Who Carries the Burden When Design Fails?

Hi there! 👋 Using a red carpet on an inaccessible staircase effectively places a person using a wheelchair, like me, as “abnormal”. The red carpet on this hotel's stairs clearly wasn't rolled out for me (Picture 1).

When Design Says: “You Don’t Belong”

As I move about in the world, I encounter quite a few inaccessible entrances.

Sometimes they almost feel like mockery. And sometimes it is easy to see that making a particular entrance accessible would require remodelling the entire building. Like the entrance in the photo, where it looks as if the old hotel is sticking out its tongue at you.

It is a remnant, a child of past times.

But the values it expresses are still largely present today. In this case, there is a separate level entrance around the corner, through the restaurant. Having such an “adapted” entrance for disabled people is still an accepted, common feature, even in recent building modifications and entirely new constructions, where this could have been easily avoided.

The hotel entrance is part of a familiar pattern, where an imagined “normal” person is placed at the centre and those deviating in the margins, influencing what is seen as “included” or “extra”, “justified” or “undue”.

Undue Burden for Who, Exactly?

In 2023, Jan Grue wrote a wonderful paper on undue burdens and invisible work [1].

In it, he unpacks the consequences of two small words in the United Nations’ Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities [2]: “Undue burden”.

“The principle of ‘undue burdens’ means that an unreasonable amount of invisible work continues to be imposed on disabled people, even in the framework of anti-discrimination.”

Since then, undue burden has been implemented in policy, where, for example, some organisations are exempted from addressing inaccessible entrances if they can argue that the cost is too high.

This means that, in Grue’s words, “the undue burden of accommodation is shifted onto disabled people themselves”.

Understanding the Consequences of Our Design Decisions is Key

One takeaway for me from Grue’s paper was that a burden remains a burden, regardless of who must bear it.

I chose to highlight the entrance in Picture 1 because it is so obviously outdated and at the same time so highly visible. In many cases, the everyday invisible work that is expected of disabled people is far more subtle and intangible: it's the thirty minutes spent researching entrances and facilities before a meeting. It's arriving early to scope out the lecture hall situation. It's the mental deliberation and implicit cost-benefit assessment before accepting every invitation.

I was able to enter, but the sting (one of many) that made me reach for the camera and take the photo lingered.

What puzzles me is not why that old hotel entrance looked as it did, but why we continue to repeat the same pattern over and over again. Perhaps it's because design defaults to an imagined "normal" person. Or that we're used to designing for categories, solving for the "main" target group first, and then adding those (often implicitly) placed as abnormal to the equation. What do you think?

But it doesn't have to be this way. Universal Design is a force for development – when we choose to use it. Before your next design decision, ask yourself: Am I creating a division between “us” and “them”? Every choice you make sends a message about who belongs and who does not, and who has to carry the burden.

Next week, I will move on to discuss "us and them" in policy texts.

Notes and References

This piece builds on material from our research into nonclusive design and categorisation in “The Syntax of Equality” project. Some images were submitted as part of citizen science studies on inclusion and exclusion, and some we took ourselves as part of observational studies.

The article is an expanded version of a short post from earlier this year. I wanted to include it in this collection as I'll be using it in my teaching (today actually). If you would like more articles like this and join the conversation, click the "subscribe" button above.

Want to use the photos or illustrations in a publication? Please go ahead. Or in a presentation or video? Please do, and tell me about 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. Grue, J. (2023). The CRPD and the economic model of disability: Undue burdens and invisible work. Disability & Society, 39(12), 3119–3135. https://doi.org/10.1080/09687599.2023.2255734.
2. United Nations. (2006). Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. https://www.ohchr.org/en/instruments-mechanisms/instruments/convention-rights-persons-disabilities.