proportionate health disparities and institutionalization of disabled people of color
in the 1960s, two issues related to segregated housing.133 Shortly after the assassina-
tion of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (one month after the Kerner Report was released),
Congress passed the Fair Housing Act of 1968, a bill enforcing the Civil Rights Act
of 1964 by prohibiting housing discrimination on the basis of race, religion, national-
ity, and sex. While Design for All Americans had recommended revising existing hous-
ing standards to include barrier-­free requirements, its aim was to establish disability
as a housing issue, not to address race in barrier-­free design.134 And it was not until
two decades later—­in 1988—­that Congress amended the law to include disability
and age-­related discrimination (through Mace’s advocacy).135
Ultimately, rights legislation treated disability as a medical and rehabilitative cate­
gory. While disabled peoples’ rights of citizenship were becoming more legible, these
rights were contingent upon evidence of productivity and amenability to rehabilita-
tion. Barrier-­free design discourses thus married rehabilitative access-­knowledge to
bureaucratic and ablenationalist regimes, continuing to justify access through ideolo-
gies of ability. Advocates testified in Congress that accessibility would produce more
“self-­sufficient, productive” workers, or as Peter Lassen, executive director of Paralyzed

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 All Americans 93

Veterans of America, put it in 1969, more “complete human being[s].”136 Barrier-­free

advocates framed equal access to government resources as a right of public citizenship:
“the handicapped,” noted Jack H. MacDonald, a Michigan Republican and member
of the House of Representatives, “represent a tremendous potential asset for the
Nation. It can only be fully utilized, however, by insuring that all facilities constructed
with public funds are readily accessible to them, whether for work, recreation, or
residence.”137 If productive spatial and public citizenship materialized through a field
of access-­knowledge dominated by rehabilitation experts, ideologies of ability, and
views of disability as tragedy or deficit in need of elimination, barrier-­free design
merely redesigned the language through which architectural and cultural norms of
embodiment were enforced. There can be no doubt that these conditions came at
a cost to those bodies that were deemed unproductive, incurable, or unamenable to
rehabilitation. But as a grassroots disabled peoples’ movement emerged in the follow-
ing decade to challenge compulsory productivity, rehabilitation, and inaccessible en-
vironments, the question remained: would access-­knowledge problematize the false
neutrality of “all” or would it remain committed to the narrows of white, middle-­class,
and gendered norms?

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 Chapter 4

Sloped Technoscience
Curb Cuts, Critical Frictions, and
Disability (Maker) Cultures
Responsibility flows out of cuts that bind.
—Ka r e n Ba r a d, “Intra-actions”

In the late 1960s, disability activists and their allies drove around Berkeley, California,
under dark of night, smashing sidewalks with sledgehammers and pouring new curb
cuts with bags of cement or asphalt—or so the rumor goes.1 While those allegedly
involved describe the circumstances surrounding activist curb cuts as far more mun-
dane, heroic stories about sledgehammer-wielding activists have taken shape as the
primal scenes of U.S. disability activism, securing the movement’s place within the
broader memory of civil rights–era direct action and portraying disability as a social
and cultural rather than medical category (Figure 4.1). These stories have, in turn,
shaped the national narrative about disability rights and U.S. citizenship. The Smith-
sonian’s National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C., for instance,
houses in its permanent collections a concrete fragment from an activist-made curb
cut in Denver, Colorado, from 1978 (Figure 4.2). At their core, artifacts and narratives
of activist curb-cutting express the central ideas of the 1960s and ’70s independent
living movement, through which disabled people rejected their status as objects of
knowledge for rehabilitation professionals and architects, asserting disability as a kind
of expert knowledge and critical making.2 When disabled people enact politics, these
narratives suggest, they also design and build new worlds.
“The social life of city sidewalks,” wrote Jane Jacobs in 1961, “is precisely that
they are public.”3 The curb cut is often understood as a post–World War II technol-
ogy of barrier-free design, a design feature enabling access to the public sidewalk.
Accordingly, the curb cut has also served as a storytelling device in liberal narratives
of inclusion and good design. In 1946 lawyer Jack H. Fisher wrote to the mayor of
Kalamazoo, Michigan, arguing that curb cuts and ramps “were instrumental in allow-
ing disabled veterans, disabled non-veterans, aged and infirm persons and mothers
with baby carriages more freedom of movement.”4 Productive disabled citizenship

95

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 Figure 4.1.  Flat sidewalks and curb cut at the corner of Dwight and Dana, an alleged site of
DIY curb cuts, in the present day. Photograph by author.

Figure 4.2. 
A fragment of a
concrete sidewalk,
which disability
activists in Denver
smashed as part
of a protest in
1978. Courtesy
of National
Museum of
American History,
Smithsonian
Institution, Division
of Medicine and
Science.

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 Sloped Technoscience 97

and the liberal narrative surrounding it were central to these particular user categories
and the stories they told. Fisher continued:

These cement ramps in many instances mean the difference between disabled vet­
erans and disabled non-­veterans having employment, as with the ramps a person
confined to a wheel chair, on crutches or wearing an artificial limb is able to get to a
place of employment unaided. The ramps thus enable many so called unemployable
persons to become employable persons, and not only benefits the disabled person
alone, but benefits the community at large as well.5

To suggest that curb cuts reflect the idea that accessibility benefits everyone requires
accepting that the universe of users encompasses particular, legible forms. While
curb cuts would not appear in most U.S. cities until the 1970s, Fisher’s assertion that
these features would increase employment for disabled veterans and have added
value for others resonates with the claims of rehabilitation experts that barrier-­free
design benefits “all.” Reinforcing the nondisabled, normate status of the “community,”
Fisher’s explanation presents as fact that “everyone” benefits from the curb cut, a fact
that dematerializes the racialized, gendered, and classed dimensions of difference—­
even within the category of disability. And even within the category of disability, this
story obscures the diverse physical, sensory, and mental access needs of different
disabled users. Much like disability activists’ political claims that “every body needs
equal access” (Figure 4.3), claims that “everyone” benefits from curb cuts are histori-
cally materialized conditions of legibility and illegibility.
Materiality is messy, but the optics of concrete can be misleading. On the surface
of Berkeley’s streets, curb cuts appeared to materialize en masse after 1973, follow-
ing high-­profile acts of Congress that provided a political mandate and government
funding.6 A year earlier, however, in 1972, the city of Berkeley adopted an official man-
date to install curb cuts at every corner—­a major victory that symbolized disabled
peoples’ legibility as users.7 Once integrated into the urban fabric, the curb cut be-
came a material device for securing the place of disability in public space, as well as a
metaphor for the smooth integration of misfit users into social, economic, and mate-
rial life. Yet this victory erased any physical evidence of guerrilla curb-­cutting and
other crip interventions into the social life of Berkeley’s sidewalks. By repaving Berke-
ley’s sidewalks, the official curb cuts rewrote the history and theory of curb cutting.
Reproduced for nearly a century, the liberal curb cut narrative has become a quint-
essential explanatory device for the claim that accessibility benefits “everyone.” As
disability rights leader Ed Roberts framed it in the early 1990s,

We secured the first curb cut in the country; it was at the corner of Bancroft and Tele-
graph Avenue. When we first talked to legislators about the issue, they told us, “Curb
cuts, why do you need curb cuts? We never see people with disabilities out on the

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 98 Sloped Technoscience

Figure 4.3.  Disability activists used the term “everybody” strategically. Here, a protester holds
a sign that says “Every Body Needs Equal Access.” Raymond Lifchez and Barbara Winslow,
Design for Independent Living: The Environment and Physically Disabled People (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1979), 10. Courtesy of Raymond Lifchez.

streets. Who is going to use them?” They didn’t understand that their reasoning was
circular. When curb cuts were put in, they discovered that access for disabled people
benefit[s] many others as well. For instance, people pushing strollers use curb cuts, as
do people on bikes and elderly people who can’t lift their legs so high. So many people
benefit from this accommodation. This is what the concept of universal design is all
about. Now Berkeley is a very accessible city. We [people with disabilities] are visible
in the community because we can get around everywhere fairly easily. . . . I look around,
and I notice that a lot of us are getting gray. As we get older, we realize that disability
is just a part of life. Anyone can join our group at any point in life. In this way, the dis-
ability rights movement doesn’t discriminate. So those of us who are temporarily able-­
bodied and working for access and accommodation now get older, and the changes
they make will benefit them as well.8

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 Sloped Technoscience 99

Much like the barrier-­free design regime that framed accessibility through its benefits
for “all,” Roberts’s narrative of curb cuts as benefiting “everyone” or “many people”
reproduces an often-­told story about accessible design and disability. In this story,
the curb cut’s treatment as a metaphor, historical object, and material frame repre-
sents the values of unmarked assimilation into public space and promotes a notion
of disability identity and community as indiscriminate, uniform, and united in its
goals and needs.9 Far from neutralizing the curb cut’s symbolic and material work,
however, these valences suggest that the foundational objects and origin stories of
the independent living movement, of barrier-­free design, and of Universal Design
contain manifold ways of understanding disability, varied positions on assimilation
and resistance, and wide-­ranging approaches to access-­knowledge. These complexi-
ties require unpacking.
Smooth belonging, the crux of the liberal curb cut theory, contrasts with rumors
of guerrilla curb-­cutting by dark of night to animate one of the central tensions within
twentieth-­century access-­knowledge: the friction between liberal demands for com-
pliance, productivity, and assimilation and radical, anti-­assimilationist, and crip meth-
ods of knowing-­making the world. This chapter historicizes these frictions by tracing
the rise of what I term “crip technoscience.”10 Emerging from within disability cul-
tures and communities, these experimental practices of knowing-­making challenged
hierarchies and power relations within the field of access-­knowledge by shifting ex-
pertise to those with lived experiences of disability and away from the outside experts
often designing in their name. Unlike most accounts of assistive and adaptive tech-
nologies, which focus on conforming the user to its material environment, I argue
that curb cuts are politically, materially, and epistemologically adaptive technologies
around which two distinct approaches to disability inclusion—­liberal, assimilationist
positions and crip, anti-­assimilationist positions—­have cohered.11 Tilting and recon-
sidering the historical archive of the curb cut and other disability-­made technologies,
crip technoscience reveals a field of critical labor, friction, leverage, noncompliance,
and disorientation that materialized within access-­knowledge as a response to domi-
nant medical, scientific, and rehabilitative ways of knowing the user.

THE POLITICS OF SURFACE TEXTURE

Curb cuts (and their close cousins, wheelchair ramps) often signify the notion that
disability is a social and environmental construction, produced in the relationship
between bodies and built environments, and thus not something innate to the body.
Frequently referenced as the “social model” of disability, this idea was central to the
regime of knowing-­making that I am calling access-­knowledge. In the mid-­1960s,
rehabilitation professionals and medical sociologists developed a notion of “func-
tional limitation” to describe the environmental production of misfit, or the discrep-
ancy between what a body can do and what it ought to be able to do (by normate

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 100 Sloped Technoscience

rehabilitation standards).12 Simultaneously, a growing movement of physically dis-

abled, D/deaf, and blind people challenged the authority of rehabilitation experts
and their claims to know disability, offering instead a politicized and cultural under-
standing of disabled people as resourceful, creative, nonnormative, and interdepen-
dent.13 Disability activists produced a set of ideas that later influenced an academic
theory of the “social model,” which is often taken to argue that disability is a system
of disadvantages that societies produce, and not solely embodied pathology.14 But as
disability activists articulated it, the notion of environmentally produced disability
was not the social model’s primary contribution. Instead, activists were concerned
with creating a new standard of knowledge, offered as an alternative to medicine and
rehabilitation. In 1972 the UK-­based Union of the Physically Impaired Against Segre-
gation (UPIAS) proclaimed:

We as a Union are not interested in descriptions of how awful it is to be disabled. What

we are interested in, are ways of changing our conditions of life, and thus overcom-
ing the disabilities which are imposed on top our physical impairments by the way
this society is organised to exclude us. In our view, it is only the actual impairment
which we must accept; the additional and totally unnecessary problems caused by the
way we are treated are essentially to be overcome and not accepted. We look forward
to the day when the army of “experts” on our social and psychological problems can
find more productive work.15

Treating disability as deficit and disqualification, in other words, failed to understand

the broader social and cultural contexts of disability, which included lived experi-
ences of oppression and disability communities forged from acceptance of disabled
embodiments. This epistemological and political argument appropriated the reha-
bilitation language of productive citizenship, using it to characterize rehabilitation
experts as engaged in the unproductive labor of normalization.
As a metaphor for disability’s social construction, the liberal curb cut metaphor
often reproduces the rehabilitation notion of body-­environment misfit in concert
with ideas of equal rights and universal disability. Yet this metaphor says little of the
politics of knowing-­making disability.16 For instance, theorists invoke the frictioned
dynamic between wheels and stairs to argue, as feminist philosopher Iris Marion
Young has, that “moving on wheels is a disadvantage only in a world full of stairs.”17
Metaphors of “ramping” or curb cutting to a better world suggest overcoming bar­riers,
reorienting values, and achieving broad accessibility through flexible design.18 Such
metaphors circulate beyond architecture in the “electronic curb cut,” a metaphor for
built-­in accessibility, and even “curb cut feminism,” which explains that everyone ben-
efits from feminism, not only women.19 Prevalent uses of the curb cut as a metaphor
for broad inclusion refer to the historical “fact” of its usability to multiple types of

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 Sloped Technoscience 101

users, including wheelchair users, cyclists, or people pushing strollers and shopping
carts, to emphasize the necessity of unmarked, smooth disability integration into U.S.
public space.

