Episode 34: Contra* History (2) with Elizabeth Guffey and Bess Williamson

Introduction:

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

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

What is the history of disability-accessible design? And how does this history get written? In this episode of Contra*, I continue to talk to historians Elizabeth Guffey and Bess Williamson about this topic. We focus on the ways that law and design shape understandings of disabled people, whether as consumers, workers, or activists. And we get to hear more about Guffey and Williamson's new book, where they propose a "disability theory of design"!

Interview:

Aimi Hamraie: I remember one of the things that I saw in the archive somewhere, I can't even remember where, was like Justin Dart, who is one of the disabled people who was behind pushing the ADA, also had created in the aftermath of the ADA, this huge marketing campaign about why companies should, first of all, think of disabled people as consumers. And it had this like interesting spin that was like if you don't do stuff for all these consumers then you're going to lose out on business. And we hear that repeated all the time now. But it really was this first citizenship, then consumption and those things are intimately tied together and justifying the existence of the other. Which as we've all kind of talked about, like raises all these questions about the citizenship status of people who are not able to consume luxury or even like middle class amenities.

Aimi Hamraie: But I wanted to tie this back to the disability theory of design too because the way that, Elizabeth, you were describing it earlier I thought was so interesting that design has become a way of like curing or removing barriers for disabled people. And there's, of course, this longer trajectory of that in the rehabilitation profession and in technology design in general. So Bess and I, we've written a lot about prosthetics. Elizabeth, you have that great stuff about the history of the wheelchair, which most... I don't really know anybody else who's writing about the history of the wheelchair. It's really necessary and the elephant in the room and all of these stories. But so what is the difference between the design theory of disability that existed in the early and mid 20th century, and the one that is kind of emerging now?

Elizabeth Guffey: Yeah, that's a good question because I think the one that's emerging now, you can actually be tracing it back through these themes that we've all been talking about. You can start to see it emerging and it starts to separate away from the social model. And I would say that's happened in the 80s and into the 90s. And it's especially, I think with the ADA itself, where design starts becoming this really important thing that's treated separately from a larger social movement. The stuff that you guys are talking about, the new liberal aspect. I don't get that sense within the social models that was playing out at that time, but boy does it start kicking in with design. And-

Bess Williamson: Would you say like a de-politicized form of disability identification? Do you think or?

Elizabeth Guffey: Yeah, it is really isn't it?

Bess Williamson: [crosstalk 00:02:56] Elizabeth and I are still trying to figure out what this design model disability is, hot on the near or soon to be hot on the presses. But this idea that, there's overlap with both medical and social models, right? What design you have access to or are you diagnosed with needing a certain device or whatever. But there's also moments in which design approaches to addressing disabled people's lives becomes separate from both of those, right? Because to construct a ramp, you don't know who's going to use it necessarily, right? And there's no sense of like diagnosis, you must have this particular condition in order to use a ramp, right?

Bess Williamson: Or a lever shaped door handle or in a contemporary sense we can think of like capturing videos, right? There's a lot of different reasons why you might be using those, but when does that become an ideology or an ideological approach to disability? And for me there is one version there that is de-politicized, right? Which is like, "We build a ramp, then we never have to talk about disability anymore."

Elizabeth Guffey: Right.

Bess Williamson: Or as we all know when you call or email or whatever to say like, "Is this accessible? And people say it's ADA compliant." And you're like, "Oh, well let's just, let's check"... what exactly does that mean to you? Because chances are whoever saying that hasn't actually read the latest code. So what they... they usually mean a certain set of things. So that becomes different from the openness and questions that might come about when you ask about access without this predetermined sense of what that may be.

Elizabeth Guffey: And I'd also add into that, you'll increasingly find in the press and even that designers themselves speak, this question, I think Meryl Alper really addresses it in terms of technology, but it's really also interface of this idea of the gift, the designer is giving to disabled people. And of course the pushback that we've seen, although it's not been articulated fully in this context, is this idea of integrating disabled people into the design process. But at the same time, that too is also reapplying design itself as the solution to disability. So it starts to reinforce the narrative that we're talking about.

