Designing Disability

Designing Disability
Symbols, Space,
and Society

Elizabeth Guffey

Bloomsbury Academic
An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

LON DON • OX F O R D • N E W YO R K • N E W D E L H I • SY DN EY
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First published 2018

© Elizabeth Guffey, 2018

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To Matt and Ellen
 CONTENTS

List of Illustrations  ix
Acknowledgments  xvi

Introduction: Disability by Design?  1

Design’s misfit  3
Defining disability  5
Defining a symbol  8

PART ONE  History of an Idea: Access (–1961)  13

1 Origins of a Misfit Design: The Advent of the Modern
Wheelchair (–1945)  15
An environmental misfit  18
A symbol of defeat?  30
How to behave in a Bath-chair  33
The chair that changed the world  37
Notes  42

2 Fitting In (1945–1961)  45
Accessing a culture on four wheels  47
The Nugent ethic  53
An attack on barriers  60
Notes  64

PART TWO  Redesigning Signs and Space (1961–1974)  65

3 The Personal Politics of Signs (1961–1965)  67
What a good sign can do  69
Down the “welfare path”  77
The ideologies of “self-help” and “social welfare cultures”  81
viii CONTENTS

Breaking barriers  87
Notes  93

4 Signs of Discrimination (1965–1968)  95

The secret signs of disabled people  98
Positive discrimination and the psychology of disablement  101
Toward a universal sign  110
Notes  118

5 A Design for the Real World? (1968–1974)  121

A technical aid  123
Man and the environment  125
A misfit head  129
A positive step forward  132
Notes  136

PART THREE  A Mark of Identity (1974–Today)  139

6 Signs of Protest (1974–1990)  141
“The Selma of handicapped rights”  142
Rights and protest  144
Passing the ADA: Compliance and defiance  155

7 A Critical Design? (1990–Today)  161

A cry for help  163
A twenty-first-century makeover  175
Notes  186

Epilogue: The Beginning of the End?  189

Notes  194

Bibliography  195
Index  213
 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

I.1 Rehabilitation International, International Symbol of

Access, c. 1969  1
I.2 Parhessiastes, Text-based access sign in Korea, c. 2008.
Creative Commons License  8
1.1 Margaret Suckley, Franklin D. Roosevelt in his
wheelchair on the porch at Top Cottage, Hyde Park,
NY, 1941  16
1.2 Boy using wheelchair outdoors, c. 1910. Courtesy
Wellcome Library, London  17
1.3 Théodore Géricault, A paralytic woman being
transported along the street in a wheelchair, 1821.
Courtesy Wellcome Library, London  19
1.4 William Kidd, The army or two Chelsea pensioners
descending stairs arm-in-arm, c. 1840. Courtesy
Wellcome Library, London  21
1.5 Jehan Lhermite, The “chayre des goutes” or gout chair,
first spotted at the court of King Phillip II of Spain, c.
1578 (in Le Passetemps de J. Lhermite, J. E. Buschmann,
1896. Courtesy Wellcome Library, London  23
1.6 Pierre-Denis Martin, King Louis XIV in his wheelchair
in front of the Swiss Lake at Versailles (detail) 1713.
Photo by FA/Roger Viollet/Getty Images 24
x LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

1.7 Merlin’s mechanical chair for the elderly or infirm,

1811 (in R. Ackermann, The Repository of Arts,
Literature, Commerce, Manufactures, Fashions, and
Politics, 1st series, vol. 6). Courtesy Wellcome Library,
London  26
1.8 Anonymous, The Great, Exhibition, 1851. Courtesy
Library of Congress  29
1.9 Matthew Brady, Ward in the Carver General Hospital in
Washington DC, 1863. Courtesy National Archives and
Records Administration  31
1.10 H. K. Browne, Cleopatra Skewton in Charles Dickens’
Dombey and Son, 1848 (in Charles Dickens, Dombey
and Son, London: 1848)  35
1.11 Herbert Everest, Drawing for folding wheelchair patent
(US 2095411 A), 1937  39
1.12 Kurt Hutton, Nurse tends an injured soldier, 1941.
Picture Post/Getty Images  40
2.1 Ed Clark, Marlon Brando practicing for his role as a
paraplegic veteran in The Men (1950), 1949. Ed Clark/
Life Picture Collection/Getty Images  45
2.2 Ed Clark, Marlon Brando joking with wheelchair
using veterans on the grounds of Birmingham Veterans
Hospital, Los Angeles, 1949. Ed Clark/Life Picture
Collection/Getty Images  48
2.3 John Florea, Paraplegic veterans registering for classes
at the University of California, Los Angeles, 1947.
John Florea/Life Picture Collection/Getty Images  53
2.4 Lincoln Hall, with semi-permanent wheelchair ramp
constructed after the university accepted the Galesburg
 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS xi

rehabilitation program, 1956. Courtesy University

of Illinois  54
2.5 Male and female cheerleaders, affiliated with the
University of Illinois’ wheelchair basketball program,
accompanied the team on all of its travels, 1955.
Courtesy University of Illinois  57
2.6 Dwight D. Eisenhower arriving for a press conference
at Fitzsimmons Army Hospital after suffering a heart
attack, 1955. Courtesy Bettmann/Getty Images  61
3.1 Ramped entrance at the first Rehabilitation Center on
the campus of the University of Illinois. In spite of its
wheelchair-accessible entry, the building was marked
by minimal signage, c. 1956. Courtesy University of
Illinois  70
3.2 A two-storied wheelchair ramp leading to a second-floor
window at the University of Illinois, 1956. Courtesy
University of Illinois  72
3.3 Cover of Sigma Signs, journal of Delta Sigma Omicron
(the rehabilitation service fraternity at the University of
Illinois), 1953. Courtesy University of Illinois  74
3.4 Mussolini gives fascist salute to a group of disabled
veterans on a visit to Berlin, 1937. Istituto Nazionale
Luce/Alinari/Getty Images  78
3.5 A 1976 invalid car issued by the Britain’s National
Health Service, 2000. Courtesy National Motor
Museum/Heritage Images  79
3.6 The Chair of Champion Athletes (advertisement for
Everest & Jennings’ wheelchairs), 1963. Courtesy of
University of Illinois  82
xii LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

3.7 No Barriers logo from President’s Committee on

Employment of the Handicapped, Architectural
Barriers: Progress Report, July 1962–July 1965.
1965  87
3.8 Wheelchair logo from FIMITIC RMAC ISRD
International Conference on Barriers, Stresa. 1965  90
3.9 Statistical Chart developed by the British Information
Services for distribution in the United States. c. 1942
Photo by FPG/Hulton Archive/Getty Images  91
4.1 Esther Bubley, Segregation sign at a bus station, Rome,
Georgia, 1930. Courtesy of Library of Congress  96
4.2 Insignia from Building Standards for the Handicapped,
from National Research Council of Canada, 1965  98
4.3 New York State Access Symbol, from Outdoors
Recreation for the Physically Handicapped, 1967.
New York State Council of Parks and Outdoor
Recreation, Albany  100
4.4 Selwyn Goldsmith, Access symbol from Designing
for the Disabled, 1967. 2nd edition. London: RIBA
Publications Ltd.  104
4.5 Selwyn Goldsmith, Peter Rea, students at Norwich
School of Art. Preliminary studies for modular range of
symbols, c. 1968  106
4.6 Selwyn Goldsmith, Peter Rea, students at Norwich
School of Art. Symbol for Disabled People. 1969  109
4.7 Paul Arthur and Associates, “Observez le ‘code’/
Watch for these signs,” from Expo 67: guide officiel:
28 avril-27 octobre 1967, Montréal, Canada: chapitre
spécial sur les fêtes du Centenaire. 1967  111
 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS xiii

4.8 Paul Arthur and Associates, Disabled symbol designed

for Expo 67 signage system. 1967  112
4.9 Wheelchair user passing in front of the Pavilion of
Guyana and Barbados, Expo 67. 1967 115
4.10 Paul Arthur and Associates, Pictograms for parking
at Expo 67. 1967. Courtesy of Royal Ontario
Museum  117
5.1 Susanne Koefoed, Access Symbol. 1968  122
5.2 Susanne Koefoed (and others), Poster created for SDO
exhibition. 1968. Courtesy Veryday  128
5.3 Susanne Koefoed, Symbol on cover of Svensk FORM
magazine. 1968. Courtesy Swedish Design/Centre for
Business History  130
5.4 President’s Committee on Employment of the
Handicapped. “People are asking about displaying the
symbol access” [Pamphlet]. 1977  135
6.1 Senator Harrison Williams addressing protestors using
wheelchairs on the steps of the Capitol, Washington
DC. Flanking the group is an American flag, with its
stars rearranged in the shape of the access symbol, 1970
Bettmann/Getty Images  146
6.2 Button with Disabled in Action logo. c. 1974 Courtesy
American History Museum Gift of Carr Massi  147
6.3 Bill Peters, Disabled youths, most of them in wheel
chairs, protesting inadequate housing provided by the
state. 1974. Bill Peters/Denver Post/Getty Images  149
6.4 Ken Stein, Protest 504 Poster, used during the twenty-
five-day occupation of the San Francisco HEW Building.
1977. Courtesy Ken Stein  150
xiv LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

6.5 John Sunderland, Wheelchair users in Denver

demonstrate the lack of access citywide by making their
own curb cuts at street corners and traffic intersections.
As the protestors arrived, they carried with them
homemade placards bearing the wheelchair access
symbol, c. 1978. The Denver Post via Getty Images  151
6.6 By the late 1990s, public signage for accessible
accommodations for wheelchair users was common not
only in the United States, but across Europe. Photo by
Nitschmann/ullstein bild via Getty Image  152
6.7 Terry Ash, Shortly after the Americans with Disabilities
Act (ADA) was signed, US legislators hold T-shirts
printed with the International Symbol of Access. 1990.
The LIFE Images Collection/Getty Images  156
7.1 Tim Clayton, Louise Sauvage competing in a
10-kilometer wheelchair road race on Australia Day
around the rocks area of Sydney, Australia. 1999.
Courtesy Corbis via Getty Images  161
7.2 John Tlumacki, Brian Glenney, and Sara Hendren hold
a new version of the wheelchair symbol. 2011. The
Boston Globe via Getty Images  162
7.3 Don Meeker and Associates, Access symbol developed
for the National Parks Service. c. 1985  164
7.4 Brendan Murphy, Proposed revision of the International
Symbol of Access. 1993. Courtesy of Brendan Murphy  166
7.5 Brendan Murphy, Early drafts for revision of the
International Symbol of Access. 1993. Courtesy of
Brendan Murphy  168
 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS xv