Unusual things happen when products are designed to be accessible by people with
disabilities. It wasn’t long after sidewalks were redesigned to accommodate wheelchair
users that the benefits of curb cuts began to be realized by everyone. People pushing
strollers, riding on skateboards, using roller-­blades, riding bicycles and pushing shop-
ping carts soon began to enjoy the benefits of curb cuts. These facts are good examples
of why sidewalks with curb cuts are simply better sidewalks.20

These supposed facts appear as commonsense yet miraculous findings discovered

in the process of enacting more inclusive built environments. They attest to the
nature of barriers as constructed rather than pregiven. They convey the notion that
more thoughtful design can remake the world. Yet, by treating disability as a univer-
sal, environmentally produced experience of misfit, curb cut metaphors align more
closely with rehabilitation models of disability and barrier-­free design than with the
social model’s articulation of disabled peoples’ resourceful, interdependent knowing-­
making as a form of politics.
Like Berkeley’s city-­sponsored curb cuts, liberal curb cut metaphors pave over the
history of crip resistance to the normate template, rehabilitation, and expert logics
of environmental knowing-­making that guerrilla curb cutting embodied. There is
another way to understand the curb cut, however. Illustrating a crip theory of the
curb cut, which professes the antinormative work of noncompliant users empowered
as makers, Robert McRuer writes,

The chunk of concrete dislodged by crip theorists in the street—­simultaneously solid

and disintegrated, fixed and displaced . . . marks the will to remake the material world.
The curb cut, in turn, marks a necessary openness to the accessible public cultures
we might yet inhabit. Crip theory questions—­or takes a sledgehammer to—­that
which has been concretized; it might, consequently, be comprehended as a curb cut
into disability studies, and into critical theory more generally.21

Curb cutting disrupts, in other words, the concretized status quo through acts of re-
materialization. Understood as simultaneously productive and disruptive, cutting and
rebuilding, the crip curb cutting narrative suggests that misfitting can be a resource
for redesigning not only the place of disability in the built world but also our ways of
knowing disability. Curb cutting, in other words, is crip technoscience.
Seamless, smooth, a cross-­cutting plane from point A to point B, paving over phys-
ical and attitudinal barriers—­these are some of the ways that liberal curb cut theories

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 102 Sloped Technoscience

understand the materiality of this feature. Liberal curb cuts embody simple, effortless
common sense and flexibility. Crip curb cuts, by contrast, are instruments of friction,
disruption, and countermaterial rhetoric. They propose access as negotiation, rather
than as a resolved, measurable end. Taking curb cuts to signify friction, as opposed
to smoothness, has implications for how we understand the strategies and tactics of
disability activism. Curb cuts can signify critical labor rather than productive work,
explains Eric Dibner, a nondisabled ally of the independent living movement and
early ramp designer.

A ramp is a bevel between two elevations. . . . In order to reach something you need
location—­you might have to move it closer—­and ease of operation—­it has to turn
easily. So you extend it to make it a lever, which gives you greater force and also brings
it down closer to you. To me, the ramp is really symbolic, in a way, of how I see pro-
ceeding through the system. You’re trying to get from point A to point B and you need
to figure out how to lever your way—­a ramp is a lever—­and you need to figure out
how to move objects that are blocking your path. . . . People aren’t really trying to make
a different world; they’re just trying to build ramps.22

Dibner’s theory of the ramp as a leverage-­producing device references Galileo’s notion

of ramps as “simple machines” that move objects from one plane to another and thus
create a more advantageous mechanics.23 The operative work of ramps as levers is not
an ease of use but the generation of force. Ramps generate friction and leverage toward
particular outcomes or goals. In other words, they materialize politics.
For Galileo, simple machines fell into one of two categories. Frictionless, “ideal”
machines required almost no force to set them into motion (relative to what they
produced). “Real” machines,” however, required some energy to work, producing
frictions that reduced their leverage.24 Like the ideal machine, liberal curb cuts are
purportedly neutral, smoothing out tensions between users and ramping over the
frictioned work of critical knowing-­making. Elision, rather than friction, is their sur-
face texture. But apprehending the significance of curb cuts for access-­knowledge
requires challenging these associations, not because they are inaccurate but because
they risk depoliticizing and oversimplifying the material, epistemic, and technologi-
cal force of designing ramps and curb cuts for disability access.
Crip curb cutting (or ramping) is not assimilation, Dibner seems to suggest, nor
does curb cutting remake the world by displacing dominant norms. As a frictioned,
leverage-­generating device, the curb cut represents noncompliant labor within an
existing system, discourse, or built arrangement. As in political struggles for systemic
change, critical, interrogative, and “adversarial” design practices leverage material
disruption and contention as productive forces.25 In Slope:Intercept, designer Sara
Hendren captures the “interrogative” work of curb cutting as public noncompliance.26
A series of portable, inexpensively produced plywood ramps can be carried, stacked,

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 Sloped Technoscience 103

and arranged in urban environments to produce surfaces on which wheelchair users

and skateboarders (both urban misfits) can roll, maneuver, and occupy space. The
temporary curb cuts require neither productive labor nor assimilation into existing
material arrangements, but their presence generates friction and their use multiplies
force. Slope:Intercept suggests that the political work of curb cuts rests upon the pro-
duction of friction and disorientation rather than smooth, neutral belonging.27
“Functional estrangement” is a term that critical design theorist Anthony Dunne
uses to describe the interrogative work of certain material forms, which can unsettle
the user’s experience of the designed world.28 In some respects, critical design resem-
bles so-­called empathic simulation exercises, prevalent in rehabilitation education,
which enroll nondisabled users in observing impaired experience through temporary
use of a wheelchair or blindfold. Often conducted in the name of disability awareness,
these exercises presume a user that is normate and open to temporary experiences
of estrangement.29 And like the rehabilitation promises that accessibility reduces
functional limitation and relieves frictions between bodies and environments, Dunne
contrasts functional estrangement with user-­centered design, which appears as purely
functional and rarely social, interrogative, or agonistic.30 Hence, the critical design
theory of functional estrangement takes for granted that disability is a depoliticized
experience and that accessibility is a neutral solution to functional limitation.
But power and privilege shape critical design and its means of enactment. My
concept of “crip technoscience” takes a different approach, investigating the critical
design work of how misfit disabled users, for whom estrangement is already a perva-
sive experience, draw on the sensibilities of friction and disorientation to enact design
politics. Reading the curb cut as crip technoscience centralizes disabled people as
critical knowers and makers, extending the work of feminist technoscience scholars,
who frame technoscience as an interface between critical ways of knowing and itera-
tive practices of world-­making.31 Crip technoscience understands ramps and curb
cuts as frictioned “real machines,” to use Galileo’s term, often operating in tension
with their users, rather than as frictionless, “ideal machines,” integrating seamlessly.
Crip curb cutting is a friction-­producing concept through which accessibility mate-
rializes “slantedly,” to borrow from Sara Ahmed, through disorienting, tense negotia-
tions of the categories of “knower” and “maker.”32 While disabled people are often
imagined as cyborgs with “seamless” relationships to technology, Alison Kafer explains,
these relations are often tense, frictioned, and subject to other forms of economic
and embodied privilege.33 Following Kafer, this chapter centers disabled peoples’
“ambivalent relationship to technology,” informed by histories of failure and denials
of access, as well as iterative, political design practices.34 Rather than centering assis-
tive technologies that aim to cure or rehabilitate bodies, then, I focus on how dis­
ability design and politics co-­materialize. If we take a sledgehammer to the seemingly
concretized sidewalks of disability rights history, what layered sedimentations of re-
sistance do we find below?

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 104 Sloped Technoscience

DISABILITY MAKER CULTURES

Ronald Mace half-­smiles at the camera (Figure 4.4). He sits in a high-­backed hospital
wheelchair, one arm in a sling, the other using a tool to tinker with something on the
table surface before him. In the background, glimpses of the Central Carolina Con-
valescent Hospital, where nine-­year-­old Mace was committed in 1950, are fuzzy but
visible. The wheelchair configures him as disabled, a body acted upon in this reha-
bilitation hospital, but the tool and Mace’s gaze suggest that he, too, makes and knows.
Diffuse networks of disabled youth, adults, and their families in the postpolio
maker community of the 1940s and ’50s practiced “self-­help” citizenship, employing
do-­it-­yourself tinkering and engineering to access built environments. Concentrated
in white, middle-­class communities, for whom the rehabilitation regime sought
access to private homes and public universities, the disability maker culture both

Figure 4.4.  Ronald

Mace tinkering with
a tool at the
Central Carolina
Convalescent
Hospital (1950).
Courtesy of Joy
Weeber.

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 Sloped Technoscience 105

embraced and resisted the demands of productive spatial citizenship. In “Electric

Moms and Quad Drivers,” design historian Bess Williamson captures the postpolio
maker community of this era, which designed adaptive technologies as consumer
goods and also produced small-­scale architectural features such as ramps.35 Through
newsletters such as the Ohio-­based Toomey Gazette (later the Rehabilitation Gazette),
families shared information gleaned from other sources, including prominent re-
habilitation proponents and popular magazines, built their own wheelchairs from
spare parts, designed everyday household tools with found materials, and offered
techniques for hacking automobiles, beds, and wheelchair ramps (Figure 4.5). One
of many postwar disability cultures, the postpolio maker community reflected the
white, middle-­class norms of the era.36 As Williamson points out, the only people
of color apparent in the Toomey Gazette were representatives of institutionalized pop-
ulations.37 Despite opposing institutionalization, Williamson argues, postpolio mak-
ers were engaging in “acts of integration, not resistance into the normative roles for
men and women of their class and race.”38 Tinkering with homemade tools, auto­
mobiles, and the architectures of single-­family homes contributed to smoothing out
the frictions between physically disabled bodies and compulsory white, middle-­class,
heteronormative able-­bodiedness.

Figure 4.5.  Disabled makers shared tips for designing features such as homemade
wheelchair ramps. Toomey Gazette (Spring 1961): 11. Courtesy of Post-­Polio Health
International.

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 106 Sloped Technoscience

Disabled Knowing-­Making in Private

Although disabled makers were not engaging in public acts of disobedience, and
while their domain was often the privileged white, middle-­class home, subtle acts
of critical remaking were taking place. The interdependent, networked nature of the
postpolio maker culture, wherein disabled people and their families connected to oth-
ers with similar experiences, made disability a resource for grassroots social networks.
Through these networks, postpolio makers shared strategies for creating mundane
tools of daily life, and not just technologies that would enhance their productivity.
Alice Loomer, a white disabled woman and wheelchair user who had polio as a child,
described these activities as “hanging onto the coattails of science” in a time when
disabled people were often excluded from schools and had “been given little knowl-
edge of science and technology” but instead “learn[ed] to improvise, invent, super-
vise, or do more of our own construction.”39 Mace, for instance, created a device for
squeezing his wheelchair into a narrower profile so that he could access the restroom
of his family home. Loomer developed “all kinds of things: kitchens, hand controls,
van lifts, even urinals” over her lifetime by using everyday materials, such as “a paper
coffee cup, a small garbage bag, a bunch of Kleenex, and a rubber band.”40 While the
public face of access-­knowledge—­rehabilitation experts, legislators, and architects—­
defined an experimental field of knowledge in public, many disabled makers operated
through these nonapparent, distributed networks of knowing-­making, remaining un-
recognized as engineers or researchers.
Because it operated in the illegibly political sphere of the private home, the post-
polio maker culture of the 1940s and ’50s did not appear explicitly resistant to rehabili­
tation norms. But for many postpolio makers, tinkering with and adapting technologies
was a way of enacting access, either through disabled expertise or through interde-
pendence with nondisabled allies such as family members. Loomer’s first wheelchair,
for instance, was an assemblage built from “a kitchen chair and [her brother’s] old
bicycle.”41 Another, a rigged power chair, combined a manual wheelchair frame with
electrical controls and motorized wheels; “its craftsmanship is deplorable,” she said
of the chair, “but it’s the only wheelchair that could have kept me away from nursing
homes and attendants. . . . I made it. So I know how to fix it. . . . I may have failed almost
as often as I succeeded, but I have equipment that fits me.”42 This ethos of reinven-
tion was not the individualistic endeavor of single engineering geniuses in their
workshops but a product of the interdependent networks of disabled people, fami-
lies, and assistants who co-­materialized a disability maker culture in the mid-­twentieth
century, often without formal training in engineering or architecture.
While Loomer was not subverting the white, middle-­class norms of the mid-­
twentieth century, she also did not embody the white disabled housewife that reha-
bilitation engineers and scientific managers sought to transform into a productive
worker. Nor was she (or Mace) a disabled cyborg, whose relationship to technology
operated as a well-­integrated, smooth circuit.43 Loomer’s experiences tinkering with

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 Sloped Technoscience 107

wheelchairs disclose a technological ambivalence, which holds in tension the need

for access or function with the frictions, limitations, and failures inherent to techno-
scientific design processes. Unlike the Cold War–­era hopefulness toward technology
as a solution to human problems, technologies such as prosthetic limbs, wheelchairs,
or canes could nevertheless be awkward or painful to use, ineffective in the absence
of ramps and curb cuts, or simply prone to error. Ambivalence toward these technolo­
gies, then, is itself a disabled way of knowing-­making, born from the iterations of lived
experience, technological failure, and ambivalence toward the fantasy of normaliza-
tion. In this sense, postpolio makers were imagining access as a beginning, what Jay
Dolmage calls a “place to start,” rather than a measurable or imaginable outcome.44

