What If Universal Design Were Always Nonclusive? (#13)

Hi there 👋 Every few years, I return to a chapter I first read as a fresh PhD student in 2006. Edward Steinfeld and Beth Tauke's "Universal Designing"[2] was part of a remarkable period for the field. When someone asks me about a key era in Universal Design, I still point to the early 2000s.

This line has shaped how I think about UD:

"Ultimately, Universal Design sets its sights beyond breaking physical barriers to include the redefinition of disablement as a universal condition, a condition of difference that we all share." [2, p. 165]

In short, everyone is differently different.

Two Ways to Read the Universal Design Definition

The original definition of UD came a couple of years earlier, in 1997, and it was slightly amended in the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. In Article 2, Universal Design is defined as the “design of products, environments, programs, and services to be usable by all people to the greatest extent possible, without the need for adaptation or specialized design” [3].

People often fixate on the hedge in the middle: "to the greatest extent possible". This sounds like an admission in advance. We'll try to include everyone, but we already know we won't get there.

But look at the ending. "Without the need for adaptation or specialized design."

One reading: We design the main solution so well that we don't need extras for disabled people afterwards. Efficient, but still assuming a norm and deviations from it.

Another reading: There's no original norm to be included in. No standard body to negotiate with. "Specialized" doesn't apply because we never sorted people into "normal" and "special" in the first place.

Whether Mace intended this reading, I can't say. But the words can carry it. And Steinfeld and Tauke, writing in 2002, seem to have been reaching for exactly this.

This second reading depends on how we understand “universal.”

Difference is Universal

Universal Design gets criticised for the word "universal." Critics hear modernism: one measure, one solution, bodies that don't fit get left out. That critique is fair, if that's the understanding of "universal" we strive for.

But there's another lineage, based on an understanding centred on human difference and designing for flexibility as the “norm”. Here, "universal" doesn't mean identical. It means everyone counts. We already exist. We are all already part of human variation.

Connect Universal Design to this line of thinking, and the question shifts. We stop asking how to include everyone. We start asking why our designs hinder people who are already here.

One reader who frequently contributes with new thoughts and practice-based experience, Christelle Montreuil, put it like this in a comment to one of my previous newsletters: "Design does not need to include us, but rather to stop excluding us."

That's the flip in perspective. Not letting people in. Stopping what pushes them out.

Think about a standard that requires a ramp at a certain gradient. You can read it as providing access to wheelchair users who would otherwise remain excluded. Or, you can read it as establishing a minimal recognition that bodies move through space in different ways.

Same ramp. Same standard. Different understanding of what it's for.

Try this: take a guideline you work with. Read it as acknowledging variation rather than providing access. See if anything shifts.

Discovering What Was Always There: Nonclusion

In a recent paper, we ended with the line: "Universal design has always been nonclusive." [4], based on a shift towards what we call third-generation Universal Design, with nonclusion as a core characteristic [5].

By “nonclusion”, we mean designing without a predefined outside – no gatekeeping, no categories to conform with, no invitation required:

“Nonclusive design means design that resists categorisations of bodies/roles, and that does not come with predefined or presupposed limits in terms of who it is meant for” [5, p.91].

Returning to Steinfeld and Tauke's chapter, as well as others from that period, I'm convinced that this radical potential was there all along. The phrase "A condition of difference that we all share" was and is radical, and so was “without the need for adaptation or specialized design”.

Still, the way Universal Design has been practised over the years largely relies on patterns of norm and deviation, on “us” who design to let “them” in. The methodology has yet to catch up. The culture hasn't caught up either, and human variation is still handled by categorisations into normal and deviant.

But the words were there all along, waiting for us to take in their full weight.

Maybe that's the task now. Not to invent something new, but to finally practice what was always there.

Your Turn

Does this reading resonate? Or does it feel like a stretch?

Thanks to all of you who comment and share! One of my goals when I started the newsletter was “to learn in public together with others and make a few friends along the way”. Happy to see that this is already happening.

Let’s keep this discussion going 😊

Notes and References

This piece builds on findings from The Syntax of Equality project, where we investigate situation-based categorisation and nonclusive design through citizen science and field observations.

Do you want to use the photos or illustrations in a publication, presentation, or video? Go ahead, and please tell me how you use them and what you learn. I appreciate attribution in some form, i.e., that you tell where you got the material from ("Per-Olof Hedvall"), but it is not mandatory 👍

References:

1. Preiser, W., & Ostroff, E. (Eds.). (2001). Universal design handbook. New York: McGraw-Hill.
2. Steinfeld, E., & Tauke, B. (2002). Universal Designing. In J. Christophersen & Norske stats husbank (Eds.), Universal design: 17 ways of thinking and teaching (1. utg, pp. 165-189). Norway: Husbanken.
3. United Nations. (2006). Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. http://www.un.org/disabilities/default.asp?id=150
4. Hedvall, P.-O., & Ericsson, S. (2024). The Problem with “Inclusion”? It Is Done to Someone by Someone. In Universal Design 2024: Shaping a Sustainable, Equitable and Resilient Future for All (pp. 18–25). IOS Press. https://doi.org/10.3233/SHTI240978
5. Hedvall, P.-O., Price, M., Keller, J., & Ericsson, S. (2022). Towards 3rd Generation Universal Design: Exploring Nonclusive Design. Transforming Our World through Universal Design for Human Development, 85–92. https://doi.org/10.3233/SHTI220824