7.6 Allan Webb, I am visually impaired pin. 2017. Courtesy

trend badges  169
7.7 Brendan Murphy, Alternative symbols to the wheelchair
Sign. 1993. Courtesy Brendan Murphy  170
7.8 Sara Hendren and Brian Glenney, The Accessible Icon
Project, 2010. Courtesy Sara Hendren  176
7.9 Park McArthur, Blanks. 2014. Courtesy the artist and
ESSEX STREET, New York  178
7.10 Brian Glenney and Sara Hendren, An early version of
the Accessible Icon Project (AIP) using red sticky vinyl
figures and heads on top of the official symbol of access,
c. 2010. Courtesy Sara Hendren  180
7.11 Brian Glenney and Sara Hendren, A later version of
Accessible Icon Project uses a transparent red sticker that
allows the official symbol of access to continue being
visible under it, c. 2010. Courtesy Sara Hendren  181
7.12 Vince Bucci, Artist Shepard Fairey affixing a sticker on a
parking sign in Los Angeles, 2005. Getty Images  183
E.1 Taghreed Al-Zubaidi, Julie Buelow, Yijin Jiang, and Arief
Yulianto, Symbols created by a student design team
for the Reimagining Accessibility contest. One of two
designs that earned an honorable mention, this project
features an infinity symbol in red, blue, and yellow.
Stylized symbols, representing a variety of individual
disabilities, can be placed within the larger design, 2013.
Courtesy Julie Buelow  190
E.2 Dusan Vulic, Essential accessibility button set. In recent
years, designers have worked with limited success in
applying the wheelchair symbol to newer technologies.
From DigitalVision Vectors, Getty Images  192
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

For all their advice, comments, and research leads, I want to thank David
Serlin, Aimi Hamraie, Bess Williamson, Rosemary Garland Thomson, and
Sara Hendren. I also want to say special thanks to Maggie Taft, Claire
Constable, and Rebecca Barden.
I also want to thank, for all their patience, Tucker Beachak, Emma
Bobb, Daniella Chiaramonte, Brian Cranston, Lauren Douglas, Spjamal
Drummond, Brandi Eby, Jerielys Estevez, Mary Fennell, Raissa Fomerand,
Julie Godefroid, Adam Hamdy, Steven Hummel, Lamease Jamal, Ashley
Johnson, Dane Kranjac, Gail Martin, Briana McKenzie, Daniel Nassimos,
Julianne Olori, Caroline Perthuis, David Peterman, Octavia Poenix, Alan
Publielli, Tyreck Rand, Emely-Ann Rodriguez, Nathaniel Rojas, Ashly
Sajous-Turner, Tristen Stafford, Kristin Stella, Allyson Taylor, Kim Toffali,
John Tognino, Nicolas Umpierrez, Boris Yanez, and James Yarusso.
 Introduction

Disability by Design?

FIGURE I.1  Rehabilitation International, International Symbol of Access. 1969.

2 DESIGNING DISABILITY

At its heart, this book aims to show how the International Symbol of Access
(ISA) came into being, not just as a design, but also a manner of thinking
(Figure I.1). When I began writing this book, I was under the illusion that
this would be a short article on a design that had shaped my life for many
years. As a disabled person, I’ve long been aware that this seemingly simple
symbol has profoundly shaped my day-to-day movements in a way that
able-bodied persons scarcely realize. But I’d never understood that it also
shapes the world at large in a way that able-bodied persons barely know.
Then, in 2012, I began to consider it more carefully after I saw the
Accessible Icon Project (AIP). The older symbol I’d known for years—
little more than a schematic wheelchair with a head placed on it—was
increasingly criticized as cold and mechanical. The newer symbol echoes
the rise of a disruptive, participatory disability culture. The AIP thrusts its
wheelchair user into a more active and dynamic role. With the grace of a
wheelchair athlete, its figure pushing itself headfirst, leaning dynamically to
propel itself forward. At first, I was amused by the AIP, then irritated by the
debate that began to surround it, engulfing the small figure with questions
of passivity and assertions of personal agency. Finally, I was roused enough
to jot down my own, highly personal feelings about the symbol already in
use. I began to keep files of scattered references and wrote occasional articles
related to the subject. In one, I told the story of the ISA’s conception by a
Scandinavian student. In another, I described the newer symbol’s inclusion
in art collections, even as the museums themselves can overlook real-world
questions of access. I eagerly exchanged ideas with colleagues whenever
circumstances brought me into contact with people who shared my
growing obsession with the subject. But each time I dipped into the history
and meaning of the access symbol, looking for books or other writing on
the subject, I was startled to see how little research had been done and
how infrequently the topic had been considered from scholarly point of
view; to put together any kind of history of the symbol—or even the idea
of environmental access—meant maneuvering through a web of primary
sources. Slowly, it dawned on me that there was an untold history here, and
it is larger than simply the story of one symbol’s design and implementation.
Even after I came to this realization, however, I labored under the illusion
that I could write a simple history of a symbol—the story of a designer,
a design, and how it was used. Chapters were plotted, researched, and
written—only to be ultimately discarded. In my more despairing moments, I
wondered why a focused design history of a single symbol ended up looking
more like a history of the ideas and technologies of access. Why was my
study of a graphic symbol becoming a history of mobility devices? Why
was I studying post-Civil War hospital design? Gradually, I realized that this
wasn’t just the history of a symbol. It was a multilayered story of ideas—
about people, accommodations, barriers, architecture, and human rights.
And, as I found it necessary to look beyond the creation of a simple graphic
symbol, I was immersed in debates on segregation, definitions of disability,
 INTRODUCTION: DISABILITY BY DESIGN? 3

the role of humanism in medicine, and changing global perceptions of

disability. While this remains a historical case study, it is also an exploration
of public policy, public relations, and the profound power of visual rhetoric.
Disability and access remain issues of real and pressing concern. Because
of this, Designing Disability does not foreground theory; it aims to be as
user-friendly in style and format as possible, shifting between ideas of access
to the incidents and individuals who have lived and known those issues.
At the same time, this remains an account of the development of the iconic
wheelchair symbol. Of course, that symbol has been used many ways, and
to represent accommodations for many types of disability. But, as originally
understood, it was developed with mobility-impaired persons in mind.
Necessarily, in Designing Disability, this type of impairment looms large.
Simply put, this is an account of how one device—the wheelchair—and one
type of disability came to stand in for many others.

Design’s misfit
The problem of access is a new idea, but its connection to design is even
newer. Attending Brooklyn College in the early 1950s, student Frieda Zames
quickly discovered how Boylan Hall and Ingersoll Hall, two “mirror images
facing each other across a central quadrangle” at the center of campus,
impeded her ability to get to class. Each building required Zames “to go
up two steps. On rainy days I was terrified of falling because my crutch tips
would slip. Snowy or icy days were worse. Never once at Brooklyn College
did I think that those two steps in any way could be changed. I had to make
do as best I could. I thought that it was my responsibility to fit in” (Fleischer
and Zames, 2011: xiii). Today, Zames’ problem is understood as a question
of access. But in the 1950s, when Zames arrived at Brooklyn College, she,
like most people, interpreted issues like this as a kind of personal challenge.
It was her responsibility to “fit in.”
The question of fit—and misfit—haunts this book. But “access” is the
better-known term and is used more often. To the casual observer, access and
disability come together visibly, in the ISA. In this context, the idea of access
flags a host of very real accommodations, including Braille signs, ramps,
and elevators. But for disabled people, such access does not exist in a void.
As scholar Tanya Titchkosky relates, the word can be tied “to a complex
form of perception that organizes socio-political relations between people in
social space” (Titchkosky, 2011: 4). And yet linguistically the word “access”
remains a rather formal or legalistic term. The Americans with Disabilities
Act (ADA) ensures access to the built environment, while the UK’s Equality
Act considers equal opportunity to access.
At the same time, “fit” and “misfit” more closely capture the problem of
disability today, particularly in terms of design. Certainly, ideas of being fit,
fitting in, and fitness suffuse our culture today. They are a part of our daily
4 DESIGNING DISABILITY

lives. They also have the advantage of being tangible. Fit can denote the
state of one’s own body as well as others’ perceptions of it. Fitting in, on the
other hand, suggests vast subtleties in social interaction. But it also aligns
more closely with the topic at hand—namely, disability as a design problem.
Just how do disabled bodies fit into cars, buildings, and other objects, or
landscapes and spaces? Recognizing designs that aim to make a good fit
highlights our efforts to shape a world usable for all types of bodies. In the
end, a growing recognition of disability’s profound engagement with design
and the challenge of the misfit is what brought the access symbol into being.
Of course, ideas of disabled “fit” or access simply didn’t exist when
Frieda Zames enrolled in Brooklyn College. The groundbreaking work of
scholars like Tom Shakespeare (2006) and Susan Wendell (1996) remains
foundational in the field, but is also relatively new. I turn here to Rosemarie
Garland-Thomson’s work suggesting that disability is not a physical state
but a social condition; here she introduces the provocative idea of disability’s
“misfit.” Traceable to what she calls a feminist materialist disability concept
or theory (Garland-Thomson, 2011a), Garland-Thomson builds on the
useful distinction made between sex and gender. Gayle Rubin and others
argue that bodily states or conditions must be separated from social processes
(Rubin, 1975). In feminist theory, sex is a physiological state; gender, on the
other hand, is a social construct. A parallel divide can distinguish between
the widely used term “impairment,” and disability itself. The former is about
medical processes and bodily function; the latter, Garland-Thompson argues,
is less a bodily state than a “social process of disablement that gives meaning
and consequences to those impairments in the world” (Garland-Thompson,
2011b: 591). As an idea, misfit allows us to produce a humanist, rather than
medical, view of how designers have imagined, practiced, contested, and
revised our notions of disability.
Here, then, “misfit” is a physical state and a social attitude; the two
are inextricably linked. Bodies exist in a wide variety of shapes, sizes, and
abilities. The clash between this degree of variety and a society unwilling or
unable to plan for bodily difference can cause many kinds of misfit. Through
graphic communications, urban planning, and architecture, design weaves
social attitudes into the very shape and texture of our built environment.
Garland-Thomson notes how the “space through which we navigate our
lives tends to offer fits to majority bodies and functioning and create misfits
with minority forms of embodiment” (Garland-Thompson, 2011b: 594).
Tall or short, wide or narrow, anybody outside the norm has—at one time
or another—experienced what it is to misfit. This is especially the case for
people with disabilities.
If physicality and sociality are closely linked, design has a clear role in
negotiating the two. That is, designers have it in their power to invent better
fits. They can, for example, avoid planning for staircases and include ramps
for access to buildings. But they can also create misfits. Revolving doors, for
example, continue to be widely used, but are a barrier to wheelchair users
 INTRODUCTION: DISABILITY BY DESIGN? 5

and visually impaired people alike. And yet, it’s a sign of how little these
issues are discussed that architects and designers almost reflexively continue
to work with a limited vocabulary of construction and design forms. Some
proponents of revolving doors, for example, still argue that they are more
energy efficient than swing doors. Creating separate entrances that feature
conventional swing doors, they argue, can accommodate disabled people.
But do we really need to create two sets of entrances? New ideas often
meet with skepticism or are ignored. Unchallenged, many designs repeat
forms that are assumed to be useful, or important, or universal. And on
occasion, they really are all of these things. But how often might a staircase
be replaced by a sloped ramp? Or a set of double doors simply replace those
that revolve? More accessible—and sustainable—alternatives to revolving
doors do exist. Automatic double doors, for example, allow everyone to
use the same entrance. And they create a vestibule or “air curtain” that
helps control interior temperatures while being both energy efficient and
accessible. One set of conventions—in this case the air curtain—can create an
easy “fit” between disabled bodies and constructed spaces, while another—
the revolving door—can transform an impaired person into a “misfit.” This
book argues that design both produces different notions of disability, and
responds to them.
Designing Disability aims to do more than highlight a simple binary of
fit and misfit in the world around us; by applying this binary historically,
this book links ideas of disability to design. Implicitly, it also deals with
wayfinding, that is, the systems used to guide people through physical space,
and the signage that publicly communicates messages of direction. But it also
touches on some of the best-known landmarks in design and architectural
history. These gain unexpected significance when seen from the perspective
of access. Familiar landmarks, like the elegant parterres of Versailles and
the open halls of the Crystal Palace in London, acquire new meaning when
viewed in terms of workaday accessibility. So too does the disability-friendly
environment of late eighteenth-century Bath. Of course, applying current
ideas of disability and accommodations to historical spaces is anachronistic.
These sites were not always designed with disabled people in mind. But, in
the end, understanding the history of access, design, and disability is still
useful. It helps us better understand these issues in our contemporary world.