Disabled Knowing-­Making in Public

Public accessibility, through barrier-­free design, also contributed to the rise of dis-
ability maker cultures. In public, ambivalence toward technology presented opportu-
nities for political friction and contestation. Take, for example, the disability maker
culture that materialized around access to public universities. In 1949 the governor
of Illinois threatened to shut down an educational program for disabled students at
the University of Illinois at Galesburg, intending to repurpose the building as an
institution for the elderly, where the state would transfer people housed in other,
overcrowded “mental wards.”45 The program’s thirteen students and their director,
Timothy Nugent, organized a series of demonstrations to protest the move (see Fig-
ure 3.1). The first protest took place at the inaccessible Illinois state capitol building.
With the support of a local police motorcade, paraplegics drove adapted automobiles
(like those created by postpolio makers) from Galesburg to Springfield, where they
circled the drive in front of the building and attempted to visit the governor at his
mansion before speaking to state officials.46 These officials offered students the options
of completing “two years of college work by correspondence” or remaining at Gales-
burg in an “‘isolated ward’ for paraplegic students in conjunction with the new med-
ical center for the aged and infirm.”47 Opposing the options of isolated coursework
or reentering a public university-­turned-­institution, the students organized a second
demonstration, this time to put pressure on the University of Illinois’s administration.
Tactics for the second protest drew upon the resourcefulness of disability maker cul-
ture. Some students wheeled around campus to gain public visibility, while others
demonstrated access-­in-­action by placing “two-­by-­ten planks from a paint scaffold-
ing . . . over some steps to show that these guys in wheelchairs could get into that
building.”48 Constructed in situ with repurposed supplies from the campus landscape,
these informal ramps were material-­discursive arguments, which made the case for
disabled students’ belonging in mainstream built environments.
At stake in these demonstrations of disabled knowing-­making was the admission
of students with disabilities, the majority white and male, to a major public university.
In one sense, the students resourcefully demanded access to a rehabilitation program

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 108 Sloped Technoscience

that would extend their normalization into productive citizenship. In another sense,
however, the students made their nonuniform belonging legible and demonstrated
its value by producing friction. The rough, noticeable presence of disabled bodies,
technologies, and design forms in the campus environment was an argument for
belonging but not necessarily sameness. While the student protests were not imme-
diately successful, the state government eventually decided to allow a program for
physically disabled students to continue at the Urbana-Champaign campus “as an
experiment.”49 It was within the context of this disability maker culture (and its rela-
tively privileged location) that the Rehabilitation Education Center and the city of
Champaign became experimental sites for access-­knowledge.50
Physically disabled students, particularly wheelchair users, who attended the Uni-
versity of Illinois in the 1950s and participated in the Rehabilitation Education Center
would have been enrolled as designers in experiments with accessibility technologies.
Some would have lived in adapted dormitories and others in buildings that were
“designed and constructed so that they are equally usable by the able-­bodied and
the physically disabled.”51 Some would have used an informal ride system, organized
through word of mouth, to get to class on time, and others would have helped to design
new accessible buses, outfitted with hydraulic lifts resembling machines for loading
trucks with heavy materials, which would serve as an alternative transit system in
Champaign.52 If they were athletes, they would have ridden these buses to nearby
wheelchair basketball or cheerleading competitions.53 Some would have been involved
in lobbying Emerson Dexter, a vocational rehabilitation counselor and the city’s mayor,
to install curb cuts in Champaign, and because few precedents for such features
existed, some disabled students would have helped to design them (Figure 4.6).54 For
the predominantly white, physically disabled students in the program, the new curb
cuts would have enabled participation in the surrounding community.
In all these spaces, technologies, and design features, accessibility was continu-
ally being remade. There were not, at this point, any standards for accessible universi-
ties, public buildings, or city streets. Nor was accessibility understood as an objective
set of circumstances that would benefit all users. The material conditions of access
had to be studied, tested, and enacted. But in this space of vocational rehabilitation
and productive citizenship, the frictions of access-­experimentation channeled into
efforts to standardize accessible knowing-­making. In 1959 the Rehabilitation Educa-
tion Center received federal and private funding for the American National Standards
Project A117, which would create standards for barrier-­free design based on the cen-
ter’s research and experiments.
Like design, research is an iterative material practice, and like public protest, it
involves negotiation, material symbols, and generative frictions. Accessibility research
at the Rehabilitation Education Center would not have resembled, on its surface, the
protests that, nearly a decade earlier, had enabled the program to continue. In one
major study, researchers used well-­established methods of rehabilitation and human

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 Sloped Technoscience 109

Figure 4.6.  The city of Champaign, Illinois, adopted wide curb cuts (ca. 1956–­66). Courtesy
of the University of Illinois Archives, image 4022.tif.

factors research, such as anthropometry, to measure wheelchair users’ space require-

ments. But similar to the student demonstrators, who had repurposed scaffolding
planks to build ad hoc ramps for a campus protest, researchers repurposed methods,
such as anthropometry, and in the process reinvented them. Even their experimen-
tal tools were appropriated and remade. A primary apparatus of measurement was a
“thirty-­four foot long” adjustable ramp with a flexible design: it was “adjustable to
length and pitch” and served as an experimental space, as well as a tool for spatial
measurement (Figure 4.7).55 Bearing little resemblance to anthropometric calipers
and rulers, which quantified the body as a discrete unit with standard landmarks, the
adjustable ramp measured the body, technology, and space together in the generation
of force and leverage. According to Nugent, “hundreds of paraplegics and quadriple-
gics, men and women, young and old”—­in other words, people with varying degrees
of strength and stamina—­rolled up and down the ramp, their measurements serving
as a new evidence base for barrier-­free design.56

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 110 Sloped Technoscience

Figure 4.7.  An experimental ramp for accessibility research at the University of Illinois (ca.
1950s). Courtesy of the University of Illinois Archives, image 5301.tif.

Although concerned with measures such as energy and fatigue, the researchers
approached the ramp as a “real machine,” in Galileo’s terms, a lever operating flexibly
in recognition of far-­ranging abilities. While the ramp was experimental, flexible,
and adjustable, however, the research project required a final set of standards, which
would dictate ideal practices for ramp construction. But the researchers acknowl-
edged that their sample, the majority of whom were young, physically rehabilitated
wheelchair users, would likely skew the results, and their suggestion for the final ANSI
A117.1 standard recommended a modified ramp with a “shallower” slope of 1:12 to
account for users with less upper body strength and stamina.57 Highlighting the en-
tanglements of legibility and flexibility in the work of experimental access-­knowledge,
the process of designing ramps and curb cuts for accessibility standards repeated
in the Rehabilitation Education Center’s efforts to include students with a broader
spectrum of sensory, mobility, and cognitive disabilities and chronic illnesses in com-
ing decades.58 Where these efforts to develop access-­knowledge remained within the
rehabilitation regime, however, disability activists in other locales would soon enter
into disoriented relations with this regime.

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 Sloped Technoscience 111

CRIP TECHNOSCIENCE

“John uses an electric powered wheelchair, writing brace, raised tables, Handihook,
specially devised door knobs for radio, television, recorder, etc. Ed uses an iron lung,
mouthstick. Both use a microswitch speaker phone with a direct line to the opera-
tor; Stenorette with special controls, and keys to the campus elevators.”59 The two
University of California, Berkeley, students were Ed Roberts and John Hessler, and
the account of their commercially available and self-­made technologies appeared in
a Toomey Gazette article on quadriplegic students across the United States, who were
accessing public life beyond institutions by enrolling at universities. Although Roberts
and Hessler eventually became leading disability activists in Berkeley, the article pro-
vides a snapshot of these two disabled men as makers, sharing their experiences and
expertise with a community of people with similar disabilities. The optimistic account
of Roberts’s and Hessler’s technologies echoed, in some respects, the rehabilitation
narrative: with the right technologies, quadriplegic students could attend universities
and receive the privileges of education. But the two were also part of emerging oppo-
sition to this narrative, through a radical, anti-­assimilationist culture sometimes called
“crip.”60 As one activist put it, the independent living movement sought to “reverse
the history of rehab within rehab itself.”61 Even before the movement adopted its best-­
known strategies of direct action and public protest, independent living activists made
creative use of friction and subtlety as they sought to shift the rehabilitation regime,
and the broader field of access-­knowledge, from within.

Cripping Rehabilitation
Berkeley’s crip culture shared features of earlier disability maker cultures. According
to historical records, the majority of its participants were white and many were mid-
dle class.62 Some had postpolio disabilities while others had experienced disability
since birth or as a result of injuries in late adolescence. This community was also sited
in the privileged geography of a university, within which a marginalized residential
community of quadriplegic students housed in the campus’s Cowell infirmary became
a space from which activism would emerge. Recalling the early days of the University
of Illinois program at Galesburg, disabled students at Berkeley lived in the infirmary’s
third floor, which was established in 1962 as a “residence program for severely physi-
cally disabled students” with funding from the Department of Vocational Rehabilita-
tion.63 Demographically, the Cowell students embodied the imagined demographics
of rehabilitation’s focus: most were male and white, a few were (white) women, and
there was one disabled man of color as part of the group of nine.64
Isolated from Berkeley dormitories and student life, Cowell became a seedbed for
crip community and activism through the independent living movement. Although
the term “independent living” had originated within vocational rehabilitation to de-
scribe rehabilitation for those deemed unemployable, the movement appropriated
this term to define a political position against compulsory productivity.65 Espousing

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 112 Sloped Technoscience

principles of self-­determination, rather than rehabilitation-­oriented self-­help, the

movement argued that everyone (regardless of their productivity) should have equal
access to housing and care in the community rather than in nursing homes or insti­
tutions. Despite its title, the movement invested in an ethics of interdependence;
personal assistants included nondisabled people hired to help with daily activities, as
well as other disabled people who provided one another formal or informal services.66
This subtle shift from independence to interdependence challenged dominant re-
habilitation norms, which dictated that nonproductive bodies were dependent and
dysfunctional misfits in need of correction.
Prior to the movement, options for severely disabled people were bleak: many were
institutionalized, placed in nursing homes, forced to rehabilitate, or even sterilized
or killed through eugenics programs.67 Disability charity organizations confirmed a
view of disability as a problem in need of cure. Rather than promoting access or
acceptance, organizations such as the March of Dimes portrayed the lives of children
with polio as pitiful and used ableist imagery in fundraising marathons promoting
cure.68 Although disability communities had formed around maker practices and at
public universities, a cultural notion of disability was not yet legible within the dom-
inant rehabilitation frame.
Consequently, many of the disabled students entering universities in the 1960s
were leaving situations of institutionalization, medical paternalism, or isolation. In-
dependent living intercepted these conditions of confinement, isolation, and nor­
malization by producing a new epistemic culture surrounding disability, centered on
experiments in access-­knowledge.69 Similar to the feminist women’s health movement
driven by texts such as Our Bodies, Ourselves, disabled people organized knowledge
and expertise around their independence from medical authority and interdepen-
dence with one another.70 Knowledge about and by disabled people became the stuff
of political friction. Resisting their patient status, the Cowell students formed an activ-
ist group called the Rolling Quads. One of their first actions was to “revolt” against
Cowell’s rehabilitation counselor, whose strict insistence on attending classes did not
often account for their access needs.71 When the counselor was removed, the stu-
dents became further politicized, advocating for changes to the campus environment.
Numerous historical accounts of the independent living movement, including Ed
Roberts’s earlier in this chapter, attribute the rise of disability culture to Berkeley’s
urban infrastructure, with its curb cuts, ramps, and independent living services. Few
accounts consider the role of crip technoscience in the making of Berkeley’s accessi-
ble infrastructures or its disability culture. Cowell was a site of crip epistemic culture-­
in-­the-­making, where disabled students shared space, formed mutual aid networks,
transferred knowledge, and experimented with adaptive technologies of everyday
life. Much of this ingenuity manifested in small, ephemeral designs, such as “pips,” or
rubber grips fitted with levers for turning doorknobs, and “Balkan frames” engineered
by students to lift themselves out of bed without the help of attendants.72 Through

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 Sloped Technoscience 113

these experiments, the Cowell students amassed user-­generated access-­knowledge

and advocated for the university to build ramps in new buildings and retrofit older
entrances to their specifications.73
Although the disability rights motto “Nothing About Us Without Us” would not
circulate until the 1990s,74 the independent living movement adopted an epistemol-
ogy of self-­determination that presaged this motto. In Illinois, ramp-­invention and
barrier-­free design research had focused on creating standardized forms of access. At
Berkeley, crip technoscience centered disabled students’ authority as experts about
their bodies and surrounding environments. But the movement did not understand
medical, technoscientific, and rehabilitative knowledge as inherently normalizing (as
later crip theories and some articulations of the social model of disability would do).
Nor did it view rehabilitation knowledge and user experiences as inherently conflict-
ing. Independent living activists claimed a kind of “strong objectivity,” which feminist
epistemologists describe as the idea that one’s own lived experiences, though situ-
ated, are also more objective than the dominant frame.75 Put simply, medical and
rehabilitation experts did not have a monopoly on objectivity. As John Hessler and
Michael Fuss put it in a 1969 proposal for independent living beyond Cowell,