Aimi Hamraie: There seems to be like, and this is happening so quickly, maybe even just in the last year or two, I think because of people like Liz Jackson, like taking some of these critiques directly to designers and setting up almost these natural experiments of social interactions. Or like these ideas are being tested and refined that there are these histories, of course, and present day examples of disabled people designing things for themselves, for ourselves, and then also what happens to the user expert. How does the user expert start to transform into like the dominant expert. Is that possible? What has to change? And it's so interesting how quickly like theory is developing around that too. So I wonder if some of that informing how you all are thinking about the design model of disability?

Elizabeth Guffey: Yeah. I mean there are all these new terms that we're hearing too, which is coming exactly out of what you're talking about. It's a real fulcrum of creativity. It's fascinating in its own way. And let me just say that Bess and I have talked about, we're not really endorsing or saying that there's something wrong, we're just acting as scholars and trying to trace a bigger picture to place all this. But those words that are coming out like access pale, which I've written about or techno science. Aimi, or think of Ashley Shew's technoableism, or Liz Jackson comes up with a dongle too. All of that stuff is really coming out of this mix in which design is really, really being loaded on about what it does, and can do, and what it has done for disabled people too. Yeah.

Aimi Hamraie: I'll add also, Louis Hickman has this great discussion of access labor, which I think is really important and the thread that runs beneath all of these things is like who is doing the making and then what are the labor politics of that? Or in her case she's writing about cart transcribers who are often in a completely different place, but their labor appears on a screen. And then there are all these like labor relations issues too which mean like the universities that hire them, the users and stuff.

Elizabeth Guffey: Well, Bess and I were writing about something that somebody had just alerted me to about a month or two ago about this cafe run by robots in Tokyo, which is fascinating. But it turns out that the robots are actually just avatars for disabled people who are working from their home. And it has been touted as this, it's really a promotional effort, but it's being touted as this way to bring disabled people into the workforce. And Japan of course has really serious labor issues with the aging of its population. So in one sense this was being proclaimed as a way to use the efforts of these people who are not interacting with the rest of society and so on and so forth. But yeah. It brings up interesting other questions too. They're being paid the minimum wage. It brings up other labor issues there too. The technology is enabling, but it also, in many ways, it also restricts us. Because technology only enables as much as the person who's made the technology, the designer has thought about these things.

Aimi Hamraie: Yeah. And in these kinds of contexts where someone is being paid a very poor wage, it really, the system that benefits from that is not the disabled person because the disabled person may get other kinds of supports if they are not able to work, like government supports. Which are fraught in all sorts of ways too, obviously. But the system that benefits is like the macro economy that is also not working into the benefit of the disabled people. So these are the types of critiques that like Marxist geographers of disability and people like Marta Russell have talked about for a really long time.

Aimi Hamraie: But now we're in this moment where disability justice is emerging as a new framework and really challenging disability rights and the way that it thinks about like disabled people but also collectively. And so we're kind of like having these conversations again. And I think it's really productive and important. And it goes to like another question that I have, which is about the implications of these histories that we study for present day politics. Why does it matter for people engaged in various forms of disabilities struggle or policymakers or whomever to understand these stories in the ways that we're telling them?

Bess Williamson: There's so many implications. I think, the really big ones are the ones that you both just articulated around who's in control, who's in power in these projects, right? It all comes back to in many ways, it's not the object of design, it's the process that tells us, speaks a lot to its potential outcome in terms of what were the factors involved. But I think also in terms of, I think, to get back to our original question of like, why now? Why did these stories seem to be coming out so much more now than a decade ago when we all started working on it? And I think there's also an overall sharpening of critical discourse around design, right?

Bess Williamson: And while of course that critical discourse goes back through, at least Marx, if not before. When I think of how when I started to work on this, and even when I look back at my own dissertation, there was a very sunny point of view around designing in response to disability. Which is to say that basically any design effort was considered to be a good one, right? In the worst cases what I see it is that design students who are churning out these projects often without a lot of consultation with disabled people are always awarded for even making an effort. Like, "You're such a good person for thinking about this. Or this is such a good application of design." Without a critical thought about it.