Defining disability
In 1975, Victor Finkelstein, a South African anti-apartheid activist and
early leader in the disability rights movement, asked: What if we designed
an “upside-down world created for wheelchair-users?” (Finkelstein, 1975).
Finkelstein imagined a very different world with a village shaped entirely
around wheelchair-users’ needs. As opposed to the real world, here, he
proudly announced, all residents were wheelchair users. Here, he proclaimed,
6 DESIGNING DISABILITY

they could finally “control all aspects of their lives.” In this small utopia “they
make the goods that they sell in their shops with special aids, they work the
machines that clean the street, run their own educational colleges, banks, post
offices, and transport system.” Of course, in this village a resident using a
wheelchair was not just normal, but also “like everyone else in their world
of people that she or he meets in daily life.” Naturally enough, this village
would be constructed with different building codes. The very vocabulary of
architectural and design forms might change. For one thing, in a world of
wheelchair users, everything could be lowered. Wheelchair-using architects,
he speculated, would realize that all ceilings and doors could be dropped in
height. Now, Finkelstein posited, “There is no need to have the ceilings 9ft 6
in. or the door heights at 7ft 2 in. Soon it becomes standard practice in this
village for doors to be designed to a height of 5ft, and ceilings of rooms to be
7ft. 4in. Now everyone is happy in this village, all the physical difficulties in
the environment have been overcome.” But so far, Finkelstein’s story was really
only a thought experiment. The real provocation comes when he asked, what
would happen to able-bodied people who might choose to live there too?
Of course, Finkelstein’s tale was presented as an extended experiment
appearing in a larger article that explored the social nature of disability. But
in this situation, he argued, able-bodied people would become the misfits.
When non-wheelchair users initially arrived in this imaginary village,
Finkelstein continued, “one of the first things they noticed was the height
of the doors and ceilings. They noticed this directly, by constantly knocking
their heads on the door lintels.” Seeing how the able-bodied members of the
village went about with dark bruises on their foreheads, the village doctors,
themselves wheelchair users, fretted that able-bodied people could suffer
from a “loss or reduction of functional ability.” Thus handicapped, special
aids like helmets and braces were developed for non-wheelchair users. But
still, Finkelstein added, they stood out and “when they sought jobs no one
would employ them.” In time, voluntary “societies were created to collect
charity and many shops and pubs had an upturned helmet placed on the
counters for customers to leave their small change.” The situation was
strained. Only when the able-bodied got together did they realize that their
“disability” had a social solution—the wheelchair users needed to change
door and ceiling heights. In the end, Finkelstein speculates, “The able-bodied
disabled” began to hope for something better: “Perhaps, just perhaps, their
disabilities could be overcome (and disappear!) with changes in society”
(Finkelstein, 1975).
Throughout his career, Finkelstein challenged society’s role in creating
outsiders. Whether in this fictional world, or in the real one in which we
live, Finkelstein argued, we must take a deeper look “at what is meant by
disability” (Finkelstein, 1975). And yet, there is not now—nor has there ever
been—a comprehensive and static definition of “disability.” As Finkelstein’s
parable suggests, the meaning of “disability” can shift depending on the
context. Moreover, some societies are more willing to accommodate
 INTRODUCTION: DISABILITY BY DESIGN? 7

impairment—in both material and social terms—than others. But also,

symptoms and states of disability can be made more visible or hidden. In the
industrialized West, institutionalization of disabled people in the nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries meant that many lived their lives out of public
view. Deinstitutionalization, normalization, and ever-extending lifespans in
the twenty-first century make impairment, old age, and infirmity evermore
present in our society today.
Bearing such changes in mind, it is important to situate the term “disability”
historically. The American Civil War brought the term “disability” into
common parlance. The term was commonly used to define who could
or could not fight in the war or those who would later seek support or
compensation for wartime injuries. The debilitating conditions claimed by
veterans included amputation, deafness, blindness, as well as conditions like
lung disease and incapacitating rheumatism. Some devastating physical and
mental states passed under still familiar terms like “combat fatigue”; others,
like the cryptic “soldier’s heart,” defy modern categorization. But in all of
this, it is easy to recognize the sober list of core or iconic impairments that still
dominate our understanding of disability today. With social, technological,
and medical change, however, our twenty-first-century definitions have
expanded to encompass neurodiversity and conditions like chronic fatigue
syndrome that were not previously recognized.
In 1990, when the ADA was passed, disability was defined anew. This
time it referred to any mental or physical impairment that substantially
limits one of more major life activity. It encompasses those with physical
impairments, including mobility, hearing, and visual impairment, as well as
cosmetic disfigurement or anatomic loss impacting some key kind of bodily
or mental function. On the other hand, it also recognizes mental impairment
or psychological disorders as forms of disabilities.
Keeping the evolving definition of disability in mind, Designing Disability is
a limited tale. It examines how designed fits and misfits have reconfigured our
understanding of disability in the years between the Civil War and the passing
of the ADA. But its focus on the ISA means that its scope is restricted. Although
the wheelchair symbol claims an international audience, questions around its
worldwide impact remain unanswered here. Just how global is this symbol?
And does it carry the same meaning everywhere? Outside the industrialized
West, other cultures have entirely different ways of conceiving disability. In
much of Asia, for instance, it is considered appropriate for individuals with
impairments to live entirely within a family framework; this situation, as
Cherie S. Lewis observes “ensures that disabled individuals will not live in
isolation, [but] it often mandates against independence for disabled persons”
(Lewis, 1994: 190). If living with familial caretakers, many such disabled
people don’t access public spaces in the same way as in the West. Vision- or
mobility-impaired persons accompanied by family members may not need
accommodations like Braille lettering or automatically opening doors. For
that matter, signage can also be of secondary importance (Figure I.2).
8 DESIGNING DISABILITY

FIGURE I.2  Example of a text-based access sign in Korea, c. 2008. Creative Com-
mons License.

Even when access is provided, it does not always follow the signage
standards established in the West. In fact, the access symbol may in some
ways be read as a marker of Western attitudes, not only toward disabled
persons, but also of who shapes and uses public space. The wheelchair
symbol may be found in airports from Dubai to Fairbanks, but how common
is it in rural or undeveloped parts of Africa or Asia? And is it even necessary
there? In China, the very idea of access is relatively recent. Just before the
2008 Beijing Olympics and Paralympics, the city sprouted ISA symbols
where tourists and athletes might visit, even adding seventy wheelchair
accessible taxis to the city’s fleet. Here, as well as on the Olympic grounds,
the ISA was used. But outside Beijing, the symbol is much less known. And
when access has been introduced, textual—rather than pictorial—signs
have sometimes replaced the ISA. But in the West as well, the access symbol
is relatively new.

Defining a symbol
Designing Disability is broken into three discrete parts: before the access
symbol, the symbol’s creation, and, finally, its reception and uses. No history
of the access symbol can be told without acknowledging the deep connection
between mobility and the designed environment. In the end, this book aims
 INTRODUCTION: DISABILITY BY DESIGN? 9

to be a multilayered history, opening with an examination of the age-old

issue of misfit between impaired bodies and the built world.
Chapter 1, “Origins of a Misfit Design,” explores the notion of
environmental misfit by looking at the ways in which mobility impairment
has been dealt with in the West historically. I argue that the origins of the
access symbol must be linked to the advent of a particular design: the
modern wheelchair. Before its development, many mobility-impaired persons
were irresolvably homebound. Gradually, with the professionalization of
medicine in the nineteenth century, wheelchairs became more and more
common; but still, they were largely connected with hospitals, sanitaria,
and other institutions associated with serious illness. This tradition was still
dominant when the modern, folding wheelchair was first introduced in the
1930s. It was no coincidence that, with the advent of the modern wheelchair,
large numbers of seriously disabled people could leave the confines of home
and hospitals. And yet, with this change the question of misfit became
exaggerated; only then was it evident how poorly public space and the built
environment fit the mobility impaired.
Chapter 2, “Fitting In,” explores the gradual dissemination of the
modern wheelchair and the growing awareness of impairment as not only a
medical problem, but also a reflection of the question of fit. In the years after
the Second World War, the proliferation of this modern wheelchair might
suggest a sudden change in the lives of many disabled people. But many
gradually realized that wheelchairs could not “fit” into the built environment
until widespread changes were made. For the first time ever, the minutiae
of building design, for example, staircases, sidewalks, even doors, had to
be reevaluated. Only when such reassessments were made did planners,
builders, and government officials begin to realize how profoundly the built
environment could disable people. Understanding this shifted concern away
from disabled bodies and toward an examination of how design contributes
to socially designed misfit, thus paving the way for access signage.
I focus on several sites where, in the years after the Second World
War, this radical rethinking began to take shape. In Southern California,
where the modern wheelchair was first invented, personal mobility was
already equated with wheels. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the pavement that
accommodated the region’s many cars also offered an infrastructure that
unintentionally enabled disabled mobility. A second model developed more
purposefully in the 1950s, at the University of Illinois. Here, an entire school
and, later, the college town around it were refitted as a vast experiment
in wheelchair access. But, by the early 1960s the simple modification of a
single American college campus was clearly not enough. Infuriated by the
architectural and design conventions that prevented their integration into
society, a diverse group of disabled people joined forces with the President’s
Committee on Employment of the Physically Handicapped to demand a
nationwide “attack” on design barriers that prohibited physical mobility.
Their various demands on design came to a head in 1961 when, after almost
10 DESIGNING DISABILITY

five years of research, the group nudged the American Standards Association
to endorse the first ever set of building standards written with disabled access
in mind. Here is when the book’s central theme—the intertwined problem of
fit and misfit—began to capture the imagination of a larger audience.
The second part of this book addresses the development of the wheelchair
symbol and its role in broader debates around access, rights, and space.
Chapter 3, “The “Personal Politics of Signs (1961–1965),” deals with the
question of signage, and its intersection with ideas of disability. The barrier-
free architecture movement succeeded in drawing public attention to design’s
role in creating disablement. But how to confront the problem remained
unclear. While pragmatists argued that the existing environment could—
wherever possible—be altered and adapted for disabled people, signage
advocates asked how persons with disabilities would be able to find these
accommodations. They argued for consistent and easily understood labels
that would publicly announce these adaptations to disabled and non-disabled
people alike.
This way of thinking developed more rapidly in the UK and Europe
than in the United States. In both places, access was linked to politics.
In Europe’s new welfare states, the bond between government planners,
architects and designers, and society’s weakest members was foundational.
Because public accommodations made for disabled people were viewed as
an assertion of that bond, experts argued that special access and retrofitting
should be publicly announced with signs. Meanwhile, in North America,
a political system that favored independence held with accommodations
that helped mobility-impaired people “fit in” as seamlessly as possible.
Ultimately, by the mid-1960s, advocates for disabled people on both sides
of the Atlantic began to introduce access signage. Anyone could see that
humanity came in a vast variety of abilities. The aim, though, was not
to abolish all barriers, but to piece together accommodations whenever
possible, until the broad outlines of a more equitable environment might
be composed.
By the mid-1960s, Chapter 4, “Signs of Discrimination (1965–1968),”
proposes, several very different approaches to access symbols had
developed. In the United States, people tended to view access as an emerging
Civil Right. Accessible pathways were constructed, but the legacy of racial
segregation complicated the project. The idea of separating or distinguishing
disabled citizens from all others made many people uncomfortable. As the
government systematically dismantled discriminatory signage that had
segregated the nation into black and white, it also implemented a series
of “secret” symbols newly developed to direct disabled people toward
designated accommodations. In the UK, on the other hand, supporters
not only framed access within the context of the welfare state but some
even lauded it as a form of “positive discrimination.” Without any need
for secrecy, signage proudly advertised accommodations with clear, bold
symbols based on the human form.
 INTRODUCTION: DISABILITY BY DESIGN? 11