One of the greatest sources of information on self-­care will be the disabled themselves.
Having been disabled for a long time, they have gained a great amount of invalu-
able knowledge on self-­care that they can pass on to those recently disabled, who
in turn can teach valuable information on newer techniques learned at rehabilitation
centers.76

Thus, the independent living movement’s epistemological claims were grounded in

the politics of knowing-­making: the problem with rehabilitation, they implied, was
the exclusion of disability expertise and agency from the arenas of medical care and
decision-­making and the consequent exclusion of (what they deemed) more objec-
tive self-­knowledge of disability grounded in life experiences. As Fuss and Hessler
make clear, the Cowell residents did not reject liberal autonomous values, such as
“self-­help.”77 Instead, they insisted on disabled peoples’ unique technoscientific litera-
cies, with relevance for the politics of everyday life. In their proposal to expand the
Cowell program, Fuss and Hessler recalled,

One young man, after many years of having to have his leg urinal drained, talked to
students at Cowell who were either able to drain their own urinals or who were devel-
oping their own methods. They were able to show him how he could wear his urinal
bag above his knee so that he could reach it. He added this knowledge to his own—­
where he had designed a pair of pants where he could open up the seams—­and now
is able to drain his own urinal. The importance of such an ability can be measured in
many ways. What draining his urinal means for this man is that he is able to leave his

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 114 Sloped Technoscience

living residence and remain outdoors all day long. He can go to classes. When he has
to drain his urinal he can go to a public lavatory. This contrasts with what he had to
do before—­that was, each time his urinal filled (which was every two or three hours),
he would have to come back to Cowell Hospital, unless he could find a friend, or was
willing to ask a stranger to drain it for him. Also, it means that several times a day he
no longer has to ask someone to help him. . . . Another thing that it has done for him
is to make him realize that with the appropriate equipment and with the right frame
of mind he may even be able to do more things for himself such as fixing his own
meals, doing his own dinner tray, and perhaps, even putting himself to bed.78

The young man described was not a seamless cyborg with an easy, frictionless rela-
tionship to technology. Everyday practices of remaking the world, however, were
infused with a disability politics of independence from expert medical knowledge
and interdependence between disabled students. As they moved toward establishing
a more permanent and expansive program for disabled students, the Cowell students
proposed that the program reserve central leadership positions for disabled people,
whose expertise in navigating inaccessible environments and healthcare systems
would be an asset.79
By the time that Berkeley students proposed a formal Center for Independent
Living (CIL) in 1972, they had developed a theory of the user tied to an epistemo-
logical critique of expertise, authority, and objectivity.80 Activists framed rehabilita-
tion as a hegemonic system of medical expertise, in which biased “‘professionals,’
‘experts,’ and ‘specialists’” are “more likely to be knowledgeable about a person’s lim-
itations than about his capacities.”81 As an alternative, the CIL proposed putting dis-
abled people in the role of service providers in order to infuse the system with user
perspectives. It proposed an independent living program that was

designed and will be implemented by blind and disabled people who at one time were
consumers of rehabilitation services and now, because of the nature of their expe­
riences as consumers, have decided it is time for them to become providers. It rep­
resents an effort to create something which at present does not exist, namely client
participation in the rehabilitation system.82

The CIL’s early objective was not to reject rehabilitation but to transform its medical
expert cultures and paternalistic power from within. These transformations of the
rehabilitation regime drove the paradigm shift that the CIL intended to produce.83
For instance, rather than shutting down rehabilitation hospitals, in 1974 CIL mem-
bers acted as consumers, providers, and social workers in a rehabilitation program at
Herrick Memorial Hospital in Berkeley.84 At Herrick, disabled people constituted the
majority of the hospital advisory board, leading movement leader Ed Roberts to
report, “The clinic meets the needs of the disabled because we helped design it. . . .

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 Sloped Technoscience 115

The doctors learn from us and we receive medical care from them. Here, it is not a
superior-­inferior thing.”85 This political focus on hierarchies of knowledge justified
claims to strong objectivity but did not eschew rehabilitative or medical science alto-
gether. The role of nondisabled allies was to provide physical or emotional support
to disabled peoples’ leadership.86
Visitors to the CIL in the 1970s would have witnessed blind people using Braille
typewriters and books, wheelchair users fixing chairs and retrofitting vans with lifts,
and many people engaged in sign language, computer programming, and indepen-
dent living skills courses.87 The space became a training ground for other forms of
activism. Disabled designer Ralf Hotchkiss, who later won a MacArthur Award for
his work with do-­it-­yourself wheelchair building in developing countries, established
a wheelchair and van repair shop (modeled after bicycle self-­repair shops) at the
CIL.88 Computer programming courses, which offered vocational skills, were seed-
beds for later computer activism by disabled children and their families, who (in the
1980s) would tinker with and hack computers to create assistive technologies.89 These
activities could be considered a type of epistemic activism, which sought to transform
access-­knowledge from within.90
Positioning itself “not [as] a political action program” but as an effort to “plug into
the operations of the present rehabilitation network and observe the new relation-
ships which are developed in the course of its existence,” the CIL aimed to influence
“the greater milieu of which we are a part.”91 Strategically, the organization appro­
priated the term “independent living” from the rehabilitation field in order to access
funding. Previously, the term “independent living” referred to rehabilitation activities
for those who were not eligible for vocational rehabilitation and thus required atten-
dant care.92 The CIL’s focus on access, wheelchair repair, and technological training
addressed vocational employment, in one sense, but also challenged the imperative for
productive citizenship by providing skills that would benefit disabled people regard-
less of their employment status. Consequently, the California Department of Reha-
bilitation, on which the CIL had expected to rely for funding, initially objected to
the nonvocational nature of access activities.93 Despite philosophical differences,
however, the CIL eventually received a $50,000 grant in 1972 from the regional office
of the Rehabilitation Services Administration, initiating a flurry of activity that in-
cluded connecting disabled people to service providers, finding accessible housing,
and doing community advocacy.94 Between 1972 and 1979, the CIL served 6,600
people and provided 813 different services, including attendant referral, blind services,
computer training, counseling, D/deaf services, legal resources, housing assistance,
job assistance and training, mechanical training, technical assistance, architectural
barrier-­removal, transportation, and wheelchair design and repair.95 The approach
also created a national model: by 1978, only six years after its establishment, approxi-
mately sixty to seventy Centers of Independent Living had been established across
the United States.96

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 116 Sloped Technoscience

Intercept Activism
Curb cut and wheelchair ramp experiments materialized the independent living
philosophy of gaining access to public life beyond the dictates of rehabilitation and
productivity. Between 1969 and 1970, the Rolling Quads lobbied the city of Berkeley
to install curb cuts on sidewalks, requesting an annual budget of $30,000 for “wheel-
chair ramps in existing curbs” and for adding ramps “in all new construction as a
matter of course.”97 Although funding was allocated, installation was slow. It centered
on the main strip of Telegraph Avenue and did not always cover desired intersections.
Consequently, members of the CIL used asphalt to pave some of their own curb cuts
as they waited for the city to complete its project.98 While these activist-­made curb
cuts were not forged from activist anger carried out under cover of night, their inter-
vention was no less significant as an experiment in crip access-­knowledge, which
operated in the spaces where municipal curb cuts had failed to materialize.
Crip technsocience experiments with curb cut materials, sizes, shapes, slopes,
and construction methods reveal that in environmental design, as in other forms of
technoscience, objectivity and authority are materialized rather than pregiven. Two
designers—­Hale Zukas and his attendant, Eric Dibner—­developed some of the ear-
liest iterations (Figure 4.8). Zukas was a power chair user with cerebral palsy who
worked on public advocacy for curb cuts for the CIL. The two met in 1968, when
Dibner worked at the Disabled Students Program at Berkeley, which grew from
Cowell.99 While Dibner was not himself disabled, he had worked for several years as
a personal attendant to Cowell residents John Hessler and Scott Sorenson.100 In 1968
Dibner traveled with Hessler to France, where he crafted ad hoc ramps and experi-
mented with slope and materials such as wood planks.101 When Hessler and Dibner
returned from their trip, some curb cuts had appeared in Berkeley and enabled chair
users to navigate the streets “without needing assistance at each curb.”102 Consequently,
Hessler and Dibner lived together in an apartment in the community, where Dibner
built a ramped entrance to the door.103 It was by supporting the leaders of the CIL as
an attendant, rather than by acting as an expert architect, that Dibner became inter-
ested in accessibility.104
Initial curb cut experiments addressed issues such as slope and materials. Zukas
developed a curb cut prototype that Berkeley used for a decade until curb cuts entered
building codes.105 This prototype, initially created with plywood and duct tape, was
“four feet deep by eight feet wide, which in a standard six-­inch curb is obviously much
steeper than the one in twelve [1:12]” standard developed by research in Illinois.106
While fairly simple, the prototype allowed power chair users access to Berkeley side-
walks and streets. The rough, do-­it-­yourself nature of these curb cuts suggests a crip
understanding of access as a critical project in inaccessible cities but also as an always
unfinished effort requiring further iteration.
Activist-­made curb cuts introduced critical frictions into built environments.
Beyond their functional value, they also drew attention to the failures of existing

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 Figure 4.8.  Four disability activists, including Hale Zukas and Eric Dibner, along with
two unidentified people in the foreground, roll up Berkeley’s first official curb cut, which
maintained a high lip. The Independent 2, no. 1 (Fall 1974). Courtesy of the Bancroft
Library, University of California, Berkeley, and the Center for Independent Living, Berkeley.

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 118 Sloped Technoscience

material arrangements to account for the presence of wheelchair and power chair
users. Design considerations regarding materials and slope were important for dis-
abled users because the curb cut served as a lever, moving wheeled technologies
between street and sidewalk. But the process of developing curb cuts also produced
frictions when it became evident that access needs are not uniform across users.
Blind people, in particular, pointed out that when a curb cut smoothly intercepted the
street and the sidewalk, it disoriented their learned sense of the city’s layout. These
concerns had not been legible when the focus had been on chair users and walking
people, both presumed to be sighted.
Objections to the curb cut’s universality disoriented the movement’s presump-
tion of chair users as the prototypical disabled body. Activists reiterated the curb cut
through a growing “cross-­disability consciousness.”107 As Zukas explained it, the ini-
tial solution was to create curb ramps “outside the crosswalk. So there would con-
tinue to be a curb in the regular path of travel to alert blind people that they were
about to step into the street.”108 But where gutters, parking meters, or fire hydrants
interfered with placing curb cuts immediately to the side of a street corner, they
had to appear in the middle of a block.109 This compromise created navigation prob-
lems for chair users, who were faced with the choice of navigating street traffic to
reach a crosswalk or crossing at an offset location where drivers may not see them.
Getting the curb cut right for both chair users and (walking) blind people required
several more iterations.
Rather than opting for a smooth curb cut to resolve tensions between chair users
and blind people, activists experimented with materials that would produce more
friction on curb cut surfaces. Tactile paving, such as the yellow dots that appear on
contemporary curb cuts, had been a subject of experimentation around accessible
housing (see Figure 4.1). Nondisabled ally and Cowell attendant Charles Grimes
recalls a steep ramp attached to an apartment building.110 The plywood ramp’s steep
slope and two-­by-­four beams of wood made it difficult to climb and dangerous to
egress. In response, Grimes added tactile paving by spreading a mixture of cat litter
and paint on the ramp to “giv[e] the tires some purchase.”111 These material frictions
made using the intercept possible. The tactile paving eventually became a technology
with cross-­disability application, slowing down wheelchairs on steep ramps and indi-
cating changes in surface and slope to blind or visually impaired people.
Through the CIL’s experiments with tactile paving, slope, and curb cut placement,
the organization became a recognizable source of expertise for accessibility stan-
dards. In 1976 California state architect Edwin Shomate requested feedback from the
CIL on the state’s accessibility code. The CIL’s thorough response, written by Zukas,
detailed suggestions related to the organization’s experience and research. One rec-
ommendation translated experiments with rough surface textures into the design of
concrete ramps.

