Situating Universal Design Architecture: Designing With Whom?

Jones, P. (2014) ‘Situating Universal Design Architecture: Designing with Whom?’,

Disability and Rehabilitation 36(16): 1369-74.

Introduction

‘Change life! Change society! These precepts mean nothing without the

production of an appropriate space [...] new social relationships call for a new

space, and vice versa’ ([1]: 59)

Architectural design is frequently drawn upon as part of attempts to challenge existing forms

of social order and to deliver spaces that will symbolise, or even catalyse, more equitable

social worlds [2-8]. Meanwhile, a good deal of related critique has addressed what could be

termed the ‘architecturally disabling’ [9] nature of much of the existing built environment

(for example [8-14]). An implication of these distinct-but-related literatures is that

historically and contemporaneously architects have designed spaces that privilege certain

bodily capacities over others [12] [15].

Against this backdrop, Universal Design (UD) has the following starting points: i) the built

fabric of cities is experienced by many as hostile to their bodies, mobilities and

understandings of urban space; and ii) that ‘better design’ may militate this situation. When

stated thus, the appeal of UD is certainly difficult to appreciate. The architect and designer

Ronald L. Mace, who coined the term, and after whom a major research centre is named,

defined UD as the ‘design of products and environments to be useable by all people, to the

greatest extent possible, without the need for adaptation or specialised design’ [16: page 4].

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The readily-communicable, intuitively-desirable nature of this, and other statements of UD

(for example [17-23]) has seen what are in actual fact diffuse and often only loosely

connected interventions becoming widely resonant in the spheres of politics and design.

While claims that UD represents a ‘century’s worth of change in a decade’ [24: page xxiii]

are over-stated, the widespread take-up of UD has seen its incorporation into declarations of

the United Nations and World Trade Organisation, and national policy statements in

Australia, Brasil, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, USA and the Netherlands [21: page 1.5] [24:

page xxiii]. The discourse of UD is also widely resonant across fields of rehabilitation [22]

[26-28], education policy and practice [18] [29-30] - including in architectural pedagogy [31-

34] – and in the development of assistive technologies [35]. And although yet to be

‘mainstreamed’ in architectural practice, such has been the impact of the movement relative

to accessible architecture and urban design that one commentator has described UD as a ‘new

orthodoxy... albeit one that is still to filter into many of the practices of architects’ [36: page

874]. This article suggests that the ongoing embedding of UD into the architectural field is an

opportune juncture at which to open up debate about the movement.

Echoing the calls expressed by a range of disability scholars for an unpacking of UD [36-40],

the article explores the relationship between UD and architecture, and in particular focuses on

the presently ambiguous capacity of the user to materially affect decision-making therein.

The article is divided into a further three sections and a Conclusion. Section One considers

aforementioned theoretically-engaged calls for an unpacking of the foundational assumptions

of UD [36-40], exploring the extent to which the quest for a coherent definition of the

movement can usefully be refocused to engage more fully with the politics of architectural

design. This discussion of why UD has proved so successful at setting the tone for a wide

variety of political and design interventions also takes in a problematization of the taken-for-

granteds within much UD scholarship. Second, I situate UD vis-a-vis those ‘participatory

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architecture’ interventions that have sought to problematize what are characteristically

unequal architect-user relations in professional architectural practice [3-7]. Drawing from

social scientific analyses of participation in architectural production, the centrally-important,

but hitherto under-developed role of the user is a crucial consideration for UD as its

principles and working methods continue to percolate into architects’ practice. Third, and

developing the analysis of the frequently taken-for-granted professional-user relation,

Antonio Gramsci’s concept of the ‘organic intellectual’ is suggested as one device for

exploring the professional implications of foregrounding the user as a decision-maker in

architectural design practice. In doing so, the article address a series of typically underplayed

issues in UD concerning users, participation and power, and seeks to contribute to emergent

debates on UD and architecture.

Universal Design: Some Initial Observations

The meaning of “Universal Design” has proliferated as a concept with

ideological, political and epistemological resonances beyond its original

design context [39]

Certain types of architecture make the social world a more difficult place for many to dwell.