Chapter 5, “A Design for the Real World? (1968–1974),” tells the story of
the development of the ISA, the globally implemented symbol that remains in
use today. This symbol reveals both an awakening awareness of the need for
visibility and the difficulty of expressing disabled people’s humanity within
a systematic program of design; it registers two very different approaches
to disability, signage, and citizenship. Part of a radical design workshop, a
Danish student designed the original icon as a schematic wheelchair. When
the conservative international organization Rehabilitation International
adopted it, they slapped a circle on top of the wheelchair form, transforming
the chair into a body.
This may be seen as one of those wonderfully telling moments in the
history of design, where a significant decision is made with unexpected
consequences. I argue that in working to find an acceptable compromise,
Rehabilitation International created a profoundly misfit symbol, that,
through efficient marketing, nevertheless became the universal symbol of
access.
The final two chapters of this book examine the ISA’s reception, and its
recent evolution. When first introduced in the late 1960s, the ISA represented
a vast social promise, a kind of commitment and assurance that the built
environment would be accessible wherever the sign appears. But by the early
1970s, other connotations also began to emerge. As Chapter 6, “Signs of
Protest (1974–1990),” describes, the access symbol made disability itself
more visible. Using the Civil Rights movement as a model, some disabled
people began advocating for full access to the rights, protections, and duties
of citizenship. As this disability rights movement took shape, demonstrators
began agitating through sit-ins and protests, and by acting out in civil
defiance. As meetings and demonstrations began to coalesce around
disabled access to housing, transportation, education, and other rights, the
ISA jumped from urban planners’ signage to flags, cardboard signs, and the
other paraphernalia of this protest movement. In the United States especially,
many disabled people appropriated the symbol as a powerful expression of
political will that culminated in 1990 with the signing of the ADA.
Finally, Chapter 7, “A Critical Design? (1990–Today),” explains how
and why the once radical access symbol is increasingly seen as limited and
out of date. Practically, it may seem an international success, functioning
world over by identifying mundane or everyday accommodations like
automated doors, restrooms, and parking spots for people with disabilities.
But the internal compromises and tensions evident in the image itself remain
unresolved. Even more telling, the symbol that once added cohesion to the
disability rights movement stands accused of being strikingly out of step with
changing ideas of disability in the twenty-first century. This chapter explores
two recent revisions to the ISA: the 1993 remake introduced by Brendan
Murphy under the auspices of the Society of Environmental Graphic Design,
and the 2010 Accessible Icon Project. I use these two case studies to ask just
how extensive change can really be.
12 DESIGNING DISABILITY

From the very start, or perhaps because of its very start, the access symbol
was and remains a misfit design. It still does not fit easily in professionally
designed communications systems. But it’s also a sign for misfits—those
whose bodies don’t fit the ways in which the built environment is so often
designed and constructed. Ideas of environmental, social, and philosophical
fit crisscross this simple symbol. Finally, this is more than a study of a single
design; it is a story of the particularly modern juncture between design,
bodies, and power.
 PART ONE

History of an Idea:
Access (–1961)
 1
Origins of a Misfit Design

The Advent of the Modern

Wheelchair (–1945)

After she’d grown up, Ruth Bie couldn’t remember meeting Franklin
Delano Roosevelt (FDR) or patting the dog on his lap (Fischer, 2008)
(Figure 1.1). And perhaps FDR would have preferred this. In the last twenty
years we have become increasingly accustomed to depictions of Roosevelt
in his wheelchair. But during his lifetime, images like this were rigorously
repressed. This candid snapshot of FDR, the three-year-old granddaughter
of his caretaker, and his terrier shows the president in a wheelchair on
the porch of his Hyde Park, New York, retreat Top Cottage. But even out
of camera range Roosevelt tried to avoid being seen using his chair. A
polio survivor, the president had been paralyzed from the waist down since
1921. In many ways, we could argue that Roosevelt suffered from a double
misfit. On the one hand, his body did not “fit” the environment around
it. On the other, Roosevelt worried that if others saw the extent of his
disability they might judge him as incapable, weak, and unfit to lead. He
worried for his political career and feared becoming a social “misfit.”
The issue received its first public airing when Hugh Gallagher published
FDR’s Splendid Deception: The Moving Story of Roosevelt’s Massive
Disability in 1985. The photograph of Roosevelt with Ruth Bie graced the
book’s cover. Gallagher’s argument is clear-cut: while Roosevelt was alive,
wheelchairs were, at best, an oddity. At worst, they carried a kind of stigma.
The president worked furiously to hide just how dependent he was on
one. But Gallagher built Roosevelt’s fears into a larger intellectual edifice.
Wheelchairs were stigmatizing at that time, Gallagher argued, and Roosevelt
strategically concealed his use of one; his wheelchair use was suppressed
because the American electorate would never choose a “crippled President to
lead it back to prosperity” (Gallagher, 1985: 97). The development of today’s
16 DESIGNING DISABILITY

FIGURE 1.1  Margaret Suckley, Franklin D. Roosevelt in his wheelchair on the

porch at Top Cottage, Hyde Park, NY, 1941.

access symbol must be understood within the larger context of disability and
culture. It can, in fact, be tied to a much longer history. The wheelchair, a
key component of this symbol, is itself a modern invention; for many years,
it was something to cover up and conceal rather than represent on signage.
How did the wheelchair transform from a device that people like
Roosevelt tried to hide to one of the most widely known—and accepted—
graphic symbols of the late twentieth century? This book traces not
only the development of a symbol, but also the processes, the social and
environmental pressures, and the designs that together answer this question.
In less than a generation after FDR’s death, the wheelchair came to represent
an entirely new way of thinking about disability. At the heart of this radical
 ORIGINS OF A MISFIT DESIGN 17

upheaval lies an extraordinary, yet easily, stated idea: disability is created

not by impairment but by a mismatch between bodies and the environments
in which they exist (Garland-Thomson, 2011).
What could be simpler? In fact, there is nothing easy or simple about
disability and design. During Roosevelt’s lifetime, disability was something
to be overcome. A contemporary example might be the 1937 film Heidi.
The public embraced Shirley Temple’s portrayal of the Swiss farm girl who
relentlessly urges the spoiled Clara to abandon her wheelchair and instead
breathe and walk in the clean mountain air of the Alps. Roosevelt never
climbed in mountain meadows, but he did present himself publicly as the
man who “beat” polio. To fit in, he stage-managed this persona, masterfully
building a political reputation on a brand of persuasive, if relentless, optimism
that would have made Heidi proud (Tobin, 2013: 204–212). In photographs,
FDR appears worldly, avuncular, and supremely self-confident: FDR working
industriously at his desk or a table; FDR casually sitting in a car, smoking a
filtered cigarette and pince-nez in place; FDR gripping a lectern while leaning
forward with the full force of his weight. Photographers helped perpetuate
this persona simply by not taking pictures of the president in his wheelchair.
Of course, if they ignored polite requests, the Secret Service would routinely
seize their cameras. For all his contagious, cheerful bonhomie, Roosevelt
seems to have viewed his wheelchair as a painful symbol that, to a degree
that he found shameful, marked his own disablement.

FIGURE 1.2  Boy using wheelchair outdoors, c. 1910. Courtesy Wellcome Library,
London.
18 DESIGNING DISABILITY

To explore Roosevelt as a case study, however, risks missing a larger

and even more compelling picture. The International Access Symbol and
the wheelchair depicted on it represent a break with tradition. For most
of human history, people with mobility impairments negotiated their way
through life with an ad hoc assortment of assistive devices. Most made
do with a wide variety of canes and crutches. More seriously impaired
persons could be carted around in litters or even wheelbarrows. The earliest
wheelchairs were an improvement for some, though for a host of social and
practical reasons they were more often avoided. As late as 1910, users—
and their attendants—who ventured to take these chairs outside did so at
their own risk. Any turn off the beaten path might mean a tumble, getting
mired in mud, or worse. This anonymous early twentieth-century photo
palpitates with thwarted desire (Figure 1.2). Open fields beckon, while boy
and attendant stare fixedly at the camera, his wheeled chair stranded on
a rocky dirt berm. The boy’s predicament explains a great deal about the
relative powerlessness of wheelchair users. For much of its short history,
the wheelchair embodied an entire frame of mind; its very form signaled
“resignation, decline, and defeat” (Bartolucci 1992: 29). No history of the
access symbol can be told without acknowledging this pre-history.
Examining the vast pre-history of crutches, canes, and early proto-
wheelchairs makes it easier to recognize the revolutionary introduction
of another design, what I call the modern wheelchair. Of course, better
medicine, a refinement of surgical techniques, and other innovations all
helped extend the life spans of both disabled and able-bodied persons
alike in the early twentieth century. But no single invention more clearly
shifted attitudes about disability—as well as ability—than the advent
of the modern wheelchair. Just before Roosevelt died, the White House
ordered several of these chairs. Had he lived longer, Roosevelt’s highly
personal sense of fit and misfit might itself have changed. But for most
of his adult life, Roosevelt understood one profound truth: the nature
of disability is not defined so much by impairment as by the ways in
which society—and the designed environment—bolsters and shapes our
definition of ability.