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 Sloped Technoscience 119

We recommend specifying grooving the final 36 inches of the surface only and elimi-
nating a “substantially more rough” surface as an option. Our experience indicates that
the commonly used methods of roughening surfaces almost always fail to produce a
texture that is sufficiently differentiated to be readily detectible by the blind.112

Zukas also recommended adding language to the code that would read, “Wherever
possible, curb ramps should be located outside the main stream of pedestrian traffic
so as not to present a hazard to blind persons.”113 Other recommendations empha-
sized the broad scope of disabilities that the new guidelines should include in addi-
tion to blind people and wheelchair users, such as people with hearing impairments
and “those with limited arm movement” who may not easily reach control panels
at elevators.”114 Although focused on impairment categories, Zukas’s suggested tech-
nical specifications went beyond the typical treatment of functional limitations (as
isolated in the body). Instead, Zukas infused the technical specifications with the
independent living movement’s broad understanding of disabled users and disabil-
ity culture. Zukas’s recommendations to Shomate ended with a strong suggestion
that “in the final version of the regulations, copious use be made of diagrams and
graphic illustrations. It may be an exaggeration to say that one picture is worth a
thousand words; nevertheless, illustrations can be a tremendous aid to understand-
ing.”115 Accompanying the letter, Zukas attached a page from Ronald Mace’s Illus-
trated Handbook of the Handicapped Section of the North Carolina State Building Code.
This emphasis on the optics of accessibility disclosed another CIL strategy of using
drawing, mapping, and visualization to make arguments for access, particularly for
normate sighted architects.
As the independent living movement grew, activists devised new methods of
producing access-­knowledge in addition to designing technologies and products.116
Collaborating with university faculty, the CIL created courses based on the indepen-
dent living movement’s user-­led approach to disability. Courses on “Unhandicap-
ping Design” were offered at the CIL, while Berkeley faculty taught “Barrier-­Free
Design for Disabled Persons” (in the Department of Architecture), “Independent Liv-
ing Arrangements” (in the Department of Environmental Design), “The Disabled
in Society” (in the Department of Education), “Legislation for the Disabled” (in the
School of Law), and independent studies for field work conducted while working
as an attendant (a joint independent study course of the departments of Architecture,
Environmental Design, and Social Welfare).117 Of these courses, those focused on
architecture had perhaps the greatest impact, serving as training grounds for a more
general practice of accessibility auditing.
Accessibility audits were a design methodology through which independent living
activists challenged dominant ways of knowing disability. These surveys of existing
buildings used predetermined metrics to determine their accessibility. Participants in

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 120 Sloped Technoscience

the CIL’s architecture courses conducted building audits, which taught students to
detect and design accessibility features.118 CIL audits “identifying buildings as acces-
sible or rampable”119 utilized experimental standards and guidelines from research
conducted elsewhere, including ANSI A117.1 research in Illinois, the North Carolina
accessible building code developed by Ronald Mace, disabled UK architect Selwyn
Goldmith’s influential Design for the Disabled, and early research from Edward Stein-
feld, an architect and gerontologist who would later become involved in Uni­versal
Design.120 Throughout the 1960s and ’70s, teams of wheelchair users and nondisabled
architecture students conducted massive environmental audits under the auspices
of a new type of architectural survey method called “performance testing” to gather
data about building accessibility at Berkeley.121 By recording architectural barriers on
the campus and surrounding community, disability activists grew the practice of
“performance evaluation” and helped to refine protocols for future audits as forms
of citizen survey work. This work entailed “critical assessments” of the built environ-
ment alongside establishing the terms of these audits’ validity through conversations
between users and designers.122
Accessibility audits drew from the existing ANSI A117.1 guidelines as well as other
tools in human factors and ergonomics research, such as the use of time-­lapse cam-
eras, to study the built environment.123 Although time-­lapse research originated in
scientific managers’ “time motion” studies, the focus of accessibility research was not
bodily movements alone but how bodies move through the environment. Research-
ers mounted cameras to each user’s wheelchair at eye level.124 Photographic docu-
mentation created an evidence base of legible inaccessibility, such that architects
and facilities managers at Berkeley could “analyze each building from the perspective
of the user, and not simply from a manual, a checklist.”125 Crip technoscience thus
enabled a cripping of access-­knowledge itself, as a regime otherwise focused (at the
time) on rehabilitation and normalization. Experiments in architectural education
became part of the CIL’s work when the organization collaborated with Berkeley
professor Raymond Lifchez and designer Barbara Winslow to bring disabled “user-­
experts” into the design studio.126 CIL members acknowledged these efforts as build-
ing architects’ knowledge base through a more accurate study of user-­environment
relations.127
Based on experiences with disabled experts in the design studio, Lifchez and Win-
slow conducted ethnographic research for their 1979 book, Design for Independent
Living: The Environment and Physically Disabled People. The book studied disabled
people as a resourceful maker culture, translating the authors’ observations of the
independent living philosophy into potential design applications.128 Its depictions
of diverse disabled people went far beyond the trope of the white, disabled house-
wife to portray both white and nonwhite disabled people of many genders adapting
domestic spaces and engaging in all manner of political, social, and cultural activities,
including protesting, wheelchair dancing, having meetings, engaging in intimacy, and

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 Sloped Technoscience 121

socializing. The book was the first to distinguish between rehabilitative and crip
cultural approaches to environmental design. Provocatively, Lifchez and Winslow
concluded the book by asking,

Is the objective to assimilate the disabled person into the environment, or is it to

accommodate the environment to the person? . . . Currently, the emphasis [in barrier-­
free design] is on assimilation, for this seems to assure that the disabled person,
once “broken-­in,” will be able to operate in a society as a “regular person” and that the
environment will not undermine his natural agenda to “improve” himself. . . . This
assumption can be counterproductive when designing for accessibility. It may serve
only to obscure the fact that the disabled person may have a point of view about the
design that challenges what the designers would consider good design. Many design-
ers have, in fact, expressed a certain fear that pressure to accommodate disabled people
will jeopardize good design and weaken the design vocabulary. Though certain aspects
of the contemporary design vocabulary may have to be reconsidered in making acces-
sible environments, one must also look forward to new items in the vocabulary that
will develop in response to these human needs—­ultimately leading toward more
humane concepts of what makes for good design.129

By emphasizing disabled people as experts about their own lives and needs, Lifchez
and Winslow challenged an implicit assumption that accessibility will harm the aes-
thetics or form of “good design.” They also contested the assumption of barrier-­free
design advocates that good design should seek to eliminate disability and assimilate
disabled people into the mainstream. These arguments made disabled people’s “non-­
conforming uses” of built environments legible as political practices that could chal-
lenge designers’ and rehabilitation experts’ assumptions about disability.130
In contrast to disability simulation exercises, research methods such as mapping
and environmental surveys made the distribution of accessible and inaccessible spaces
in the city more legible in aggregate. In 1973 Ruth Grimes, a planning student at
Berkeley, created a map of the city’s curb cut route on Telegraph Avenue and parts of
Shattuck Avenue.131 The following year, Grimes, Dibner, and others collaborated on
a survey of accessible housing for the city’s Master Plan.132 In accordance with the in-
dependent living philosophy, these surveys integrated disabled people into the evalu-
ation process, even when nondisabled people were involved.133 Once sites for improved
access were identified, the CIL wrote letters offering ramp design services to busi-
nesses and homeowners at the rate of fifteen dollars per hour.134 A local carpenter
built most ramps for approximately $200.135 Design drawings (informed by the ANSI
standards and Mace’s North Carolina code) showed homeowners and businesses that
wheelchair accessibility in their space was possible (Figure 4.9a, b, and c).136
Although they referred to existing accessibility standards, the CIL’s ramp de-
signs and drawings experimented with the optics of architectural representation. For

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 a

Figure 4.9a, b, and c.  Wheelchair ramps for private homes and businesses, drawn by
Eric Dibner as part of a CIL initiative (ca. 1978). Courtesy of the Bancroft Library,
University of California, Berkeley.

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 b

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 124 Sloped Technoscience

instance, they shifted the visual and technical norms of architectural drawings in
order to make accessibility imaginable for owners, designers, and builders. In some
cases, these illustrations defied the standardized architectural representations, nota-
tions, and handwriting that texts such as the Architectural Graphic Standards pre-
scribed. Dibner, who had formerly taken architectural drafting courses but shifted his
focus to disability and design issues when he began working as a personal attendant,
drew a series of architectural ramps to accompany the CIL’s evaluations of potential
accessible housing and public spaces. These drawings obeyed few of the conventions
of architectural drawing. Many materialized on lined paper, drawn with a ballpoint
pen. Casual handwriting, rather than standard capitalized letters, appeared on each
plan. Each drawing illustrated the ramp in enough detail to establish its function
and internal workings. In place of an architect’s professional seal, Dibner signed each
drawing, “Eric Dibner, CIL.”137 In material and textual form, the ramp drawings made
crip technoscience legible as a visible credential, field of work, and source of exper-
tise. No doubt, the signature also raised questions and invited interrogation.
Dibner’s ramp illustrations, their dimensional and material notations, and draw-
ings of the surrounding landscapes disclose the experimental nature of ramp design,
particularly in spaces with unusual constraints that would prevent a standard, 1:12
slope.138 Private residences, for instance, received designs that specified supports,
structures, and materials for a relatively small California front yard (see Figure 4.9a).
A directive to include “deck paint with sand” for traction recalls Grimes’s earlier paint
and cat litter mixture, and possibly others that were part of a slow accumulation of
knowledge and best practices around ramp design.
For public spaces, such as community centers and grocery stores (see Figure 4.9b
and c), where illustrating the possibilities of access required more of a rendering
than a technical drawing, the ramps acquire more detail. One proposal, for the Oak-
land community center, appears made of concrete. Existing steps, along with interior
and exterior features, are visible, and specifications for plywood siding held up with
external supports and filled with rocks and gravel make visible the ramp’s interior
frictions. Shifts in materials—­from wood to concrete—­suggest the emerging solidity
of ramp designs within the built environment, as well as the improvised and accumu-
lated knowledge of plywood structures as supports for concrete and gravel surfaces.
The tactic of mixing sand and paint to create surface friction on an inexpensive ply-
wood ramp translates directly into the choice of concrete as a material that main-
tains a pebbled surface while allowing the user the benefit of a longer ramp with a
landing for rest, and reinforced side railings. Together, the assemblage of proposed
materials and structures illustrates the material and metaphorical work of friction in
producing leverage for CIL activists seeking access to public resources such as the
community center.
Playing with ideas of public and private, the proposed ramps suggest that accessi­
bility is necessary in domestic space, and not only the public life of street commerce.

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 Sloped Technoscience 125

Other designs suggest the necessary presence of disability within Berkeley’s radical
political milieu. Ma Revolution, a local Berkeley co-­op grocery store aligned with
anti-­racist prison activism, was located at the corner of Telegraph Avenue and Dwight
Way, on the same block as the CIL and just a block away from one of the sites at which
activists allegedly created do-­it-­yourself curb cuts (see Figure 4.1). The store primar-
ily hired people of color and former prisoners and supported the San Francisco
People’s Food System, an alternative to corporate food distribution.139 A proposed
ramp for the store’s interior was a simple plywood intercept without a landing (see
Figure 4.9c). Its three-­dimensional representation appears the most solid of the three
illustrations shown here, with geometric proportions, solid lines indicating the fore-
ground, and dashed lines marking structures behind a section cut. The ramp appears
to address internal structures of the store, connecting itself to the floor and surround-
ing shelving. The proposal of a ramp for Ma Revolution’s interior was part of a cam-
paign to remove sidewalk signs and turnstiles at grocery stores in Berkeley, beginning
in 1976.140 But placed in the broader context of public space in Berkeley, the proposal
highlights the possibility that chair users could be grocery store shoppers, as well as
supporters of food justice and prison abolition, which shared an anti-­assimilationist
politics with advocates of deinstitutionalization and independent living. Disabled
peoples’ lack of access to these and other activist spaces underscored a frequent claim
that disability was not recognized as a civil rights issue. Visualizing the possibilities
of ramp design in such spaces, then, was a way of emphasizing disability activism as
a radical political force.

KNOWING-­M AKING DISABILITY HISTORIES

Relations of knowing-­making, these iterative design processes suggest, are sites of

activism, leverage, and friction. Subtle, mundane projects of crip technoscience served
as a training ground for later, more public and legible disability protests. On April 5,
1977, disability activists began a twenty-­five-­day occupation to protest the federal
government’s failure to enforce Section 504 of the Federal Rehabilitation Act of 1973
and its mandates of barrier-­free programs and services. Protesters sought the enforce-
ment of measures that would ensure ramps, Braille materials, accessible bathrooms,
sign language interpreters, and other forms of access in buildings housing federally
funded programs and services. A cross-­disability coalition, made up of majority-­white
disability activists who included chair users, D/deaf people, and blind people, staged
“the longest occupation of a federal office by protesters in U.S. history” with support
from black civil rights and labor activists.141
A turning point for U.S. disability activism, the protests made the resourceful-
ness and collective power of disabled people more public and visible. Although the
504 sit-­in has been memorialized as an overt display of power, however, more subtle
forms of crip technoscience and ingenuity created structures of support and survival

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 126 Sloped Technoscience

within the space of the sit-­in. As activist Corbett O’Toole recalls it, “Somebody went
out and scrounged an old refrigerator box, and taped it to the director’s air condi­
tioning machine to create a refrigerator for people that had medications that needed
to be refrigerated.”142 When phone lines to the building were cut off, D/deaf people
would sign from windows to friends below on the street.143 These strategies recalled
crip experiments with repurposing materials, building alliances, and working within
existing constraints, often behind the scenes of what is legible as politics, to produce
social change.
While the protest embodied these frictions, activists involved in the 504 sit-­in
framed their intervention as a sort of ramp or curb cut, which would transition dis-
abled people from their presumed, stigmatized status as patients or wards of the state
to full citizens under law. They derived this legibility from the black civil rights move-
ment tactic of the “sit-­in.” Kitty Cone, a white disabled woman activist who organized
the 504 protest in Berkeley, later recalled,

A sit-­in was a tactic of the civil rights movement, and it was a way of drawing parallels
between the issue [of disability rights] and the civil rights movement of the sixties.
People all over the country were not thinking of people with disabilities as an oppressed
minority or deserving of civil rights; they were thinking of people with disabilities as
objects of charity, objects of pity, probably a group of people who were very weak. So
a sit-­in was a really good tactic to show that we were a civil rights movement and part
of the whole history of struggling for progress for our community.144