Understanding architecture through the lens of a social model of disability (for example, [8-

14]) suggests profit in examining architecture with a view to securing spaces that militate

such hostilities (or, tantalisingly, in some instances overcome altogether). However,

outcomes that are ‘architecturally disabling’ [9] continue to be prevalent in cities the world

over [33-34].

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Those seeking to use UD to realise a human-made environment better sensitized to the

demands of a wide variety of bodies and uses are faced with an initial problem of definition:

what is it? The popularity of the term, and its elastic usage across a disparate range of fields

including but-not-limited-to rehabilitation [27-28], product design [46], politics and policy

[17] [19] and architecture [10] [32] [36] makes this fundamental task a very difficult one. UD

quests for a comprehensive definition of UD characterise much of the literature [20-21] [30]

[32] [48-49]. Across the discussions on UD there is a growing cleavage between those

programmatic documents and handbooks communicating technical design principles (for

example [17-18] [23]) and calls for a more philosophical engagement with UD’s

epistemological foundations (for example [36-40]). Due to its emergence from very different

practice contexts in a variety of places [40], UD has a polarised nature, with the cumulative

effect making UD all-the-more difficult to pin down and understand.i

One response to the vexed question of definition has been to return to sources so to speak, by

revisiting the canonical early contributions of Mace [16], who developed UD as a way as to

deliver spaces that precluded as few uses/facilitated as many uses as was possible. In order to

crystallise the concerns of the emergent movement, a group from the Center for UD at North

Carolina State University, working with Mace, distilled disparate design cases and writings

from the tradition into a coherent, seven point manifesto [11], the headlines of which is now

familiar to many:

i. Equitable use

ii. Flexibility in use

iii. Simple and intuitive use

iv. Perceptible information

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v. Tolerance for error

vi. Low physical effort

vii. Size and space for approach and use

Despite the concision and clarity that characterises this, and other programmatic UD

documents [20-22], there is something elusive in these ostensibly incontestable and

unambiguous statements. Although unsurprisingly providing a starting point for many

searching for a definition of UD, these abstracted statements are sufficiently elastic so as to

potentially include a bewilderingly wide range of design-for-all interventions. The UD

movement is dominated by the practice contexts from which it emerged and in which it has

been so enthusiastically operationalised; these are not typically or primarily philosophically

or theoretically-oriented disciplines [36] [39-40]. This is not to project a deficit on these

important and varied contributions to UD - and it would be a scholar’s fallacy to expect to

find abstract philosophy on UD in documents and resources designed for very different, more

practical, purposes - but at the same time as a direct result of this practical orientation there

has been little attention paid to the epistemological underpinnings of UD (as observed by [5],

[9-11]). Accordingly, and despite the huge and rich repertoire of technical UD materials cited

above, claims that UD constitutes ‘a new philosophical position for the practicing

professional’ [66: page 180, my emphasis] seems to invite further unpacking.

In communicating adequately a wide set of practices in resonant terms that are already

generally understood, UD has proved successful in setting the tone of practices in policy,

design and rehabilitation contexts. In lending additional force and momentum to a wide

variety of interventions, UD has had crucial affordances in both i) provided a frame for like-

minded designers in different professions, for example architects and rehabilitation specialists

[27], to communicate across professional boundaries and practice traditions; and ii)

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negotiating building regulations, which do not always compel the implementation of

accessibility rules, but rather often rest on a ‘moral obligation’ [22: page 5.3]. Although the

popularity of UD can be explained thanks to its capacity to satisfy these communicative

requirements, its popularisation has been accompanied by an unquestioning acceptance of its

working assumptions. In other words, UD’s utility in ‘bracketing off’ the complexities of

‘designing for difference’ has often seen it accompanied by an acceptance of the normative

desirability of the concept, with ‘writings about UD tend[ing] to accept it is a good thing and

focus[ing] on evaluating its technical feasibility, practical applications and operational

outcomes’ [36: page 874] (or even having an ‘evangelical feel’ [66: page 181].