Bess Williamson: But there's so much other conversation going on in the design world critique, right? Whether it's critique of a whole digital utopia that we were supposed to be getting with social media, or other state level projects and so on around climate and so on that, to me, there's still a huge opportunity for disability to be more central in that broader critique, right, that's so often in the shadows of it or not discussed. But there's a tremendous amount, I think, of overlap between the central questions that folks in the field of critical design or just in the broader critical conversation around technology.

Bess Williamson: So much of it seems to inter weave with disability studies conversation that I think it brings these... There just so often are these very clear precedents where it's like, "The disability rights movement, while it had many factors, I still see it as one of the most powerful consumer driven sort of quote unquote user driven design critiques of the 20th century." Right? Which is all of this stuff that you made that you thought was the ideal version of design didn't work for a significant segment of the population, pushed back and made significant change. So I think that's really a model for thinking about like, "Who are we missing when we invent stuff?"

Aimi Hamraie: Absolutely. So you all are developing that model for a book that you're editing. Is that right? Do you want to say a little bit about that?

Bess Williamson: So Elizabeth and I have been editing this book and it should be out next year, middle of next year. So we're in the final kind of stages right now called Making Disability Modern: Design Histories. So it's basically, in a lot of ways it's a lot of case studies that tangentially relate to the histories that we've already been tracing. But it goes back into the 18th century to the present of some great, amazing case studies of architectural sites, of objects, of digital platforms, of all kinds of things.

Bess Williamson: And as we put this together, yeah, we started to say, "There's something in common here and we can't say that what's in common is who's doing the designing, who's receiving the designing, whether they were good or bad examples." Because it runs the gamut. But what we're seeing is a common belief that design is a way of addressing disability. It's not a tool, or to say, it's not always a tool of medical change or social administration or whatever. But in itself it seems to offer this particular perspective and that makes the stakes of what do we consider a designer and so on to be very high?

Elizabeth Guffey: And potentially empowering as well as we're starting to talk about now. But it does give a history and a heft to those ideas, showing that this has been around actually for a while. And we need to be thinking of it seriously. And yes, bringing critique to it, and if only to make it be more dynamic as well. One are the best essays or they're all great in different ways. But one of the essays is fascinating to me because they opened up new ways for me to think about what disability is and the environment. Debra Parr has a great essay in there about air, and the right to breathe as well. Great way of starting to really think about what it is that we're talking about when we're designing environments too.

Bess Williamson: Yeah, and I should say while there are a lot of familiar names in there to folks in the disability studies world. Jai Verdi and Wanda Lieberman who's, I feel like is our fourth in our team of design historians of disability, and so on. But yeah, Deborah is usually a fashion historian and writing about scent as a medium of art and design. And so it's really exciting to have her perspective on grappling with, what is this, as she researched it and realizing that there's this whole discourse around scent as a an access issue.

Aimi Hamraie: Yeah, that's great. Well I look forward to reading all of it and especially that article because I think that that is an example of the types of disability issues that were still like largely illegible like in the earlier days of the ADA. And have not yet percolated into the codes and standards and things like that. But that are very much part of the disability justice conversation, and discussions about disability, and its intersections with environmental racism and related issues. So I think it's really exciting to have scholarly work also that helps to support the work that designers and activists are doing around those areas.

Bess Williamson: Yeah. In terms of tracing the history of access and design, I think all of us have had different ways of trying to articulate the stages of access, right? Or the code versus the basics or what actually happens, what's common in a given time. And then what is actually needed or asked for that may fall by under the radar of codes or just may never be documented or whatever, or never fulfilled or never achieved. And disability justice from my understanding of it, that it helps me... I don't actually, I tend to use the term writing as much. But thinking about it tends to help me think about what the limitations of rights are. Legal rights, right? There's something else out there.

Bess Williamson: And this comes up so often in terms of talking about access as well, right? It's like for me I tend to use access with a little bit of skepticism or the title of my book accessible America, right? Refers to a framework for access developed within a specific historical moment in the United States, right? So it's linked to various quote unquote American ideals around independence and self sufficiency in the post World War II period. But I think a lot of these terms it strikes me similarly seek to distinguish the mechanisms of creating access from some of the other... the ideals of access to be honest. Because it's like there's very utopian possibility there, that so frequently where identifying where it falls short.