Legibility involved visual and conceptual parallels between disability rights and black
civil rights struggles against spatial segregation, but by treating ableism and racism as
parallel structures of oppression, the sit-­in (and the discourse surrounding it) ramped
over the presumed whiteness of disabled people as a neutral dimension of disability
community. Parallels cast black civil rights as a thing of the past while disability rights
remained a present concern.
In disability activism, the notion of “cross-­disability consciousness” marks aware-
ness of power and privilege within disability communities such as the CIL. The cross-­
disability coalition of activists understood that as “descendants of the [black] civil
rights movement of the ’60s, we learned about sit ins from the civil rights movement,
we sang freedom songs to keep up morale, and consciously show the connection
between the two movements. We always drew the parallels. About public transpor­
tation we said we can’t even get on the back of the bus,” Cone recollected.145 These
claims were strategic: they borrowed and appropriated from one movement’s suc-
cesses to frame another, and even made comparative claims to establish the unique-
ness of disability as an experience of spatial misfit, evident in Cone’s insistence that “we
can’t even get on the back of the bus.” Yet the shared focus on desegregation or access
to space did not necessarily mean that these movements recognized the collective

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 Sloped Technoscience 127

stakes of spatial oppression (such as making the racial desegregation of cities a dis-
ability rights issue or the deinstitutionalization of disabled people of color a racial
justice issue related to mass incarceration).146 The pervasive but unmarked whiteness
of disability leadership reinforced the notion that invoking civil rights tactics and
strategies was a neutral practice. Despite highlighting the frictions of nondisabled
belonging as a resource for activism and protest, the sit-­in also obscured the frictions
of racialized nonbelonging in public space.
In the 1970s, white disability rights advocates drew frequent parallels between
ableism and racism to justify the need for “a Federal Civil Rights Law, with appropri-
ate sanctions, directed against the discriminations which are daily practiced against
the physically handicapped, and whose effects are every bit as demeaning and as
incapacitating as they are when directed against other citizens because of the color
of their skin.”147 The term “civil rights,” like “barrier-­free” or “citizenship,” was neutral
toward the identities of marginalized people it sought to strategically include or ex-
clude. Disability was termed a “civil rights” issue, however, in reference to racial equal-
ity. The implied argument was that racial antidiscrimination laws had not addressed
disability as a civil right, and that the time had come to recognize disability within
regimes of liberal democratic protection afforded to “all” others. This narrative, how-
ever, presumed that the fight for black civil rights was not a disability rights issue and
that the struggle for black equality had reached completion. Claims that the time for
disability rights had finally arrived, then, embodied a “post-­racial” assumption that
framed disability rights as the agenda of the future, a seamless integration of disability
into existing civil rights narratives.
Temporal distinctions have been central to liberal disability rights narratives,
which presume the smooth functioning of rights regimes more generally. Consider,
for instance, Joseph Shapiro’s claim:

In the black civil rights movement, people put their lives on the line to assert their
moral claim to laws that guaranteed their inclusion in society. When public attitudes
about race changed, African-­Americans won civil rights protections. Disabled Ameri-
cans got their civil rights protections before the same kind of sea-­change in public
understanding.148

These comments suggested that the struggle for black civil rights had ended when
rights were won but that disability rights were a continuous, more difficult, continu-
ally frictioned struggle. Framing this perception, civil rights legislation had offered
the palliative effect of obscuring ongoing white supremacy in material environments.
The neutral and unmarked status of whiteness as a presumed norm engendered the
perception that civil rights laws had cured the racial disparities of cities.149 But despite
the Fair Housing Act of 1968 and other federal legislation directed at addressing the
harms of racial segregation for black communities, barriers to accessing housing,

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 128 Sloped Technoscience

education, and work in fact ballooned in the 1970s.150 Few U.S. cities saw meaningful
decreases in segregation in that decade. As Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton have
argued, a “distinctive feature of spatial organization in American cities” remained in
the 1970s, as it does today, the pervasive (yet unmarked) isolation of black commu­
nities, with all of the attendant barriers to education, work, and public life that result
from residential segregation.151 Where segregation appeared to decrease, the causes
were sometimes in service of antiblack racism. For example, in the San Francisco Bay
area where the 504 protests took place, white movement back into the city resulted
in an early wave of “white-­black displacement through gentrification rather than a
true move toward integration” and left African American people disproportionately
isolated from resources compared to Latino and Asian people.152
Parallels, like smooth, frictionless curb cuts, tell us little about the intercepting,
frictioned work of intersections. In the same year as the 504 sit-­in, the Combahee
River Collective, a group of black socialist feminists, articulated an idea that legal
scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw would later term “intersectionality.”

The most general statement of our politics at the present time would be that we are
actively committed to struggling against racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class oppres-
sion, and see as our particular task the development of integrated analysis and prac-
tice based upon the fact that the major systems of oppression are interlocking. The
synthesis of these oppressions creates the conditions of our lives. As Black women we
see Black feminism as the logical political movement to combat the manifold and
simultaneous oppressions that all women of color face.153

Intersectionality called attention to the particular and situated perspectives that con-
stitute what appears as neutral and accordingly made it possible to think and speak
about the tensions and overlaps between these systems.154 The point was to affirm
that racism and sexism, among other systems of oppression, were not discrete and
that the intersections of these systems had material effects on the oppressions faced
by women of color. But like 1960s civil rights laws focused on race, the discourse of
intersectionality would not acknowledge disability as a category of oppression for
some time.
One reason that the concept of intersectionality has been generative for schol-
ars and activists is that by pointing out that systems of oppression overlap, this con-
cept debunks the liberal idea of a post-oppression world. Accordingly, this concept
asks us to think about how disability activism in the late 1970s was relating to the
concept of race, to anti-racist movements, and to disabled people of color. While
activists’ narratives about 504 often gave the impression that the struggle for racial
civil rights had ended, and that a new era of disability rights was thus beginning, more
recent historical accounts have explored the often discounted and overlooked presence
of disabled people of color in the movement, as well as the disability movement’s

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 Sloped Technoscience 129

relationships to black and Chicano activist organizations. These narratives also in-
form a more racially accountable narrative of crip technoscience in the 504 sit-­in.
The Black Panthers, who had recently allied themselves with efforts to remove
disabled and elderly people of color from nursing homes, and a Chicano group, the
Mission Rebels, both provided food to sustain the 504 occupiers.155 It is very clear
that this support was crucial to sustaining the occupation through its twenty-­five days.
Yet accounts of the coalition between the Black Panthers and CIL activists sometimes
reiterate the parallels or analogues between anti-­ableist and anti-­racist struggles to
explain the emergence of this coalition.156 Recall that liberal curb cut theories insist
upon the “interest convergence” of wheelchair users, parents pushing strollers, and
cyclists while ignoring the potential intersections and shared identities between these
categories. Similarly, accounts of parallel struggles against spatial segregation often
fail to produce intersectional analyses of power and privilege within and across dis-
ability and racial justice movements.157 Complicating the liberal curb cut theory that
disability design benefits “everyone” by providing a smooth transition to an equal
future, the racial histories of the 504 sit-­ins and public displays of crip friction suggest
that “everyone” continued to be a majority-­white designation.
Black crip activist and scholar Leroy Moore argues that disabled activists of color
did more than serve food at the occupation, yet their leadership and presence has
been largely ramped over in disability histories (and, I would add, histories of barrier-­
free design).158 What I am proposing here as a crip curb cut theory provides a differ-
ent way of understanding the sit-­in and the roles of activists of color: not as interest
convergence but as leverage and boundary work. Disability historian Susan Schweik
has analyzed the coalition between the CIL and the Black Panthers as a “frame exten-
sion,” which captures the internal tensions between the two groups (around issues
such as ableism within Black Panther discourses and whiteness in disability rights
discourses) while accounting for the work of overlapping membership.159 Dennis
Billups, a young blind Black Panther, called for black activists to support the sit-­ins:
“We need to do all we can. We need to show the government that we can have more
force than they can ever deal with—­and that we can eat more, drink more, love more
and pray more than they ever knew was happening. . . . We shouldn’t have to fight
for our rights, . . . they should already be there.”160 Billups emphasizes the ongoing,
frictioned struggles of disabled and black communities to gain legal recognition of
their rights. Similarly, Schweik argues, disabled Black Panther Bradley Lomax and
his caregiver Chuck Jackson (also a Panther) were unacknowledged leaders in 504.
Whereas disability was not initially part of the Black Panthers’ consciousness, Lomax
influenced an emerging intersectional analysis that then led to the Panthers’ support
for the sit-­in. Based on these accounts, black activists appeared to believe that the
ongoing, tense, and difficult work of racial justice was being enacted through disabil-
ity activism, contra the post-­racial understanding of racial justice as a thing of the past
and disability rights as the struggle for the future.

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 130 Sloped Technoscience

The significance of the 504 sit-­in for disability rights to accessible transportation,
government buildings, and other public spaces cannot be overstated. Successful sit-­
ins across the United States initiated a new era of barrier-­free design, which focused
on reiterating accessibility standards and compliance strategies. Once Section 504
became enforceable in the late 1970s, the messy, experimental practices of crip tech-
noscience were slowly eclipsed by a new form of objectivity, premised upon stan-
dardized and quantified accessibility. The CIL began consulting on accessibility with
organizations such as the Oakland Housing Authority, Bay Area Rapid Transit, the
Urban Land Institute, and local museums and hospitals.161 In the following decades,
Zukas, Dibner, and others involved with crip technoscience experiments would lend
their expertise to the emerging barrier-­free design compliance regime. Along with
these successes remained questions of frictions, disorientation, and elision: What are
the perceived stakes of accessibility? What issues count as accessible design issues?
How can designers know?

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 Chapter 5

Epistemic Activism
Design Expertise as a
Site of Intervention
Today’s culture and society, by reason of increased size and heterogeneity
of the population, has produced new problems which are completely
unprecedented and for which the architect has no answers whatsoever. . . .
The architect’s working processes must develop simultaneously and
proportionally with the development of civilization itself. The working
processes of the majority of today’s architects are not developing
proportionally, leaving the architect stranded, defeasible, or even defunct.
One of the major reasons that architects’ working processes are not
developing is the fact that architects are not studying and designing for the
full range of human experience. It is the primary task of architects to respond
to human needs, both physical and emotional.
—Wil l i a m D o g g et t, Rona ld M ace , W illi a m M a rch a n t,
F r ed Tol son, and L . Ro ck et Tho m p s on, “Housing
Environmental Research”

If followed by improved data and performance criteria in the years to come,

the vast amount of new building and rebuilding activity which lies ahead will
produce an environment that can be enjoyed by all of our citizens.
—A m er ica n Inst it u te of A rchi te cts, “Barrier-Free
Architecture”

When ideals materialize as laws, knowing and making become contested grounds.
Following the 504 sit-ins in 1977, disability activists successfully pressured the Depart-
ment of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW) to enforce Section 504 of the Reha-
bilitation Act. Barrier-free design advocates celebrated this enforcement, claiming that
it “reflects the spirit of the law.”1 Beyond requiring accessible federal programs and
services, Section 504’s enforcement initiated a new trajectory for access-knowledge.
Increasingly, barrier-free design became a matter of compliance with the ever-
broadening array of design standards and codes grounded in specific forms of empir-
ical knowledge. Legal mandates for accessible design did not solely emerge from

131

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 132 Epistemic Activism

activism, however; nor were independent living movement ideologies prevalent

among architects. Rather, codes and their enforcement materialized from new fields
of research and the social relations between experts who prepared the ground in
which new forms of accessibility would later grow and flourish. These conditions,
which I term “epistemic activism,” are this chapter’s primary focus.
Disability scholarship regarding social movements often focuses on overt tactics,
such as the 504 sit-­ins or the Capitol Crawl, which were geared toward public visi­
bility and solidifying a shared sense of disability identity.2 Epistemic activism, by
contrast, takes place in the relatively illegible spheres of knowledge-­production and
dissemination. A glimpse of such practices appeared in the previous chapter, in the
work of independent living activists to interject friction into built space, assert dis-
abled users as design experts, and “reverse the history of rehab within rehab itself.”3
But while these practices circulate in the disability rights movements’ origin stories,
far less is known about how activism takes place within the privileged sites where
knowledge is produced, bureaucratic decisions are rendered, and codes and stan-
dards are enacted. Reframing compliance regimes, professional fields, and knowledge
itself as social and relational phenomenon, I argue that these seemingly mundane
sites were no less sedimented, political, or interventionist than sit-­ins and protests.
Disability theorists often invoke accessible design as proof that built environments
and societies materialize disability oppression and that disability is not inherently
biological or physiological.4 Unlike biomedical and scientific models, which treat
disability as an object of study, social and cultural understandings of disability con-
sider scientific knowledge and accessible design as discrete enterprises. Yet a defining
feature of twentieth-­century access-­knowledge was the entanglement of accessible
design practices with dominant ways of knowing disability in fields such as rehabili­
tation and human engineering. These entanglements call into question whether the
social model is indeed discrete from scientific and biomedical knowledge. Any oppo-
sitional framing between the two is suspect, given these histories of architectural
knowing-­making.
This chapter investigates how particular intersections of design and science coa­
lesced around the regime of barrier-­free design between the 1960s and 1980s and
consequently became contested arenas in the politics of knowing-­making. Approach-
ing architecture and design discourses as a field of expertise and authority, much
like more recognized natural and social sciences, I argue that accounts of the built
environment as a materializing force of disability exclusion must attend to design
knowledge as a site in which norms are produced and resistance is enacted. If crip
technoscience works through friction and leverage, epistemic activism operates through
critical torsions, subtle twists, and strategic turns of architectural discourse and law
that generate leverage; proliferate the meanings of access; and produce momentum
for achieving it.