The tendency for systems of thought, including those associated with professional practice, to

become normalised orthodoxies less open to scrutiny from the ‘outside’ has been described as

‘black-boxing’ [55-56], a process which functions, intentionally or not, to ‘transform an input

to output [with users] not needing to know how the transformation is made in order to use the

box’ [57: p14-5]. If one response to the putative ‘black-boxing’ of UD has been to seek

illumination by tracing its origins [26] [38] [39] [49], another has been to pursue theoretical

analysis of what lies ‘beneath’ the movement. Such calls for unpacking of the foundational

assumptions of UD having grown apace in recent years [38-40]. The most persuasive of these

calls has been made by Sociologist Rob Imrie, who has engaged with the ‘underlying

assumptions about disability and design shaping the content of UD’ [36: page 874]. Imrie has

argued that key statements from within UD bear the hallmarks of technicist responses to

disability, with the resultant outcome that the movement’s value base often displaying

‘vestiges of a medical model [with] clinical and physiological rather than cultural (social)

i If this undermines the ‘universal’ character of the movement (in the usual sense of this word), it is interesting to note that some UD scholars and practicioners have expressed frustration at fuzzy application of the label, for example [21: page 37] who notes with regret that ‘unfortunately the term UD has been inappropriately adopted by some architects... as a trendy synonym for compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act.

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criteria … shaping its design mentalities and approaches’ (ibid) (for similar engagements see

also [20] [38-40] [48]).

Taking as a point of departure Imrie’s observation that there is ‘little or no evaluation of

[UD’s] underlying principles and its theoretical and conceptual content’ [36: p872], I would

argue for a refocusing of such calls. As UD is being deployed in so many different social and

cultural contexts any always-and-everywhere analysis is not possible.ii For example, while

UD is being mobilised by those committed to far-reaching social transformation of the built

environment, it is also being used to shape military applications [21] [36] and commercial

applications [46], sites where critical analyses are eschewed in favour of ‘what works’

functionalism. In this context any ‘foundations’ of UD are only as stable as actors’ capacity,

and appetite, to construct them as such [60-61].iii

In the next section I propose an engagement between UD and participatory architectural

initiatives that attempt to ‘put the user at the hub of any design exercise’ [36: page 110], so as

to allow sharper focus on the social processes through which architects both design buildings

and spaces, and deploy the term of UD as a descriptor.

ii D’Souza’s [38] case for positioning UD as a critical theory illustrates these tensions. In seeking to make a case for UD’s correspondence with critical theory, D’Souza is necessarily required to create unified and coherent versions of a diffuse, disparate intellectual tradition against which to compare/situate UD, itself a diffuse and disparate set of endeavours. In so doing, and despite elsewhere in her thought-provoking chapter suggesting that UD is in practice not dominated by one particular paradigm or epistemological perspective, D’Souza’s account risks positing a coherence on UD – and critical theory – not always evident in widely variant applications of such.

iii Neurath’s famous anti-foundationalist metaphor of the boat suggests that despite, and often actually because of, professional expertise and scientific understanding, we are all lost at sea. He suggests we ‘[i]magine sailors who, far out at sea, transform the shape of their clumsy vessel from a more circular to a more fish-like one. They use some drifting timber, besides the timber of the old structure, to modify the skeleton and the hull of their vessel. But they cannot put the ship in dock in order to start from scratch. During their work they stay on the old structure and deal with heavy gales and thundering waves. In transforming their ship they take care that dangerous leakages do not occur. A new ship grows out of the old one, step-by-step – and while they are building the sailors may already be thinking of a new structure... The whole thing will go on in a way we cannot even anticipate today. That is our fate’ [60: page 46-8]. I am very grateful to Michael Mair for introducing me to this metaphor and to Neurath’s work in general.

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Challenging an ‘Absent Present’ in Architectural Design: Users, Participation and UD

“The User” is a designer’s object, a construction which is effective only in so far it

conforms to what all reasonable participants to these design process see might be the

case [62: page 11]

We all use concepts – ‘abstract entities [to] selectively organise experience’ [63: page 437] -

when making sense of the world and acting in it [64]. In professional contexts, including

rehabilitation just as much as architecture, the use of concepts both helps us organise

experience forestalling any requirement unpack completely every statement about the world

(which necessarily always rest on lots of others, [60-61]). For example, ‘patient’, or ‘student’

are categories put to use in professional life that cover a range of lived complexities and

differences, but that are deployed to simplify and allow communication in situ. A major

appeal of the concept of UD lies precisely in the fact that its deployment allows a kind of a

‘bracketing off’ of all the messy and infinitely complex relations entangled in design

philosophy and practice. As UD has come to stand as a proxy for a particular approach, it is a

device for giving structure to a bundle of otherwise ill-structured issues concerning design

and accessibility. The concept of UD acts as a shorthand vis-a-vis theories and philosophies,

a ‘holding position’ that forestalls the requirement to ‘unpack’ every assumption while

allowing designers to get on with the demanding practical tasks at hand.