Aimi Hamraie: Yeah. I really think that that move of distinguishing between laws, and standards, and codes, and something else, something that's more expansive, more utopian maybe, has actually been part of the history of access all along. That like from the moment that any standards were created, there was the caveat that this is the floor, not the ceiling. And we ought to be trying to do so much more. And in all of these cases, the ideologies are very different, but that move exists. So I think that that also puts a little bit of pressure on disability justice as a framework to really think about how people have been making this distinction all along. But what is distinct in this moment? And there are some really big things that are distinct specifically around race, and gender, and sexuality, and kind of orientations towards market logic and things like that. But sometimes it's not as obvious.

Elizabeth Guffey: And yet at the same time, I guess as somebody who's bumping up against the laws themselves. The laws are so flimsy as it is and so hard to enforce. To me, they don't feel like a bottom or a base to build on. To me, most of them still feel quite unattainable. They're written very idealistically and it's very, very hard to actually enforce them even to know what they're referring to most of the time. We still struggle to figure out what they really mean in our day-to-day life. Which is the case with most American law. That is the system that we have, very idealistic goals and very, very difficult to adjudicate them in real life. But in my experience even that is so difficult to achieve the idea. I do like the idea of a greater justice that transcends things that can just be captured in code, which is so limiting in its own way, but it's so complicated.

Aimi Hamraie: Yeah. It's like there has to be still accountability toward a foundation and we expend most of our energy just trying to get the foundation to happen. So it's like sometimes hard to imagine what more there could be.

Bess Williamson: Yeah, and for me, what this comes back to is a big question that I found myself circling around as I was finishing up this book. Which is, is design fundamentally, the way that design operates in the contemporary and recent historical present... is it possible to have a just design or an accessible design? And this is really going to get into the weeds, but for real close readers of my book, there's this section at the end where I try to grapple with the idea of Crip design or cripistemology to use a term that Robert McRuer and others had a discussion about. Was I basically, partly because Robert McRuer was one of the editors of the series that my book was published in.

Bess Williamson: But just also in general, I wanted to grapple with that question of like, is there a such a thing as a techno-science design, which is to say that acknowledges and comes from the community driven approaches of disability politics of the later 20th century? And I ended up with a kind of ambiguous statement, but I wanted to question whether design ultimately can be a kind of tool of non-imperialist, non-capitalist production. Because design as it's practice is almost always, is inherently tied up in those gene mechanisms, right? Design is industrial, design is commercial, and design... the parts of design that we often love are the ones that are deeply rooted in that. That are luxurious, that are beautiful, that are desirable, that make us feel hot in a certain way, or accepted or comfortable or whatever. And so there is this part of me that also thinks that this is kind of in keeping with the eternal utopian shortfall of design.

Aimi Hamraie: Yeah.

Bess Williamson: [crosstalk 00:23:58] That has been really well chronicled, if you all had been listening to this Nice Try podcast from Curb, that has all these utopian things. I'm waiting for them to call us about the accessibility utopia. But I think it does link to that a little bit, that there's some serious ways in which design itself, is an imperfect tool for a lot of these social goals.

Aimi Hamraie: Yeah. The thing that what you're saying brings up for me is when Kelly Fritz and I were working on the Crip techno-science Manifesto, we were thinking a lot with Donna Harway's Cyborg Manifesto. Which is basically about like she says the techno-science is non-innocent so it's simultaneously wrapped up in all of these like imperialist and capitalist networks of production. People are dying in mines to make computer parts. People are getting seriously injured, sewing blue jeans, things like that. And yet there are these things that technology does that have positive social benefits for some people. And we were trying to think about what does this mean in a disability context when Crip politics is supposed to align very strongly against colonialism etc.