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 Epistemic Activism 133

DESIGNING ACCESS-­K NOWLEDGE

With the professionalization of architecture in the mid-­nineteenth century, archi-

tects configured the inhabitant by referencing scientific data, as well as classical geom-
etries.5 These ways of knowing, in turn, shaped the legibility of normate and average
users as the most likely inhabitants of built space. But in addition to configuring
inhabitants as objects of knowledge, the profession also configured the uses of pro­
fessional expertise. In the era of Cold War technoscience, some Modernist architects
established their authority by appealing to technical and scientific expertise.6 Simul-
taneously, new epistemological arguments (captured in the above epigraphs) con-
tended that architects had not integrated full knowledge of their inhabitants.
Access-­knowledge grew from interdisciplinary research outside the architecture
field, such as in rehabilitation and human engineering, as well as in arenas beyond
the academy, particularly in disability maker cultures and the independent living
movement. A third, hybrid domain of knowledge, however, enrolled architects, social
scientists, and users to produce new modes of architectural knowing. Compliance-­
knowledge, this third domain, was concerned with what architects engaged in barrier-­
free design needed to know. Highlighting the limits and boundaries of responsible
professional authority, proponents of evidence-­based compliance approaches har-
nessed a robust evidence base to fill the gaps in architects’ professional expertise.
Direct challenges to architectural knowledge and authority arose from within the
profession. The American Institute of Architects (AIA), the field’s professional licens-
ing body, identified a need to convince architects that barrier-­free design was valua-
ble and necessary. Initial moves toward redesigning architectural education began in
1965, when Congress established the National Commission on Architectural Barriers,
tasked with facilitating collaborations between the AIA, HEW, and the Vocational
Rehabilitation Administration (later called the Rehabilitation Services Administra-
tion). Two architects—­Leon Chatelain and Edward Noakes—­served as the commis-
sion’s chair and project director, respectively. The following year, the AIA granted
nearly $60,000 toward research investigating strategies for barrier-­free design pro­
motion and education.7 An AIA-­employed research firm studied architects’ attitudes
about barrier-­free design and identified steps toward a more widespread practice of
design with disabled people in mind. In addition to a nationwide survey, the AIA
developed and tested educational resources at its annual conference and local chap-
ter meetings. These experimental materials framed accessibility to architects in two
different ways, and compared their efficacy. The two frames were: “(a) designing and
building for the real rather than the assumed average physical and mental characteris­
tics of the population, and (b) designing and building for the ‘physically handicapped’
with its attendant emotional appeal.”8 According to the AIA’s findings, architects
reported understanding the needs of “high visibility” physical disabilities marked by
the use of wheelchairs, canes, and other assistive devices; yet architects also believed

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 134 Epistemic Activism

there to be a “general lack of demand in the private marketplace for barrier-­free

design” and few recognized people with illegible disabilities such as “heart disease or
a nervous disorder” as constituting a significant population.9 These insights recalled
the independent living movement’s paths to developing cross-­disability conscious-
ness by challenging the wheelchair user’s primacy in the optics of disability inclusion.
A new research agenda emerged, along with experimental objectives and terms
of expertise. Concluding the AIA report included in the commission’s 1967 publica-
tion, Design for All Americans, researchers recommended “long-­range program[s] of
research” in two areas: first, the “true physical characteristics of the population which
constitutes the real market for barrier-­free design”; and second, the value of accessi-
bility features, including “desirable performance characteristics of space, products,
and components.”10 These two new data sets would contribute to the organization’s
educational efforts and aid in the development of “concise instructional and reference
materials,” such as design handbooks and standards.11 In the coming decades, the AIA’s
recommendations for long-­term data collection on users, markets, and design features
would define research and policy agendas, while the conclusions of its 1967 study
(with respect to architects’ lack of knowledge about disability) would shape strate-
gies and perceptions for cultivating access-­knowledge. Based on the AIA’s research,
Design for All Americans made the case for barrier-­free design as an important mat-
ter of citizenship. While barrier-­free design was not a dominant architectural prac-
tice in the 1960s, the report and its underlying research aligned with the zeitgeist of
new evidence-­based architectural practices, which called on architects to apply broad
knowledge of the human sciences to socially and politically relevant design.

ENVIRONMENTAL DESIGN RESEARCH

In 1960 Ronald Mace matriculated at North Carolina State University’s School of

Design. A lifelong tinkerer, he initially planned to major in industrial design, but after
a meeting with the school’s dean, who “felt that a person with a disability could not
make it through the program, and did not have any business trying,” Mace felt dis-
couraged and changed his major to architecture.12 But guidelines such as ANSI A117.1
were only released during his second year in school and had no legal binding. Unlike
Champaign and Berkeley, Raleigh did not have a large student disability community,
nor did the School of Design have accessible restrooms, elevators, or studio spaces.13
As in secondary school, entering the School of Design’s inaccessible building required
Mace to be carried up and down the stairs. During the week, he lived and worked
in a rented trailer with his mother, and on weekends he returned home to Winston-­
Salem.14 While Mace was no stranger to architectural barriers, his experience at the
School of Design compounded his social isolation and lack of independence.
Daily micro-­aggressions and continued isolation intensified Mace’s view that
architectural discourse and professional culture were oblivious to disability. Mace

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 Epistemic Activism 135

developed an analysis of architects’ ignorance, which he described as a materially and

historically conditioned arrangement resulting from the public invisibility of disabled
people and from norms within the profession. Yet disability activism was not a pri-
mary influence for Mace, at least not of the variety concentrated in Berkeley and
Champaign. He would not meet other disability activists or develop a political con-
sciousness around disability until the late 1970s. But his social and epistemological
analysis of built environments appears to have emerged from exposure to 1960s-­era
epistemic activism within architectural discourses, particularly the critical field of
environmental design research (EDR). Forged at the intersections of architecture
and social science, EDR’s focus on human experiences of the built environment
shaped Mace’s theories and strategies for intervention.
Coincidentally, NC State became an epicenter of EDR in the late 1960s, after
Mace graduated. But leading up to this development, a shift toward design informed
by evidence and ecological models of person-­environment interaction was taking
place around both student and faculty work. To conclude his undergraduate degree in
1966, Mace and several classmates produced a groundbreaking thesis project, which
detailed the significance of social science research on architectural design, specifically
in the case of housing.15 Reviewing wide swaths of literature in urban sociology,
environmental psychology, public health, and other fields, the thesis demonstrated
that while vast amounts of knowledge about human behavior, cognition, and physical
embodiment existed to inform architects’ conceptions of inhabitants, these profes-
sionals relied instead upon intuition, rather than evidence, to understand the user.
An impressively detailed and interdisciplinary literature review was followed by the
students’ own ethnographic research. Comparing two public housing sites, Chavis
Heights and Walnut Terrace, both inhabited by African Americans, they studied the
influence of building design, amenities, and layout for inhabitants’ self-­reports of
psychological and social well-­being, using surveys, in-­home interviews, and drawing
exercises with children to collect data.
“Housing Environmental Research,” the thesis, offered surprising insights about
the authors’ views of the social effects of architectural practices. Architects, they pro-
posed, should “treat all architectural projects as if they were experiments”; through-
out the design process, they believed, architects should identify hypotheses and
assumptions about a project’s “bio-­social-­psychological effects” in order to create
an evidence base for future practitioners.16 In determining standards of good de-
sign, they warned against excessive reliance on “minimum standards produced under
government control [that] tend to become irrefutable edits.”17 But their critique of
minimum design standards, such as those in building codes, focused on social biases
rather than the bureaucratic nature of standards: “Compilations of middle class de-
sires and prejudices administered by conservative elements of the middle class bureau-
cracy do not automatically provide a ‘decent home and a suitable living environment’
for all people. . . . Few can deny that our knowledge of what constitutes a decent and

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 136 Epistemic Activism

satisfactory dwelling for a particular people is seriously limited. Minimum standards

cannot be expected to fill the gap left by our lack of knowledge.”18 Here, Mace and
his colleagues were weaving a theory that narrow building codes and standards pro-
duced through a privileged bureaucracy were biased in their content and required
new empirical knowledge as a remedy. Together, the critique of minimum standards,
the proposal for reflexive architectural practices, and the notion that assumptions
should be interrogated throughout the design process foreshadowed key elements of
Mace’s later Universal Design philosophy.
Before Mace articulated this philosophy, however, similar ideas were shaping the
environmental design research field, which contended that scientific knowledge
could yield more robust design practices. Mace’s thesis provides a surprising window
into the rise of EDR, a field it prefigured by two years. In the 1960s architects and
social scientists used insights derived from human experience, behavior, and embodi-
ment to challenge Modernism and its emphasis on the standard inhabitant. Whereas
Modernist architects presumed an average inhabitant, the interdisciplinary field of
EDR coalesced from environmental psychology, urban sociology, history, philoso-
phy, and ergonomics to study the varied qualitative dimensions of human life.19 With
human-­environment relations at its center, EDR adopted an ecological understand-
ing of built space as an assemblage of bodies, economies, and knowledge.20
In architectural historian Joy Knoblauch’s words, EDR represented the “going
soft” of architecture in an era of hard science.21 Against the dominant architectural
emphasis on neutrality and standardization, EDR proponents offered the concept
of “value-­explicit” design, with particular attention to “economic and political con-
text.”22 In the sense that it challenged architects’ objective authority and neutrality,
EDR resembled independent living activism. But while activists challenged architec-
ture from the outside, claiming authority precisely because they were not licensed
architects, EDR pursued epistemic activism within the architectural profession: activ-
ism “not by the protesting crowds,” as architectural historian Abigail Sachs argues, but
“by architects for architectural discourse, which is the forum in which architects make
claims to professional expertise.”23 EDR challenged High Modernist standardization,
as well as the neutral objectivity of architects as space-­makers. Proponents argued
that architects’ intuition failed to capture the complexities of misfit or atypical users.24
Similar to feminist critiques of scientific objectivity, EDR characterized the main-
stream of architectural design as embodying epistemologies of ignorance, understood
in this context as the active production of not-­knowing through historical arrange-
ments (such as the normate template) as well as through habits of thought and prac-
tice (such as the taken-­for-­granted assumption of architects’ expertise about users).25
Epistemic activism adopted diverse tactics: challenging assumptions, producing new
knowledge, and transforming the basis of previous knowledge-­generation or inter-
pretation were key sites of intervention.

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 Epistemic Activism 137

Academic disciplines coalesce from geographically diffuse networks of knowers,

but their real-­time moments of encounter at conferences and meetings make it
possible to trace these networks, their influence, and the new ways of thinking they
produce. Such encounters suggest that epistemic communities and cultures, or net-
works of knowers and their habits of thought and perception, are also materialized.26
Although EDR ideas had circulated for at least a decade prior, the Environmental
Design Research Association (EDRA) formalized the field, providing a space in
which its interdisciplinary epistemic community could share and remake ideas of
person-­environment interaction. Participatory design research expert Henry Sanoff
established EDRA in 1968, at the height of global social protest and domestic political
concerns about urban inequality.27 Writing with his colleague Sidney Cohn, Sanoff
made the stakes for EDRA explicit.

There is a tendency [among designers] to be strong on relevancy and weak on scien-

tific rigor. There is a tendency to be unaware of a body of knowledge relevant to their
problems and the need to rediscover and re-­argue epistemological issues long since
resolved or declared un-­resolvable in the social and behavioral sciences. As a result
they contribute little to resolving the major conceptual problems and simultaneously
add to the total source of confusion and disarray which has pervaded this movement.28

Recalling Mace’s thesis, quoted at the start of this chapter, Sanoff and Cohn’s argu-
ment identifies architects’ ignorance in their failure to be interdisciplinary, to read
beyond their field. The human sciences, both social and behavioral, apparently held
the key to more robust architectural practice. Framed as a social and epistemic inter-
vention, the objective was to inject an epistemological notion of “evidence” into a
field that lacked a scientific notion of discernible research or rigorous truth.
EDRA consolidated ideas about architecture and science that, if Mace’s thesis is
any indication, had been brewing for quite some time in diverse fields. Mace’s 1966
thesis prefigured EDRA’s rise and the beginning of Sanoff ’s career as an NC State
professor (which took place months later). But “Housing Environmental Research”
was very much of the epistemic culture that the organization promoted. Mace and his
colleagues wrote, for instance, that the “most basic and important problem facing
architecture today” is that “scientifically grounded knowledge about the effects this
man-­contrived environment has on its inhabitants is absolutely minimal.”29 Later,
they argued that the architect must “use social scientists as consultants . . . in order
to discover the real needs of his clients,” noting that “there is no reason that architects
should not set up and direct their own research in order to discover answers to their
own particular questions.”30 These emphases on the “real” (as opposed to imagined
or fabricated) needs of clients also foreshadowed the 1967 AIA findings, which em-
phasized the need for data about “true characteristics” of disabled users.

