Disability studies and the old "accessible design", or the newer
direction called "universal design" are ships that pass in the night.
Though in theory.... non-discriminatory, barrier-eliminating design
ought to come under the umbrella of "disability studies", look at what
DS scholars talk about, write about & edit anthologies about -- (prroof
in the pudding, indeed)... "barriers" in the physical sense often get
mentioned in passing in the introdution, often as a metaphor for
non-physical barriers... never to be mentioned again.
When you work with trying to fit three-dimensional solutions to
real-people with real-world problems, you have less time for words,
words, words. DS people who call their own field "undertheorized" (see
Lennard Davis' "Enforcing Normalcy") I suppose would find UD to be
undertheorized in the extreme. I'd say that's a very fortunate
situation. ;o)
There may be a couple of people trying to span the 2 fields; to do a bit
of communicaiton, explain DS to the UD folks, or vice versa, like
myself, but it hasn't got very far yet. Pst stuff about UD on a DS list
and you get ignored or picked at as if it's all about words. Post DS
stuff on a UD list and you get ignored. Architecture (unlike the
disciplines in which DS is established) isn't much of a
grad-school-driven thing; it's not a writing-driven thing; one studies
(in the US for 5 years for the B. Arch. degree, or the 4+2-1/2 system
which involves less specifically "architectural" education), and then
the designers learn the other 95% by working in the field, and ongoing
continuing education, formal or not.
DS may be good for some of the background or context in which UD
operates, but not DS alone. Don't forget to supplement reading the
academics, by reading the activists, and finding out what they're
currently up to. Yes, of course, academics and activists overlap a bit
(and some people mean by 'activist", something they did for an hour, 8
years ago), but beware of the tendency of academics to say or imply that
a phenomenon started to exist, only as of when an academic got it into
print. As if anything else was "too low to count". The wheel was not
invented in the year when it was first mentioned in a scholarly book,
and neither was the disabled civil rights movement. Nor was the
disabled rights movement invented by whichever person with "helping
profession" degrees, got the first paycheck as Executive Director of a
service-providing agency oriented towards clients with disabilities.
("Meet the new boss, same as the old boss." Medical Model (physician as
God / controller), replaced by other equally controlling professionals.
Remember, "A profession is a bottleneck in the flow of information."
(Watch how some on this list respond to the statements in this
paragraph, and you'll see why DS and UD don't overlap.)
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There was and is "rehab design", there was and still often is
"accessible" design (aka "handicapped design") of the old often
non-universal type, and then there's the newer "universal design" which
seeks non-specialized, non-segregating design solutions. ("Seeks",
because it's not always acheived, and probably can't be 100% acheived;
it's more of a direction, a prioritized goal, based on
anti-segregationist politics.) The term UD was coined by the late
architect and researcher Ron Mace who had post-polio syndrome, in the
early 1970's, who soon thereafter organized consensus statements on it's
definition, co-signed by a dozen of so practitioners and teachers, etc.
So, the resources for UD, learning to avoid discrimination by
architectural design, are NOT to be found under the heading of
"disability studies". If you would like to contact me off-list, I'll
point you towards those resources.
Jim Davis
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