Drawing on Donald Schön’s seminal analysis of design [65], sociologists Wes Sharrock and

Bob Anderson have studied the conceptual resources that ‘designers use to construct their

design worlds’ [62: page 5). Through ethnographic study, Sharrock and Anderson conclude

that the concept of ‘the user’ does crucial work for designers in demarcating a particular

‘space’ in the process, for example around which the functionality of machines can be

ordered and measured. On the paradoxically central-yet-passive status of the category of the

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user in design practice – and drawing on earlier coinage of Mike Lynch’s – Sharrock and

Anderson argue that ‘users’ often come to constitute a ‘scenic feature’ of the design process,

representing a conceptual element simultaneously crucial to the ‘structuring of design worlds’

[62: page 13] but seeing actual users occupying a peripheral status.

In common with rehabilitation, architecture interfaces with everyday life, bodies and

mobilities, which means that interventions in the built environment are always and

everywhere politically ‘high stakes’, with actions and decisions having material impacts on

people. The highly problematic assumptions that frequently underpin the architect-user

relation is a starting point for participatory architectural approaches. Although itself a

contested domain reflective of many of the definitional issues that bedevil UD, for present

purposes participatory architecture can be understood as an umbrella term given to an

‘extended family’ of practices that challenge problematically unequal power relations

between architects and their publics, which are otherwise prevalent in professional

architecture [3-7]. Participatory architecture rests on the notion that in democratic societies -

and even assuming the best technical knowledge and professional expertise - it is not possible

to justify making decisions and interventions that will impact directly on the lives of people

without ensuring their meaningful involvement in them [3: page 6]. Such debates on

meaningful user engagement are not limited solely to architecture, with many parallel

explorations in rehabilitation for example [28]. Participatory approaches are characterised by

an acknowledgement that public involvement – while bringing with it lots of additional

communicative challenges– not only ensures democratic legitimacy, it also improves the

quality of outcomes by bringing into the process the privileged perceptions and expertises of

users, with democratic ‘design-making methodology’ [34: page 408] enriching the resultant

spaces/interventions.

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From the perspective of participatory architects, democratic professional practice is unlikely

to be guaranteed from within the profession, with accountability accompanying full public

scrutiny of decision-making is much more likely to better decide upon limits to legitimacy

[61]. Far-reaching critique encouraged a radical rethink of architect-public relations, going so

far as to problematize the basis of much professional self-perception and distinction,

concluding that ‘all barriers between builders and users must be abolished [and] the forced

passivity of the user must dissolve in a condition of creative and decisional equivalence’ [De

Carlo, cited in 5: page 132]. Certainly much experimentation with different modes of

participatory architecture have sprung forth from wider political movements questioning

exploring social change more widely [3] [7], with the role of state institutions the site of

much critique. ‘Participation’ has become embedded in the very institutional contexts it set

out to critique, with such approaches have now mainstreamed in a variety of building

regulations and urban and national policies [7]. This embedding of participation in regulatory

contexts has also led to a number of unanticipated and unintended consequences [3] [6-7]

[41].

Critical engagements have pointed to the contradiction that participatory architectural

initiatives designed to empower users in decision-making, outcomes have often seen ‘the

same old patterns of power repeat[ing] themselves’; attempts to hear the voices of

communities paradoxically ‘stifl[e] the sound coming out’ [5: page xiv; 41: page 24] (in an

attempt to satisfy regulations these response often end up with a bureaucratic formalism, with

too often citizen involvement a ‘token, bringing a degree of worthiness to the architectural

process without transforming it’ [41: page 13]. It is also in the context of the widened take-up

of what passes for participation that accounts have proposed increased professional scrutiny

of the things done under these auspices, lest the politics of participation become too ‘settled’

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and unquestioned. Suggesting that ‘[w]hen we plan “for” people... we tend, once consensus is

reached, to freeze it into permanent fact’ [4: page13].