Aimi Hamraie:

And the thing about it is that a lot of our models for Crip politics still emerge in this majority world setting. And so they're not necessarily... they don't necessarily have built in solidarities that they ought to. And so some things that could maybe approximate the ideal or like un-built designs, like things that people designed and decided not to make because the impact of being entangled with all these production processes would outweigh the benefits to people. And you find a little bit of discussion about that, when people problematize like the iPhone as this like, "We can make all these accessibility apps. But then who's producing the iPhone? And how is that causing debility?" And things like that.

Elizabeth Guffey: One of the things that I wrote an essay on for making disability modern is this thing I use, an assistive device, the walking bag, which is Japanese. And it's just, it's great in a lot of ways because it's small and maneuverable, provides support. It tricks my brain thinking I'm more mobile than I am. And it makes it then easier for me to get my muscles moving but it's not recognized as an assistive device in the US, it looks like a rolling suitcase. So it's fascinating to me, right, there to be using an assistive device that's not recognized as an assistive device. Which then brings up this question, well what is an assistive device? And it plays out constantly in my day-to-day life, where people casually joke, "Are you from out of town?" And I live here, I've lived here for 20 years.

Elizabeth Guffey: But also people try to, valets at hotels try to grab the thing away from me so that they can store it for me and stuff like that. It was just fascinating to me how that actually we have very limited ideas of what design for disability can be. And I'm not saying there's something strange about that, it makes perfect sense, but it can be quite odd and limiting if you go anywhere outside of what's expected of a disability device or disability tools in general. So kudos to the guy who invented it. But it was actually distributed within the US, which is where I found it at a travel store.

Elizabeth Guffey: But then it ran into all kinds of legal issues. And I think it was driven also up to the market by these four wheel rolling suitcases that you see everywhere now, it innovated that. But Samsonite for example, took over that design, and mass produced it in a way that's not particularly usable for disabled people like me. The Japanese one is very, very strong and it's built in certain ways that are different. But anyway, it goes into... I talk about like that person did go ahead and build his dream of creating that device, but whether it ever has really found a good audience for it is another question too, and how that held up in the marketplace is questionable.

Bess Williamson: Elizabeth, I love that essay, that chapter so much and I'm excited for everyone to read it in our book project. But it maybe dovetails in with the Crip techno-science issue that Aimi and Kelly put together too. One of the things that strikes me when we're talking about utopian design or the shortfalls of design in reality, is that design writing is also an area that has been so fruitful, I think, for imagining access beyond what has existed. So there's an amazing three person authored piece in that Catalyst issue by Ashley Shew. Now I'm going not remember everyone's name, Mallory Nelson and Bethany Stevens?

Elizabeth Guffey: Stevens, yeah.

Bess Williamson: Stevens, thank you. About their own devices and just what they call them. And I mean it's so fanciful and it's these great drawings and stuff. And it's like I have a bottomless well of interest in reading peoples personal reflections on the design things in their lives. And so often those personal reflections have to do with disability in some way. And I think that when you actually bring together someone's life, their community, their devices or their spaces or whatever, you get at some of those beyond access dimensions of design.

Elizabeth Guffey: Yeah. That's actually the book that I'd love to see written, a bunch of people writing about their access devices or whatever else.

Aimi Hamraie: Oh, I was going to say almost exactly the same thing. That something I've been thinking about, and this podcast is part of it, is how to create more archives about disability and design. And how to leave evidence. And which is a term from Mia Mingus. If these archives that we use to write our books, they're so productive for us, and they also have these gaps, how do we create an archive of the present day that includes people's stories about how they use technology, the technologies themselves, the texts and things like that. And so some of the content in Catalyst was actually kind of an early stab at that, especially the... there's a section that has like four makers and they're talking about their design practices. Yeah. It could be... I'm imagining some like online archive of disability and technology that has these historical and contemporary examples, could be a cool profession.

Elizabeth Guffey: I think that's brilliant, Aimi, that's very, very smartly thought out.

Aimi Hamraie: NEH, if you're listening to this. [crosstalk 00:31:40] Thank you all so much. This was such a wonderful conversation. And I look forward to continuing it. And thank you for your time and for sharing also about your new book that's coming out, which we'll definitely put in the show notes.

Outro:

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