An environmental misfit
Although the sheer fact of bodily impairment has remained constant
through human history, few mobility aids were available before the mid-
twentieth century and most have obscure origins.1 Indeed, even at the dawn
of the Industrial Revolution, when the French artist Théodore Géricault
visited London in 1819, he left a keenly observed depiction of a device used
for transporting disabled people living among the urban poor (Figure 1.3).
His Paralytic Woman, a lithograph depicting an impaired woman being
carted in a shabby, if slightly modified, wheelbarrow, demonstrates how
 ORIGINS OF A MISFIT DESIGN 19

FIGURE 1.3  Théodore Géricault, A paralytic woman being transported along the
street in a Wheelchair, 1821. Courtesy Wellcome Library, London.

long this medieval device continued to lumber through urban streets and
country lanes alike. It also highlights a series of misfits. A subtler social
drama plays out behind him. A young woman passes the wheelbarrow,
casting a sidelong, fearful stare while an accompanying child hides her face,
as if the invalid’s infirmity were catching. The pair of interlopers signals a
second, social misfit, in which disabled persons were often marginalized by
society. Around 1800, the side-long, piercing glances cast at the paralytic
woman were both normal and ordinary. Like many disabled persons at this
time, she is viewed through a veil of pity and fear. But her predicament was
environmental as well. Rolled through the rough and turbulent streets of
London’s East End, the woman’s wheelbarrow does not fit the hardscrabble
environment in which she is placed; vaguely in the distance we see the hurly
burly of other wheeled vehicles passing through the urban hubbub; the stout
man touting her cart pauses for breath, but also appears to be taking it all
in, as if assessing how to safely enter the melee of the busy London street in
front of him.
Studying the predecessors of the wheelchair—and especially their
interface with the built environment—raises more questions than it answers.
For example, at what point is a wheelchair a wheelchair and not a wheeled
20 DESIGNING DISABILITY

chair? The question may seem pointlessly obscure, but wheelchairs are
constructed for human mobility; chairs with wheels, on the other hand, can
fill multiple functions. Whisked across a smooth floor, for example, wheels
may be installed on pieces of furniture so they can be easily arranged and
rearranged; they protect delicate floor finishes from scuffing. The wheelchair’s
obscure origins force us to ask, too, how often must mobility devices be
limited to chairs? Both ancient Greek and Chinese art contain images of
beds with wheels (Kamenetz, 1969: 8). We know that disabled people have
long had to make do in a world that was not configured for their bodies, but
how widely were such conveyances really used? In the Middle Ages, those
disabled persons fortunate enough to own a wheelbarrow (that is, a box
placed on wheels) might be moved around like so many barrels of wine or
bundles of wood (Kamenetz, 1969: 10, 11). Such transport was a common
enough sight for centuries to come.
Certainly, until the mid-twentieth century, mobility-impaired persons
resorted to a variety of devices for transport, but in this history a second truth
quickly emerges—canes, crutches, and walking sticks dominated through
much of human existence. The orthopedist and amateur historian Sigmund
Epstein even argued that the crutch was a kind of marker of civilization,
especially when “woven” into “a story of how the genus homo rose above
the handicap of disease, trauma and deformity” (Epstein, 1937: 304).
Canes, crutches, and walking sticks date at least to ancient Egypt and their
value—for non-disabled, temporarily disabled, and permanently disabled
persons alike—is well established (Loebl and Nunn, 1997). Of course,
they are easy to construct; a single tree limb easily makes a rudimentary
walking stick. But also, crutches were often the best “fit” available within
the built—and unbuilt—environment. In a world where most people’s lives
were shaped by farm work, physical labor, and a rough and ready terrain,
the crutch, cane, and walking stick all have an advantage. They aren’t
only better suited for uneven terrain but can help all bodies—able and
otherwise—navigate the uneven patches of ground. By contrast, wheeled
devices of all sorts need smooth, flat, and preferably paved surfaces. These
were a constellation of characteristics difficult to find anywhere before the
twentieth century. To this day, even the most developed cities present a host
of problems for wheelchair users. Ruts, holes, uneven paving, and open
gutters can make street travel difficult. In the past, carts and carriages were
specially built for uneven paving and cobblestone streets. And, unlike the
modern wheelchair, these were built to carry their passengers high off the
ground and insulate them from the muck and clamor of pre-modern towns
and cities.
However one reckons it, crutches offered a better environmental “fit” for
the semi-ambulatory. Outside of cities, crutches could negotiate uneven or
boggy ground. But they had an advantage in urban spaces. Here, crutches
helped disabled people with a built environment that included curbs and
staircases, too. In William Kidd’s early nineteenth-century painting The Army,
 ORIGINS OF A MISFIT DESIGN 21

FIGURE 1.4  William Kidd, The army or two Chelsea pensioners descending stairs
arm-in-arm, c. 1840. Courtesy Wellcome Library, London.

the Scottish-genre painter presents us with two elderly and disabled British
pensioners, veterans of the Napoleonic wars who still wear their striking
scarlet coats (Figure 1.4). Behind them we glimpse an open door and through
it a long hall within the Royal Hospital, which doubled as an old soldiers’
home for retired troops injured in service. Exiting through the majestic entry
22 DESIGNING DISABILITY

of the eighteenth-century Royal Hospital, the modest pair proceeds down

a set of stairs. Arm in arm, the two advance down the steps, with the one-
legged veteran leaning on his mate’s left arm while using a crutch to support
his other side. No wheelchair could negotiate those steps or staircases.
From an architectural point of view, the link between environment and
disability has often been obscured. In fact, in the late eighteenth and early
nineteenth centuries, far from meeting the needs of disabled persons, architects
designing hospitals saw the inclusion of large staircases as a hopeful sign of
modernity. Strategically placed around buildings, large staircases would,
reformers reasoned, provide a “reservoir for fresh air” in otherwise insalubrious
spaces (Oppert, 1867: 16). Focusing on adequate ventilation, these buildings
were often acknowledged to be inconvenient for sick and invalid patients,
especially when they had to be carried from one floor to another.2 In hindsight,
an architecture built around stairwells helps explain why so many patients
were all but bedridden, and the heavy use of small palanquins or litters to
transport the mobility impaired within such buildings. Yet it also suggests a
cultural blind spot, in which planners were scarcely aware of disablement,
let alone how their ideas might heighten—not lessen—forms of impairment.
If nothing else, crutches, canes, and walking sticks helped disabled persons
like Kidd’s pair of war veterans navigate a world that was not designed
with people like them in mind. Up and down steps and across cobblestones,
unpaved roads, and other obstacles, the crutch, cane and walking stick were
simply more adaptive and operational in a pre-modern environment.
Even so, Kidd’s casual glimpse of disabled life in the early nineteenth
century hardly expresses the lived experience of those using crutches.
Certainly, crutches were heavily used—in the nineteenth century, the British
medical journal The Lancet reported that demand at Charing Cross Hospital
was so great that the facility struggled to keep them in stock (Jones, 1836:
837). But many of the people who relied on them found crutches to be
heavy and uncomfortable. Moreover, most people used ill-fitted crutches.
And, worse still, the most commonly used designs could cause their own
injuries, ranging from joint pain to thrombosis, if used for sustained periods
of time.
Such difficulty and discomfort led the rich and powerful to resist using
crutches. As a result, the well-to-do were the first to agitate for wheelchairs.
The late sixteenth century marked the first appearance of “mechanical”
chairs placed on wheels. Developments like the “chayre des goutes” or gout
chair, first spotted at the court of King Philip II of Spain, were developed
first and foremost as a mobility aid (Figure 1.5). The overstuffed chair was
placed on wheels and designed to ease Philip’s gouty arthritis by including
a footrest, hinged arms, and a backrest upholstered with horsehair. But it
was also fixed with an ingenious system of adjustable ratchets that could be
shifted for maximum relief (Kamenetz, 1969: 14). The seat was considered
so curious that Philip’s valet, Jehan Lhermite from Antwerp, recorded the
chair in side and back view, as well as from below, with special attention
 ORIGINS OF A MISFIT DESIGN 23

FIGURE 1.5  Jehan Lhermite, The “chayre des goutes” or gout chair, first spotted
at the court of King Phillip II of Spain, c. 1578 (in Le Passetemps de J. Lhermite,
J. E. Buschmann, 1896). Courtesy Wellcome Library, London.
24 DESIGNING DISABILITY

given to the mechanics of its lounging mechanism. In this depiction the

king of Spain, normally depicted in a manner that demonstrated his noble
and honorable status, appears strangely doll like, his image clearly less
interesting to the artist than the mechanics of the chair itself (Kamenetz,
1969: 14). But court etiquette determined the style of this rolling chair;
it had to impress with elegance and avoid vulgarity. Philip had a large
entourage capable of pushing and pulling the chair along. In the end, the
same chair was transported from one palace to another, as Philip followed
courtly protocol and proceeded to his different properties (Parker, 2014:
xii). The chair was not designed for travel, and Philip used it only inside
of his palaces. It is important to remember that this was not necessarily by
choice, but because they were the only places to provide flat and polished
floors ample enough to enable allow dragging the behemoth through
rooms and down drafty halls.
A century later, at the court of Louis XIV, the sheer logistics of how and
especially where such a machine might work may be found in the example
of the French king’s “roulette,” or rolling chair (Figure 1.6). The king was
first reported using a rolling chair in 1686, when recovering from surgery
for an anal fistula. Though today there is little that sounds as antithetical to
restful recovery as a trip around the palace’s formal gardens surrounded by

FIGURE 1.6  Pierre-Denis Martin, King Louis XIV in his wheelchair in front of
the Swiss Lake at Versailles (detail) 1713. Photo by FA/Roger Viollet/Getty Images.
 ORIGINS OF A MISFIT DESIGN 25

a phalanx of retainers, Louis took delight in his roulette. Its bulky wheels,
larger than those on Philip’s chair, were able to negotiate the manicured
paths of Louis’ palace grounds. When, in 1713, Pierre-Denis Martin
depicted the king on a promenade through the gardens of Versailles, the
illustrated landscape that stretches out behind the king reveals Versailles’
elegant and carefully laid out parterre; with its flat walkways, ramps, and
broad lanes, the king’s palace provides a rare glimpse of a space that, before
the twentieth century, was well suited to a wheelchair. The French king
turned to the chair to avoid walking distances and always insisted that one
be at hand in case of sudden bouts of pain or fatigue (Perez, 2007: 109,
110). Of course, just because these chairs were wheeled does not mean that
they functioned like later wheelchairs. For Philip and Louis, these proto-
wheelchairs were more like mobile thrones. They may have accommodated
physical frailty and infirmity, but they were also declarations of wealth,
comfort, and power.
Stately and regal, Louis’ roulette and Philip II’s gout chair looked fitting
enough for a king and each, in its own way, was widely imitated in the
years to come. A less grand version of Philip’s device, the Merlin chair, was
introduced into London society in the mid-eighteenth century. In spite of its
whimsical-sounding name, taken not from Arthurian legend but from its
eccentric Belgian inventor John Joseph Merlin, this chair was not designed
for a prince surrounded by courtiers. Though the Merlin chair seized on the
gout chair’s inventive mobility, placing the seat on two front wheels, with a
third balancing wheel positioned at its back, this chair, unlike its predecessors,
was self-propelled. The chairs favored by Philip and Louis relied on fleets
of servants to push them. The Merlin chair, however, used a clever system
of winding handles, hand-cranks, and gears, all of which linked to rotating
levers that controlled the chair’s wheels. Merlin’s wheelchair gave the sitter
a new degree of agency.
Merlin took advantage of every opportunity to promote his innovation.
In the 1780s he used the chair at balls, masquerades, and other assemblies
of fashionable London. Sometimes Merlin even dressed as a quack doctor
promoting his version of a “gouty chair” (Jacob, 1985: 26). His aggressive
plugs paid off, earning him considerable fame in the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries. For the next 100 years the term “Merlin chair” was
applied to virtually any chair on wheels that allowed the sitter to propel him
or herself around a room. Even when a somewhat simpler self-wheeled chair
was introduced in the early nineteenth century (this one had a second rim
placed on each wheel, so its user could use his or her hands to roll the chair
forward), this too was often called a Merlin chair.
But, the Merlin chair was almost impossible to maneuver outside.
Urban and rural landscapes were ill adapted to them. Where Louis’ and
Philip’s throne-like conveyances could be used in palaces and princely
grounds, both versions of the Merlin or “invalid” chair revealed a deeper
truth—they made a poor environmental fit even for those wealthy enough
26 DESIGNING DISABILITY