This vignette of participatory architecture should give us pause concerning the decision-

making capacity of citizens in UD. To date UD research initiatives have focused

overwhelmingly on built outcomes of design rather than the processes that lead to such. UD

advocates have had relatively little to say about the capacity of users to shape design

outcomes; Mace did write on the political necessity to engage fully with architect-user

relations [16], but discussion of such is absent in key contemporary accounts, which tend

towards communicating within the community of UD practicioners [20-22]. This is not to say

that there is no discussion of users in UD. On the contrary: under the auspices of UD there

have been many attempts to formulate more precise and refined categorisation of users that

move away from normate versions of ‘the user’ common in mainstream architectural practice

[6] [15] [36]. An example of this is Wijk’s injunction encouraging UD designers to ‘not think

in terms of people, but to look at every aspect of human functioning’ [48: page 101, my

emphasis]. While endeavouring to design buildings and spaces in between them that can be

used by all people to the greatest extent possible [16] necessarily requires some notion of the

types of bodies and mobilities that will use them, no matter how nuanced or technically

precise these conceptualisations of users are, if citizens are not involved in materially shaping

the outcomes of the design process, they risk reproducing a ‘scenic’, disempowered, notion of

the user.

The next section uses the work of Antonio Gramsci (1971) as a way of highlighting the

professional challenge for UD architects keen to develop ‘a renewed focus placing the user at

the hub of any design exercise’ [38: 110]. While the above discussion on participation and

UD may suggest a bracketing off, an opening up is what these articles are all about.

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UD and Organic Architects

‘Architecture is too important to be left to architects’ [4: page 13].

In a distinction has some import for rehabilitation and architecture alike, the Marxist

philosopher Antonio Gramsci (1897-1937) contrasted ‘traditional’ and ‘organic’ intellectuals

[44]. ‘Traditional intellectuals’ are those professionals connected to institutions that maintain

highly asymmetric power relations with users and whose self-understanding is contingent on

a disinterested [sic], pseudo-scientific approach to knowledge. In contradistinction, the

‘organic intellectuals’ are reflective of the interests and experiences of politically

subordinated and marginalised groups. Whereas ‘traditional intellectuals’ are wont to

consider their insights as distinct from everyday social life, containing authoritative

‘solutions’ to the social problems of the less powerful, the ‘organic intellectual’ is embedded

within the very social worlds with which they engage, frequently acting as outspoken critics

of the structures and practices of their own professions (where they maintain inequalities or

obfuscate the accountabilities for the impact of professional decisions). While Gramsci’s

contrast was clearly a political device to disrupt professional knowledge and enculture social

change, his notion of professionals as ‘permanent persuaders’ - willing to marshal their

expertise and resources in the service of outcomes more favourable for the dominated [45:

page 129] – bears further scrutiny.iv

From Gramsci’s perspective, a key challenge for UD architects concerns not solely accessible

or built outcomes, but also to spearhead a way of approaching the design process that iv Although operating in a different intellectual tradition to Gramsci, Otto Neurath had much to say about professional knowledge in democratic societies [60]. Arguing that professions have no privileged insight into the ‘correct’ responses to social problems – they are always by definition normative questions – Neurath critiques the search for an objective ‘scientific’ basis to justify interventions as a problematic starting point. Neurath saw the major responsibility of professions as lying in the identification of alternative responses to social issues, and of setting out the parameters and routes of differing strategies that could be pursued in pursuit of the same, democratically decided upon, goal.

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eschews ‘black-boxed’ processes and unequal hierarchies between designer and designed-for.

In other words, the attempt to embed ways of designing that will respond better to the needs

of disabled people and a range of bodies necessarily must entails an explicit critique of

existing ways of designing that do not. A critique of the practices and processes that lead to

such unfavourable built outcomes is implied by UD accounts, but challenging dominant

notions of the user as a ‘scenic feature’ [62] in the process means making more explicit the

politics of design implied by UD.

Architectural pedagogy provides a major opportunity to engage future generations of

architects in this task. This affordance of pedagogy is something that UD in its more critical

variants has engaged fully with [31-34]. If UD is to provide resources for a sustained cultural

critique as an embedded part of architectural design pedagogy [66: page 185], this requires

those deploying the term to avoid the tendency observable in many ostensibly initiatives

towards taking-for-granted the normative or political desirability of such interventions, which

emerge in situ and in vivo. One challenge for those seeking to ‘use’ or understand UD is to

retain a sense of the entangled and political nature of the issues at stake in architecture, which

as a result of their social character should never settled [55] (it is interesting to note that this

open, self-questioning approach characterised the writings/practices of Mace [16]).