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 138 Epistemic Activism

EDR proponents positioned the field as epistemic activism within architectural

discourse, an alignment of architectural theory and practice with social justice.31
Rather than adopt mainstream standards of rigor and objectivity, EDR experimented
with a complex understanding of good knowledge for good design. A central assump-
tion was that most architects substituted their own intuitive knowledge, based on
embodied experiences, for the user experience. EDR, by contrast, “portend[ed] link-
ages between research-­driven evidence and environmental design.”32 While it chal-
lenged architects to adopt a more rigorous evidence base, EDR was not rooted in
statistics or positivism. Key sources of data included social science research on “envi-
ronmental knowing,” which was rooted in phenomenological traditions.33 Some
researchers were influenced by cybernetics and general systems theory.34 The field
enabled researchers concerned with person-­environment relations in the disciplines
of design methodology, environmental psychology, urban sociology, rehabilitation,
history, and phenomenology to connect with practicing architects through a shared
interest in spatial relations.35 The resulting epistemic community brought nonarchi-
tectural expertise to bear on the making of built environment.
But the EDR paradigm was also a microcosm of civil rights–­era epistemological
and political debates. Whereas liberal frames position legibility as a sudden discovery,
the making-­visible of invisible bodies, legibility can also occur through imperatives
for gradual data collection, whereby surveillance becomes an acceptable solution to
social problems. For psychologists studying buildings and cities, the effects of built
environments on issues such as “undesirable behavior,” “social ills,” and “mental ill-
ness” caused concerns that intersected new arenas of policing.36 Despite its apparent
progressivism, EDR was entangled with the social projects of surveillance, contain-
ment, and incarceration. In response to urban riots in the late 1960s, for example, the
Kerner Report identified stressful urban environments as a factor producing black
rage. In response, however, sociological, psychological, and criminological research
on urban conditions proliferated, enabling targeted solutions for monitoring and
controlling urban communities of color.37 Presentations at EDRA meetings addressed
issues of how to contain and discipline urban populations through built environ-
ments, a seemingly benign response that buttressed the phenomenon now known
as mass incarceration.38
Within the EDR framework, scholars, designers, and activists also explored strate­
gies of epistemic resistance to hierarchy and control. As design researcher Charles Bur-
nette described it, the field represented a shift in design knowledge from industrial
and military human factors research to an expanded field that was “inherently more
humanistic and relevant to the broader concerns of environmental design.”39 Dis­
ability research was a key “humanistic” area for the field as it developed its concepts
of evidence and expertise (and consequently contributed to access-­knowledge).40
Many of the field’s early leaders, including environmental psychologist Gary Moore
(who cochaired EDRA’s Steering Committee with Sanoff) and influential sociologist

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 Epistemic Activism 139

John Zeisel, focused their research on the built environment and its effects on dis-
ability across the life span.41 Psychologist Carolyn Vash, who worked in vocational
rehabilitation for the state of California, introduced the politicized language of dis-
ability rights to EDRA in 1972 when she presented on “Discrimination by Design:
Mobility Barriers.”42 Like other rehabilitation specialists including Nugent, Vash em-
phasized that barrier-­free design such as ramps benefit nondisabled and disabled
people alike.43
Participatory action research on disability and aging pushed the field beyond
medical and rehabilitative models toward social understanding. Drawing on Sanoff ’s
influence, scholars such as Edward Steinfeld and Elaine Ostroff, both of whom would
become leaders in Universal Design, presented their work on participatory design
research at early EDRA meetings and continued to be involved in the organization.44
Steinfeld promoted participatory research on health in low-­income housing for elders,
which informed his later accessibility research.45 Ostroff, a Massachusetts-­based artist
and researcher who was involved in the deinstitutionalization movement, described
her attempts at epistemic activism within the field of special education.46 In the early
1970s, Ostroff had promoted disability maker practices within mental institutions and
special education, two areas that she found excessively focused on controlling rather
than supporting mentally disabled children.47 Her “Do-­It-­Yourself Kits for the Handi­
capped” and other projects provided disabled children and special education teachers
recycled or repurposed materials, which they would use to redesign classroom educa-
tion.48 Whereas top-­down mandates from experts and designers drove deinstitution-
alization in the state of Massachusetts, where she worked, Ostroff adopted a different
strategy, introducing ideas about disabled children as experts at the level of “adho­
cracies, temporary work groups,” and other informal networks within the institutions
that “promoted skill sharing and helped us to go beyond limited roles and disci-
plines.”49 Transferring authority from “elite consultants of the clinical, behavioral, and
design world,”50 Ostroff ’s strategy was to empower students with developmental dis-
abilities, parents, and teachers to redesign their classrooms and understand them-
selves as experts.51 These epistemic interventions into special education, from within
its discourse rather than beyond it, were the basis of Ostroff ’s groundbreaking 1978
book, Humanizing Environments, a title that referred to the dehumanizing conditions
of mental institutions in which she had worked.52 Ostroff ’s interdisciplinary approach
and unorthodox methods demonstrate the reach of the environmental design para-
digm, which included both the imperatives of surveillance and top-­down manage-
ment as well as grassroots strategies for user participation.53
Similar strategies of epistemic activism bridged EDR with the independent living
movement. Drawing on the EDR paradigm, architecture educators Raymond Lifchez
and Barbara Winslow at the University of California, Berkeley, worked with the in-
dependent living movement to develop participatory design education practices.54
The field’s influence on Design for Independent Living is explicit in the book’s section

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 140 Epistemic Activism

on how to conduct user research, which references sociological theories, such as

symbolic interactionism, as well as ethnographic methodologies to describe methods
of studying with disabled users.55 Suggesting its legibility to EDR, Harvard environ-
mental design expert Mayer Spivack hailed the book as “encouraging evidence . . . that
designers can develop rich, verifiable, dependable data to support their design work.”56
That this conception of evidence was gaining legibility among architectural research-
ers in the 1970s also reveals the extent to which knowledge itself had become a field
of political relations and activism. EDR’s humanistic approaches toward disability,
environmental behavior, and design shaped a capacious understanding of the con-
cept of evidence, which mirrored the CIL’s more visible and explicit interventions
into knowing-­making. Design for Independent Living translated the independent living
philosophy into EDR language.

For several decades designers have tried to understand what it is like for the child or
elderly person to operate in a world designed almost exclusively for the able-­bodied
adult, in order to design more sensitively from that other perspective. Now there
emerge other spokespersons for vulnerability—­physically disabled people. They are
truly articulate about their needs and expectations, and we do not have to second-­
guess their meaning. They offer a view of being in the world that truly challenges the
designer’s imagination.57

Here, reference to architects’ attempts at understanding children and elders points to

functional limitation research, which defined disability as a contextual but mechani-
cally replicable phenomenon. Disability simulation practices, in which nondisabled
people would wear blindfolds or use wheelchairs for a day, were commonplace in
rehabilitation research but increasingly challenged by disability activists, who claimed
that these practices captured neither the adaptive resourcefulness of life with dis­
ability nor the cultural dimensions of disability community.58 Lifchez and Winslow’s
user-­led design practices, rich ethnographic data, and scenario planning reinforced
the sense that simulation exercises were unnecessary if architects recognized disabled
people as experts about their own lives, whose knowledge challenges what rehabilita-
tion professionals or designers assume about disability (Figure 5.1).

EXPERIMENTS IN COMPLIANCE-­K NOWLEDGE

In the 1970s, disabled designers such as Mace took leadership roles in a new expert
industry, which formed around compliance with barrier-­free codes between 1973
(following the passage of Section 504) and 1980 (when ANSI published an updated
version of A117.1). Mace was at the forefront of this code compliance milieu, which
included generating compliance-­knowledge to define and implement codes, as well
as translating this knowledge into presentable information for designers, civic agents,

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 Epistemic Activism 141

Figure 5.1.  “Scenario mapping” activities that Lifchez and Winslow undertook by bringing
disabled people into the design studio. Raymond Lifchez and Barbara Winslow, Design for
Independent Living: The Environment and Physically Disabled People (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1979), 144–­45. Courtesy of Raymond Lifchez.

and community organizations. Mace’s thesis and lived experiences of disability shaped
his strategies for promoting barrier-­free design. When he graduated from NC State
in 1966, Mace had great difficulty with finding an architecture internship. Although
he was eventually employed at a small firm in Greensboro, he could not find acces-
sible housing in town and had to commute from his family home in Winston-­Salem.59
Throughout his career, Mace had to tinker with and remake technologies of architec-
tural labor; to access the studio’s drafting tables, he used a hydraulic stool of his own

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 142 Epistemic Activism

design.60 Nevertheless, the firm’s small size afforded opportunities to work on a num-
ber of public works, including “banks, schools, knitting mills, and an expansion for
the Greensboro Coliseum.”61 Soon, Mace began infusing ideas about users and acces-
sibility into his design projects.
Architectural education was his next area of intervention. In 1972 Mace was offered
a job teaching architectural drafting at Fayetteville Technical Institute, where he
found opportunities to infuse accessibility awareness into the technical dimensions of
the design process.62 Word of the disabled architect spread. Mace’s professional net-
works in Fayetteville connected him to the North Carolina state government, which
hired him to clarify and illustrate the state’s new accessibility guidelines, the first
state-­level standards in the United States and a “national model” (Figure 5.2).63 The
guidelines had been in the making for several years. As the state’s architect, Theresa
Raper, described it, “legislation was not enacted overnight in North Carolina and
implementation of these measures through the State Building Code was not instan­-
ta­neous. The process of development, implementation, education and now amend-
ment has been underway for about ten years.”64 In 1967, a year before the federal

Figure 5.2.  Cover of Ronald Mace, An Illustrated Handbook of the Handicapped Section of
the North Carolina State Building Code (Raleigh: North Carolina Building Code Council,
1974), showing an abstract wheelchair symbol and a ramp.

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 Epistemic Activism 143

Archi­tectural Barriers Act, North Carolina committed to incorporating accessibility

standards, based on ANSI A117.1, into state building codes.65 Initially, the “Code was
composed primarily of ‘should’s,’ largely duplicating the ANSI Standard, instead of
‘shall’s’; hence, it was viewed as recommending compliance.”66 More specific codes
materialized from a process of “collective bargaining”: builders demanded tax incen-
tives in exchange for building accessible multifamily apartments.67 But designers
found the new regulations, published in 1973, confusing and unclear. The reason, as
Raper described it, was that they were “forced to concentrate new effort on many
traditional building elements.”68 These concerns spoke directly to Mace’s idea that
architects’ training had not equipped them with the knowledge or skills to think
beyond traditional building approaches.
Hired by the state to illustrate and explain the new code, Mace gained access to
a privileged domain of power (the state’s code bureaucracy) and utilized a strategy of
epistemic activism to challenge architects’ assumptions and practices. Referencing
the Architectural Graphic Standards and other norms of architectural representation,

Figure 5.3.  A design template showing anthropometric wheelchair users and space
requirements for people using walking sticks (1978). Ronald L. Mace Papers, MC 00260,
Special Collections Research Center, North Carolina State University Libraries, Raleigh, N.C.

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 144 Epistemic Activism

some of the illustrations featured wheelchair anthropometrics (Figure 5.3). Others

were more stylized and playful, using photographs to show wheelchairs and other
devices in motion, conveying disability as dynamic and agentive (Figure 5.4).
Developing and disseminating the North Carolina accessibility code introduced
Mace to an emerging industry of barrier-­free design experts. In the code-­development
stage, he had met other disabled professionals, who the state had solicited for feed-
back. As Special Consultant to the Commissioner of Insurance, he produced visual
aids, such as illustrations and a slide show titled “Are You Aware?,” to educate non-
disabled “code officials, design professionals, students and civic groups.”69 Illustrating
the guidelines and creating the slideshow, with the help of his drafting students, pro-
pelled Mace and his accessibility expertise into a professional community concerned
with barrier-­free design. In his professional life, this community contrasted with ex-
periences of isolation in school and university. Rather than working separately from

Figure 5.4.  Mace used stylized images such as this one, layering a photograph of a
wheelchair user to create the appearance of motion, in order to convey a more dynamic
understanding of disability. Ronald Mace, An Illustrated Handbook of the Handicapped
Section of the North Carolina State Building Code (Raleigh: North Carolina Building Code
Council, 1974), 63, 78.

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 Epistemic Activism 145

students and colleagues, Mace applied his professional expertise and lived experi-
ences to redesigning everyday life, from the Fayetteville Technical Institute campus
to government buildings.
In 1974 Mace founded Barrier Free Environments (BFE), an accessibility con-
sultancy and design firm working with local businesses.70 Initially, BFE character-
ized itself as a firm specializing in “design for the disabled and elderly population”
(Figure 5.5).71 The firm designed accessibility in spaces that were not yet subject to
building codes, particularly multifamily dwellings, group homes, and mobile homes
(Figures 5.6 and 5.7).72 Although Mace had lived for most of his life in a single-­family
home in Winston-­Salem, his years living in a mobile home during architecture school
had given him direct, day-­to-­day experiences of tweaking the structure of such a
home for greater accessibility. His architecture thesis, which addressed mass hous-
ing in a still-­segregated black neighborhood, likewise reflected his awareness of the
raced and classed dimensions of housing beyond the suburban, single-­family home.
Similarly, Mace’s work on multifamily dwellings broadened the scope of barrier-­free
design beyond the idealized white suburban single-­family home to include class and
race in designers’ conceptions of users.
Despite reaching beyond middle-­class users, much of BFE’s early work reflected
the racialized and gendered norms of the disabled user in midcentury barrier-­free
design. This was evident in the bodies that BFE’s design publications depicted. A
mobile home accessibility g