FIGURE 1.7  Merlin’s mechanical chair for the elderly or infirm, 1811 (in R. Ack-
ermann, R. The Repository of Arts, Literature, Commerce, Manufactures, Fashions,
and Politics, 1st series, vol. 6). Courtesy Wellcome Library, London.

to afford them. Merlin’s ingenious mechanism was complex and delicately

formed, but its promise of access was, by today’s standards, limited.
Carved from expensive wood and covered with padded upholstery, its
delicate design would suggest that these chairs were meant for indoor
use. An illustration of a Merlin chair that appeared in an 1811 issue of
 ORIGINS OF A MISFIT DESIGN 27

Rudolf Ackerman’s Repository of Arts, a popular periodical at the time,

suggests as much (Figure 1.7) (Ackermann, 1811: 225). Riderless, this
Merlin chair is encircled by a well-tended lawn, every bit as rarefied as
the manicured estate of Louis XIV’s palace gardens. Unlike the rugged
wheelbarrows and pushcarts that roamed London’s eighteenth-century
streets, the Merlin chair’s dainty wheels, low-hung stretcher bars and
elaborate footrest leave it open to the smallest of impediments; a small
pebble, for instance, might stop its wheels, while a puddle would soil
its delicate finish. In 1836, the Scottish inventor and historian Sir David
Brewster offered a realistic assessment of its use. Noting the Merlin
chair’s fragility, Brewster reminds us that most are “fitted only to move
on the smooth surface of a floor, and not to overcome the inequalities of a
common road” (Brewster, 1831: 6). Certainly, its inventor never promoted
the chair as an all-terrain vehicle and the wealthy gout and palsy sufferers
who bought it scarcely expected to go outside at all. The chair very much
reflected social expectation that impaired or disabled people wanted to
stay at home and not partake in society. It was a delicate chair designed
for delicate people.
It was not that doctors at the time urged their patients to stay home.
Those wealthy enough were urged to travel and take treatments at spas. In
Britain, the city of Bath was a common destination. There, disabled people
were encouraged out of doors, if only for their treatment at the city’s many
spas. Bit by bit, Bath was remade into a city reconfigured for disabled people,
and no design better expressed these accommodations than the hulking and
robust Bath chair. Lower to the ground than the Merlin chair, it was also
sturdier (Figure 1.10). Though today the Bath chair seems utterly antique,
its appearance and purpose hint at a connection between disability, access,
and the environment in a way that today seems utterly modern. The Bath
chair is a symbol of an emerging idea about disability as much as it is a
unique design to serve impairment. Reordering the priorities of Merlin’s
invention, the Bath chair was designed specifically for outdoor use.
The origins of the Bath Chair were humble enough. It took the shape
of a sedan chair or litter, a mode of transport fashionable across Europe
in the early years of the eighteenth century (Peach, 1893: 129). By the
late eighteenth century, however, politics and a scarcity of labor made the
uncompanionable and undeniably elitist sedan chair less popular. In much
of Europe, they were replaced by horse-drawn carriages. But in small,
walkable cities like Bath, the sedan chair was a practical feature of spa life,
gently carrying invalids short distances about town for their treatments.
Here a somewhat more egalitarian version of the sedan chair emerged, its
cab placed on three wheels, with a single person pushing it from behind. The
Bath-based inventor John Dawson is generally credited with introducing
the Bath chair to British society by 1780 (Peach, 1893: 148). But after his
death in 1824, James Heath, another Bath-based manufacturer, began to
promote his version of the chair; James Heath advertised extensively in local
28 DESIGNING DISABILITY

newspapers and was so successful that he was often cited as the chair’s
inventor by the late nineteenth century (Gloag, 1964: 245).
The Bath chair’s roots are evident enough but less obvious is how much
of the city of Bath was shifted and altered to accommodate it, and disabled
people as well. Treatment at Bath, of course, was prescribed for a variety of
ailments, ranging from recovery from febrile diseases to diabetes. But many
of the maladies that touched on mobility disabilities led visitors to Bath.
Visitors suffering from lumbago and sciatica sought its healing waters, as
did those afflicted with gout, rheumatism, and paraplegia. When the ancient
Roman spa town in southern England began to make its principal income
from wealthy and infirm visitors, easy access became an issue of concern.
By the mid-eighteenth century, the local government started to invest in its
built infrastructure. Problems of access and public planning abounded. The
spa was hilly in places and the approach from London fraught. Hoping to
make arrival and access “safe and easy,” the town fathers lobbied to begin
“repairing, amending, and enlarging the principal roads leading to Bath,”
as well as “cleansing, paving and enlightening” its actual streets (Warner,
1801: 338). The elegant Georgian buildings of the Circus, and particularly
its paved streets, are more than a testament to town planning. As a system of
transportation in which the infirm or elderly could make their way around,
the city’s manicured streets allowed easy movement.
While the city’s famous waters and cosmopolitan atmosphere attracted
visitors and attention, Bath became known because of its accommodations.
As an 1821 guidebook proudly announced, “besides the rich boon of its
waters, its high social privileges, and many other attractions,” the city
possesses “every variety of surface and aspect which can benefit the aged,
the consumptive, and the constitutional invalid, or the convalescent from
recent disease” (Anon, 1825: 15). Many who came hoping to be cured
by its healing waters stayed for its disability-friendly atmosphere, and its
population of elderly, frail, and unwell visitors swelled. In 1860, the doctor
and amateur historian James Tunstall noted, “The houses on the Parades
and streets adjacent were erected exclusively for the accommodation of the
invalid. The pavement is on a level with the street doors, so that, by means
of the wheel chairs—which take their name from this city—even the cripple
may enjoy the fresh air without fatigue, and partake, in some degree, in the
amusements, so necessary to his forlorn condition” (Tunstall, 1860: 19). Not
only was the town well planned, but also it was gradually improved with
certain kinds of bodies and devices in mind. In nineteenth-century Bath,
impairments might not disappear, but disability was lessened. It provided a
good fit.
Though the Bath chair had emerged as a fixture on the local scene by the
turn of the nineteenth century, the design—and the access it provided—only
burst into the popular imagination at the 1851 Great Exhibition. The city
of Bath sent to the Exhibition a display of three-wheeled chairs intended
to showcase local industry. But Heath also persuaded the Exhibition’s
 ORIGINS OF A MISFIT DESIGN 29

FIGURE 1.8  Anonymous, The Great, Exhibition of 1851, 1851. Courtesy Library
of Congress.

organizers to allow him to rent his chairs to visitors. As the newspaper

The Guardian would later note, because of Heath, “many an infirm or
invalid lady, and others deprived of the power of locomotion” were able
“to go through and inspect at their ease the countless art treasures in the
Exhibition” (Anon, 1857: 3). The space was so accessible that exhibition
organizers opened the hall an hour early specifically for elderly and infirm
visitors. For visitors like the elderly writer Amelia Opie, the Exhibition
became a rare chance to venture out in public. Opie, an octogenarian by
this point, took full advantage of the Exhibition’s early opening hours and
went often in her Bath chair. Encountering other invalid friends she hadn’t
seen in years, she joked that they should hold races down the Exhibition’s
vast interior side aisles (Brightwell, 1854: 389). As it happened, Opie waited
for the general public to be let in, watched the arrivals, and was delighted
that people, pleased to see her in public, frequently came over to greet her
(Brightwell, 1854: 389).
But, just as in Bath, the environment played a unique role in allowing this
proto-wheelchair to work (Figure 1.8). Joseph Paxton’s innovative Crystal
Palace proved remarkably well suited to the Bath chair’s needs, especially
as it provided a space for its wheels to easily glide or be pushed across its
30 DESIGNING DISABILITY

surfaces. The vast iron and glass building was over 1,800 feet long with
a total floor area of almost a million square feet. Built to enhance visual
spectacle, including a stuffed elephant covered with the richly ornamented
trappings of an Indian prince and a machine that made cigarettes in front
of visitors, the structure’s massive barrel vault allowed open spaces around
individual features. It also left the vast interior of the building entirely open.
Recalling the palatial homes of Philip II and Louis XIV, Paxton’s Palace was
the first large-scale, barrier-free environment open to the public. (Many
years later, after the Crystal Palace was dissembled and reconstructed in
Sydenham Park, Paxton himself, now elderly and infirm, returned to the
building in a Bath chair.)
But unlike the city of Bath, the building was accessible by accident, and
the fit between bodies, spaces, and building was never entirely seamless. No
one, for example, thought to provide disabled access ways into the building,
which was raised on a plinth and approached only by stairs. And visitors
confronted even more stairs leading up to the second-floor galleries and
down to the subterranean basement. Access was the product of accident
rather than ambition.
The Great Exhibition set a precedent of access that was carried forward at
subsequent World’s Fairs. In the United States, at both the 1855 World’s Fair
in New York and the 1876 Centennial in Philadelphia, the main exhibition
halls imitated Paxton’s innovative architecture. And at both events, disabled
and able-bodied visitors were invited to rent wheelchairs. Organizers at the
1893 Columbian Exhibition provided an entire landscape of flat, accessible
routes around the massive fair grounds. They also contracted with the
Columbian Roller-Chair Company to provide rentals (and attendants) that
were available at some twenty booths throughout the fair. By the end of
the fair, the company reported that they had rented approximately 794,100
chairs to visitors (and reportedly made over $400,000) (Johnson, 1897: 385).
There is no record of how many of these visitors were disabled, but it is clear
that this Exposition and subsequent ones uniquely accommodated impaired
visitors. Indeed, the parameters of wheelchair use were beginning to shift.

A symbol of defeat?
Matthew Brady’s 1863 picture of a ward in Carver General Hospital in
Washington DC presents a cheerful space carefully decorated with ivy
bunting and American flags, patients siting at attention in dress uniform, and
the unit’s nurses arranging themselves on seats, mindful of staying out of the
photographer’s main gaze (Figure 1.9). Down the center of the photograph,
a flat and accessible path leads to a young man, his right leg amputated just
below the knee. He stares at us from a wheelchair. This photograph signals a
shift in the conception and use of wheelchairs in the mid-nineteenth century,
when wheelchairs came to be used as medical tools.
 ORIGINS OF A MISFIT DESIGN 31

FIGURE 1.9  Matthew Brady. Ward in the Carver General Hospital in Washington
DC, 1863. Courtesy National Archives and Records Administration.