This is not to diminish the role of the professional architect, far from it, but to suggest a

collaborative task that draws not only on a range of professions – including but not limited to

rehabilitation and architecture – but professionals engaging seriously with the expertise that

resides in ‘everyday life’ and users’ understandings of their own positionality, both politically

understood and practically, relative to their own bodies and mobilities. In UD engagement

with the social role of the architect and the relationship between professionals and users can

go further than it does at present. Actively facilitating scrutiny of the design process from

those outside the ‘black box’ of design means architects revealing the basis of decisions

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based on scientifically ungrounded assumptions [60-61] – it is all the better if the design

process itself illuminates such arbitraries and rationales [3-7] [60] [66] – resultantly keeping

debates about the limits of professional power at the forefront of the process and providing an

active challenge to the illusion of the ‘objective, scientific’ basis of professional judgement

where it is found.

Conclusion

It must be possible to design better [68: page 21]

Those architects deploying UD as a way of ‘designing better’ face a key challenge vis-à-vis

developing and embedding appropriate modes of users’ participation in the process. While

UD continues to play an important part in ‘develop[ing] a politics of design that will

challenge the […] sources of disablement in society [36: page 880], hitherto engagement with

the professional-user decision-making imbalances is under-developed in the movement.

Indeed, ‘users’ are often positioned in a problematic way in UD accounts, with technical

representation of bodies and mobilities featuring prominently while their capacity to

materially shape decisions and outcomes remains by-and-large absent. In common with

architectural design in general, the scope for users and publics to shape decisions in the

design process is frequently backgrounded; attempts to reconfigure professional as more

participatory in this respect can add much to UD, with analysis both illuminating power

relationships of user-architect also highlighting the necessity to guard against romanticised

and ‘settled’ notions of user participation that can serve to leave the politics of transformatory

interventions unquestioned.

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UD’s popularity to date is explainable in part because of its capacity to operate as a ‘flag of

convenience’ under which many design-for-all initiatives can ‘sail’. UD’s success in setting

the tone of interactions across a range of practice sites has seen an already-disparate

movement inflected into very many contexts. It is something of a paradox that the

popularisation of UD approaches across many sites has been accompanied by a

thoroughgoing search for epistemological foundations, with critical scholars seeking to

illuminate the basis of the movement. The suggestion here has been that UD’s conceptual

incoherence is of less significance than the practical interventions that its deployment allows

the space for.

UD has served to open communication and collaboration beyond sometimes impermeable

professional boundaries, meaningfully opening up collaborative design processes between a

wider group of professional decision-makers than is typical. This has opened up major

possibilities for designers and publics to collectively reconfigure the affordances of

architecture, both as built production and process. While architects’ professional skill is

associated with expanding the scope of possibles, they do not do this in a social vacuum (or

in conditions of their own choosing). In addition to constraints associated with client-

relations and regulatory contexts, architects’ socialisation into prior genres and modes of

working often renders invisible the ‘architecturally disabling’ nature of the built environment,

and the normalisation of such in the design process. UD architects are challenging the

architectural field’s own sets of assumptions in respect of the normate principles

characterising the built products of the process. From Gramsci, this can be understood as a

radical challenge both for UD architects and citizens but also crucially to those architectural

designers who sustain the conditions and practices that have ‘architecturally disabling’ [9]

outcomes for so many people.

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Acknowledgements

Thanks to the editors of this edition Rob Imrie and Rachel Luck, and the anonymous D&R reviewers,

all of whom made constructive and perceptive comments on the article. Jeffrey Chan; Monika

Grubbauer; Andrew Kirton; Michael Mair; Maike Pötschulat; and Jarmin Yeh also helped me sharpen

considerably the article’s central claims.

Declaration of Interest

An earlier iteration of this paper was developed for the Understanding Universal Design

ESRC Seminar, funded as part of an ESRC Seminar Series entitled Designing Inclusive

Environments: From Theory into Practice.

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