The medicalization of wheelchairs is traceable, in part, to advances in

surgery and sanitation. As battlefield medicine and attention to cleanliness
improved in the mid-nineteenth century, more and more amputees survived.
This was especially true of the American Civil War, the first war in which
the injured survived long enough to be taken off the battlefield and into the
hospital. Such a large casualty rate meant that administrators were pressed
for space and put a premium on patient mobility. Moving large numbers
of patients into, around, and out of hospital wards caused doctors and
mechanics alike to reevaluate the wheeled chair.
Of course, outside hospital contexts, wheelchairs were flimsily made
and even dangerous. Throughout the century it was widely acknowledged
that these chairs provided a ride so bumpy that many users complained “of
pain, not only when jolted over a rough road by an unsteady hand, but even
when they passed over a pebble in a garden-walk” (Tilt and Etter, 1881: 48).
Nineteenth-century novels like J Haggard Rider’s 1895 Joan Haste give casual
mention that, when used indoors, they were ill-proportioned, and rammed
into furniture and doorjambs with alarming frequency (Rider, 1895: 225).3
But, for several decades, doctors had been examining non-wheeled
invalid or “therapeutic” chairs arguing for more support for the spine,
32 DESIGNING DISABILITY

ideally in chairs with high backs and reclining features. As early as 1863,
the enterprising Charles Bander had devised a supportive chair, specially
designed to move the injured or sick around for transport. His patent for an
“ambulance” or “traveling” invalid chair placed particular emphasis on an
adjustable spring mechanism in its back (Charles L. Bander, November 10,
1863, patent No 40,547). The profile of Bander’s chair signaled a broader
shift from the chubby and relatively low-lying chairs associated with the
Merlin to seats with higher backs, like the one captured in Brady’s 1863
photograph. The styling and production of these chairs was not complex;
most drew from ladder-back and other chair construction typically made
by skilled craftsmen of the period. Since they were meant for transport
around hospitals, these chairs were constructed of cheap, light, and practical
materials like lightweight Indian reed and inexpensive wooden frames. What
they lost in luxury, they gained in a new seriousness of purpose.
For the first time, wheelchairs were truly on the threshold of something
new. They were being used not merely for wealthy persons—sick and
healthy—but for large numbers of people in serious medical need. Invalid
and Merlin chairs had been advertised in surgical and medical instrument
catalogs in the late eighteenth century (Woods and Watson, 2004: 407).
But it was in the mid-nineteenth century, with the development of modern
healthcare and especially with the Civil War, that, as scholars Woods and
Watson point out, wheelchairs “became primarily medical devices” (Woods
and Watson, 2004: 407). Private individuals may have continued to own
wheeled chairs, but by the end of the Civil War, the professionalization of
medicine brought wheeled chairs increasingly within the realm of well-
defined medical practices.
Hospital-issued wheelchairs were also labor-saving devices. Made
with special “push” rims, they allowed patients to push themselves along.
Furthermore, emphasis was put on practicality and especially safety. In the
decades following the Civil War, innovation focused primarily on technical
changes, particularly in the development of chair wheels. Under the influence
of innovations in bike manufacture, chairs began to incorporate wire bicycle
wheels and braking systems as well. In 1874, the French-Canadian inventor
Peter Gendron patented a wheel originally developed for bicycles, wagons,
and baby carriages, but adapted for wheelchairs (Peter Gendron, April 21,
1874, patent No 150022 A). Soon, even smoother riding hollow rubber
wheels were developed and sold.
The medicalization of wheelchairs, however, also fixed their place in
the center of professional medicine—the hospital. As hospital architecture
shifted away from the pavilion model with its ventilated staircases, interiors
were increasingly flat and accessible. No longer were the frail, impaired, or
sick expected to limp down hallways on canes or be arduously carried on
special litters as they mounted staircases. Wheelchairs helped to facilitate the
functionality and smooth running procedures favored by builders and doctors
alike. Training manuals and hospital advice books urged medical facilities
 ORIGINS OF A MISFIT DESIGN 33

to keep at least one “invalid chair” or “wheel chair” on hand, if only “for
the conveyance of patients” (Swete, 1870: 137). Most inventories or annual
reports of healthcare institutions in the late nineteenth century mention at
least one or two on site.4 However, as they became increasingly common in
hospitals, wheelchairs also became increasingly suspect outside of them.

How to behave in a Bath-chair

The medicalization of the wheelchair made its private use and ownership
more complex. Nobody knew this better than the poet and novelist Joseph
Ashby-Sterry. Self-identifying as a “heretic,” when the fifty-year-old writer
temporarily injured his knee in 1883, he took to a Bath chair. Humorously
chronicling his experience in his regular Punch magazine column, “Lays of
a Lazy Minstrel,” Ashby-Sterry confronted the very serious question of how
a chair user is expected to act in public. Smiling as he greeted onlookers,
Ashby-Sterry began to:

Fancy my bearing is too jovial. Rather too much of the Bath-brick! I

temper it by putting on a sentimental expression and end by appearing
like a faint fool. A disgusting red man who has just passed shakes his
head, says something to his friend, looks at me, and taps his forehead.
(Sterry, 1883: 253)

Tired of parsing “how to behave in a bath-chair,” he suggested that someone

write “Rules for Behaviour in a Bath-chair” (Sterry, 1883: 253). Had anyone
bothered to write an etiquette manual for wheeled chair users, they might
have consulted Frank R. Stockton’s Pomona’s Travels. Here, Stockton’s
humorous advice is voiced by the practical Pomona, a naïve servant, who
fecklessly explains appropriate behavior. The key, she recounts, is for a man
to sit “in the bath-chair, with the buggy-top down, and his pipe lighted, and
his hat cocked on one side a little, so as to look as if he was doing the whole
thing for a lark” (Stockton, 1900: 182, 183).
When the Empress Eugenie climbed onto a Bath chair in order to see the
Great Exhibition in 1851, she was exerting the prerogative of some wealthy
but able-bodied persons. Indeed, by the late nineteenth century, the Bath
chair in particular was increasingly associated with pampered wealth. This
type of Bath or invalid chair user haunts the margins of Victorian literature.
Charles Dickens provided a short and sharp verbal portrait of the elderly
Cleopatra Skewton in Dombey and Son. Here he describes “her attitude in
the wheeled chair (which she never varied)” was like that of her namesake.
She was like a “Princess as she reclined on board her galley.” Mrs. Skewton’s
beauty, Dickens assures us, had long ago “passed away, but she still preserved
the attitude, and for this reason expressly, maintained the chair ... there being
nothing whatever, except the attitude, to prevent her from walking” (Dickens,
34 DESIGNING DISABILITY

1848: 204). Just as wheelchairs became more and more common in hospitals,
in many luxurious resorts, the Bath chair was increasingly marginalized.
Visiting the seaside around the turn of the century, Beatrix Buchanan
described how her mother’s crippling arthritis made a Bath chair necessary.
At the same time, the daughter claimed “a fierce, ferocious, smoldering
hatred” for the chair, which made a spectacle of them both. The daughter’s
“martyrdom” was made complete as she accompanied her mother—in the
chair. Quickly, she noted onlookers’ disapproval. Above all, she hated “how
passers-by would glance at mama’s large, red face, make unfeeling remarks,
and snigger brutally to themselves” (Buchanan, 1903: 155). Though some
die-hards continued to use “the ‘bath chair’ of Brighton and Bournemouth,
in which fat dowagers go forth,” it was, as one observer noted in 1915, “a
poor old-fashioned thing” (Rhodes, 1915: 12) (Figure 1.10).
In fact, the growing disdain for Bath chairs can at least be traced earlier.
In 1859, a furniture maker was listed in a New York City directory as
specializing in chairs “for the comfort and convenience of sick, lame, and
lazy people” (Anon, 1859: 140). While truly ill persons were increasingly
sent to hospitals, observers like the essayist James Hain Friswell inveighed
against “The hypochondriac who... lounges about in an invalid chair.” In
his “character formation manual,” Friswell went so far as to claim that
chair users were among “the most self-indulgent and lazy people” he knew
(Friswell, 1864: 144). These attitudes were widely held and filtered into
memorable characters like Clara, the spoilt child and wheelchair user in
Swiss author Johanna Spyri’s 1880 book Heidi. Born into a wealthy and
indulgent family, Clara thinks she cannot walk and uses a wheelchair until
she visits Heidi in the Alps. Removed from the comfort of her urban home
and embracing the simple lifestyle of the mountaineers, Clara blossoms; in
fact, she learns that she can thrive without a wheelchair.
At the same time that wheeled and Bath chairs were considered increasingly
suspect in public spaces, workaday crutches were almost ordinary. From
beggars in the streets of Rome and New York to the disabled veterans
who crowded cheap Parisian cafes, crutches could be found everywhere
in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In sheer day-to-day visibility,
wheelchairs were uncommon. Indeed, while the wheelchair was increasingly
associated with luxury and laziness, the crutch, which requires labor and
strength to use, was perceived differently. Unlike the wheelchair, the crutch
could adapt to a number of different environments and required few, if any,
special accommodations. Little wonder the device became a quick signal
or stand-in for active disability in the public’s imagination. Crutches were
visible everywhere. In this respect, nineteenth-century literature is filled with
iconic invalids like Dickens’ charming waif, Tiny Tim, and Thomas Hardy’s
“fallen” woman, Fanny, in Far From the Madding Crowd. Furthermore,
Robert Louis Stevenson drew one of the most vivid pictures of disabled
dexterity yet when depicting the pirate captain Long John Silver in Treasure
Island; in the ship’s tight quarters, Silver fixed “his crutch by a lanyard round
 ORIGINS OF A MISFIT DESIGN 35

FIGURE 1.10  H. K. Browne, Cleopatra Skewton in Charles Dickens’ Dombey and

Son, 1848 (in Charles Dickens, Dombey and Son, London: 1848).
36 DESIGNING DISABILITY

his neck” (Stevenson, 1884: 79) but could also use it to stabilize himself
while cooking and on dry land he might emphasize a point by crushing the
crutch in the ground while speaking.
Would Stevenson’s wily and unprincipled pirate have been the same
character had he used a wheelchair instead of a crutch? Could he have
even managed on the schooners and rocky jungle islands portrayed in
Stevenson’s novel? Such literary reflections explain, at least in part, the role
of the crutch in the public’s consciousness by the early twentieth century.
For all their liabilities, crutches were the most practical solution to many
forms of mobility impairment. No nineteenth-century wheelchair would fit
on a cramped pirate schooner or scoot across the untamed jungles of the
Caribbean. Crutches met with fewer barriers in the environment. They were
so ubiquitous, too, that no one saw the need for a crutch etiquette manual—
that is, an equivalent of Sterry’s suggestion “how to behave in a Bath chair.”
Thus it was the crutch, and not the wheelchair, that served as the first
modern symbol of active disablement. As recently as 1938, the crutch was
used as the symbol for the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, a
group formed by Franklin Roosevelt. Now better known as the March
of Dimes, the organization’s aggressive fundraising techniques are still
memorable for their ingenuity. Volunteers organized parades and square
dances, telethons, and tag sales. But one of their best fundraisers was “blue
crutch days,” referring to a plastic blue-crutch lapel pin sold to the public as
a fundraiser (Rose, 2003: 56). Following a moneymaking initiative begun
by a California Lions Club, state legislatures across the United States began
to declare official “blue crutch days,” while boy and girl scouts, civic or
veterans’ groups sold miniature representations of the crutch that could
be worn as lapel pins (Rose, 2003: 56). Little more than a simple, single
bright blue plastic crutch, at the top of this small pin were three silver circles
resembling the US coins. On each “coin” was printed the words “MARCH”
“OF” “DIMES.” The little lapel pin ratified a symbol that expressed solidarity
with polio survivors.
When FDR helped found the March of Dimes in 1938, he still avoided
using assistive devices in public, except when absolutely necessary. Bearing
in mind the wheelchair’s increasing association with institutional care, it is
unsurprising to find that Roosevelt, himself much preferred using a cane
or crutch when seen before audiences, and usually employed these while
leaning on the arm of a son or assistant. In later years, the president’s
attitude toward his various mobility aids shifted. Late in his presidency,
FDR began using a new type of folding wheelchair, and although he refused
to be photographed in it, he did speak openly to others about his use of
this new chair. When, for example, in 1945 he was returning from the Yalta
conference, Roosevelt spent the better part of a day entertaining Abdulaziz
Ibn Saud, the king of Saudi Arabia, on a navy cruiser moored off Egypt. Saud
was also disabled with acute arthritis, walked with pain, and often used a
wheelchair himself. On first meeting Roosevelt, the Saudi king immediately
 ORIGINS OF A MISFIT DESIGN 37

proclaimed that they were like “twin” brothers because of “their close ages,
their responsibilities for their nations’ well-being, their interests in farming,
and the grave physical infirmities” that each faced (Yergin, 1991: 386). Ever
the diplomat, Roosevelt replied to the king, “You are luckier than I because
you can still walk on your legs and I have to be wheeled wherever I go.”
But Ibn Saud would have none of this, responding, “No, my friend, you are
more fortunate. Your chair will take you wherever you want to go and you
know you will get there” (Yergin, 1991). Clearly touched by this response,
Roosevelt gifted the king his backup wheelchair, calling it a “twin” of the
one he was using (Eddy, 1954: 31).
The Saudi ruler went on to request a custom-made wheelchair that had
silk and antique brocade and was equipped with a fringe cover. The king’s
specially commissioned chair recalls the elaborate devices used by Philip II
and Louis XIV, centuries earlier. Its California-based maker went so far as
to describe the chair as “a throne on wheels” (Anderson, 1977). By the mid-
twentieth century, of course, there was little interest in chairs like this. But the
basic design was identical to the less ostentatious version originally given by
Roosevelt. Lightweight and collapsible, Roosevelt’s new chair demonstrated
a significant rethinking of the wheelchair, and the environments in which it
could be used.

The chair that changed the world

His rigid wicker chair wouldn’t fit on the back of the family Buick, or so
Herbert Everest would always explain to reporters, investors, and anyone
else who would listen. Everest was a mining engineer who became disabled
in 1918 when a wall fell and fractured his spine while he was fighting a
fire in an Arkansas mine. As a paraplegic, he struggled with the wheelchair
problem for the next fifteen years. Everest’s largest frustration was how
to strap his delicate but also rather bulky wicker chair onto a vehicle. He
strove to make a living as an independent consultant in electronics, but
“found my greatest difficulty was the lack of a usable, folding wheelchair.
It just was not practical to tie the hospital chair on the back bumper to
go on business errands” (Anon, 1955b: 4). Out of this misfit the modern
wheelchair was born.
As Everest would later recall, one day his wife “found a self-propelled,
wooden, folding chair which could be put in the car.” Although “the chair was
a wonderful help,” it was made for use up and down hospital corridors, was
held together with lightweight and flimsy wicker caning, was easily frayed
and crushed in the back of his car, and “had to be rebuilt after nearly every
long trip” (Anon, 1955b). Trained as an engineer, Everest approached another
engineer, his neighbor Harry Jennings. Working with industrial materials and
using the folding chair as a model, they created a sturdy wheelchair with
tubular steel and welded joints. Moreover, it could be folded and used in
38 DESIGNING DISABILITY

careful coordination with cars. The result, patented in 1937 (H. A. Everest
et al., October 12, 1937, patent No 2095411 A), was, in the words of the
writer Freda Bruce Lockhardt, a “comparatively peaceful revolution, which
has made wheelchairs familiar features of modern life” (Lockhart, 1971:
5). This was the chair that FDR used in his final years. This was the chair
that would be pictured on the International Symbol of Access. Because of
its revolutionary design, construction, and uses, I call this the first modern
wheelchair (Figure 1.11).
To be clear, Everest and Jennings’ first chairs invoke the best-known
mechanisms of modernity. Certainly, for Everest himself, the wheelchair was
not a medical device. It was a social tool, essential to being in and of the world
around him. And it made little sense for his wheelchair to be constructed like
the chairs used to transport patients through the wards of hospitals. It was
wrong, too, for his chair to be fashioned from the same materials as cheaply
crafted furniture. Unlike the hand-crafted cane and wood chairs then in use,
these chairs were made in factories, and they were constructed from the
materials of the machine age—steel, chrome, and vinyl. But they didn’t just
look more modern. They were also designed specifically with the automobile
in mind. This new wheelchair was anchored to the interconnected, sped-
up world of modern mobility. Everest and Jennings conceived their first
prototype wheelchair as belonging in the world of machines.
It is especially difficult today to appreciate the impact of this first,
modern wheelchair design. Although it took time for the chair to be
widely introduced, it gradually made the wood and wicker chairs used
in hospitals look obsolete. Its introduction was an act of empowerment
that fundamentally changed ideas around mobility, access, and disability
itself. Herbert Everest “became a rolling advertisement” for the chair he
developed and put into production (Cooper et al, 2003: 281). Everest would
later explain to the readers of the Paralyzed Veterans Association newsletter
Paraplegia News that as late as 1935 “anyone wishing to buy a chair had a
choice of a restricted few.” Chair users usually “took what the dealer had, or
went without” (Anon, 1955b: 4).
Eschewing the padded upholstery, wood and rattan or rush seating of
prior chairs, Everest & Jennings’ (E&J) chair was a strikingly “dramatic
departure” from those that came before (Bartolucci, 1992: 32); it had more
in common with the stripped down, functionalist furniture design coming
out of the Bauhaus in Germany than the Victorian-era spas of Brighton
and Bath. Instead of padding, it employed a plain and sturdy fabric that
could collapse like a hammock on its seat and back. And its spare, chrome-
plated structure recalls the tubular steel chairs of Marcel Breuer and the
cantilevered steel-bar chairs of Mies van der Rohe.
The first E&J wheelchairs were sturdy but also lightweight, and made
for both indoor and outdoor use. Not only were they collapsible, but also
the company continued to innovate its design. Unlike the Merlin chair, and
most of the chairs used in hospitals after the Civil War, the company quickly
 ORIGINS OF A MISFIT DESIGN 39

FIGURE 1.11  Herbert Everest. Drawing for folding wheelchair patent (US
2095411 A), 1937.
40 DESIGNING DISABILITY

FIGURE 1.12  Kurt Hutton, Nurse tends an injured soldier, 1941. Picture Post/Getty
Images.
 ORIGINS OF A MISFIT DESIGN 41

enlarged the rear—propelling—wheels of E&J chairs. While almost all chairs

produced by this time were fitted with small wheel rims that allowed users to
propel their chairs forward, because the E&J chair led with smaller, lighter,
and more responsive casters, it was easier to guide and steer. Thus the newer
design combined hand rims with a relatively lightweight frame, meaning that
it was easier for the user to move him- or herself. Indoors, this wheelchair
could be maneuvered well in small spaces, fitting through doorways without
first having to carefully line the chair up with the doorjamb. But also, unlike
the Bath chair that was designed for outdoor use, the E&J chair was more
compact and its user could manoeuver it up single steps and around curves.
And, of course, addressing Everest’s original need, it could also be easily folded
and placed in a car. This feature would, as we shall soon see, help shape a
new attitude toward chairs—and their fit into the larger environment. In the
final analysis, E&J chair was more than a convenient new chair design; it also
reflected changing attitudes about personal mobility.
The new wheelchair’s promise of light, compact mobility led the White
House to acquire several E&J chairs in early 1944. To be sure, the foldable
wheelchair was not invisible. But to Roosevelt, who had struggled for years
to find a practical and inconspicuous way of getting around, it must have
been a welcome alternative to earlier wheelchairs. The president began using
a standard issue E&J design, and several more were quickly acquired. When
the Secret Service oversaw a redesign of Roosevelt’s airplane, E&J was asked
to build a more compact version, without arms, so he could fit in an unusual
elevator. The president did not want to enter the plane in public, carried up
steps, or be seen wheeling across the tarmac and up a ramp. Instead, he chose
to board the plane privately, by way of a special elevator that opened on the
aircraft’s door (Gallagher, 1985: 176). Roosevelt’s wealth and power allowed
him to find or make special accommodations necessary to use a wheelchair.
His wheelchair did not change the world; the turning point in attitudes
toward the disabled came only after his death. But, as more and more people
started to use the E&J wheelchair, it gradually becomes clearer: the modern
wheelchair required an environment built with it in mind.
Even in FDR’s day-to-day life, Hugh Gallagher observes, “the President
moved in a ramped world” (Gallagher, 1985: 142). As early as 1933, on the
bright and sunny porch where Roosevelt relaxed with the three-year-old Ruth
Bie and Fala, the setting was clearly accessible to his chair, as was the rest of
the residence at Hill Top cottage. The modest Dutch Colonial Revival home
was designed by architect Henry Toombs, but with considerable input from
FDR, who fitted it to his needs.5 The first floor had no stairs or steps at all. For
instance, the small porch where Roosevelt sat was accessible to the grounds via
an earthen ramp. Inside the cottage, windows were built lower, for maximum
viewing from a wheelchair, and doorways lacked thresholds or other
impediments to wheeled access. Roosevelt’s assistants went to great lengths in
order to accommodate his chairs, particularly in the nation’s capital. Ramps
were built in front of public buildings and railings placed to enable walking
42 DESIGNING DISABILITY

from backstage to podium. Sometimes, the Secret Service even constructed

ramps “not just for the President, but for his car too” (Gallagher, 1985: 98).
Traveling around the country, FDR liked to ride in his car all the way up
to a speaking platform, waving his hat along the way, and even delivering
speeches from the vehicle. Those early accommodations remind us how ill-
fitted Roosevelt’s surroundings were to his impairment, but also suggest that
clever design allowed FDR to cultivate the appearance of normalcy.
Roosevelt died just as the war was ending and legions of veterans, many of
them injured, were returning home. Companies like Everest & Jennings were
uniquely poised to meet their wheelchair needs. But after the president died
in April 1945, the accommodations around Washington were seen as having
fulfilled their purpose. Without Roosevelt there, “the ramps constructed in
the White House and other places across Washington for the use of the
President’s wheelchair were soon taken up” (Gallagher, 1985: 209). Even
FDR’s church, an institution that might pride itself on access, did not see a
continuing need. At St. John’s, the place of worship favored by presidents
and just across Lafayette Square from the White House, “removed the small
ramp from the two steps at the church’s nave” (Gallagher, 1985: 209).
Here, as elsewhere, access was available on a case-by-case basis, through
individual accommodations. Most of the public continued to believe that
seriously disabled persons should adapt themselves to the environment, or
else stay in infirmaries, in hospitals, or at home.
Roosevelt’s needs were not an aberration. In fact, E&J wheelchairs became
standard issue for the waves of injured veterans returning home. But the
invention of the modern wheelchair and its widespread dissemination was
not enough. It still remained for society to recognize disability as a matter
of environment as much as one of technology or medicine. The product of
need, innovation, and technology, the modern wheelchair could not be put
into widespread use until there was the social and political will to make it
fit within the built environment. The invention of the modern wheelchair
thus highlighted a heretofore unrecognized kind of misfit, suggesting it as a
new way of thinking about disability and the role that design could play in
mitigating its effects. And signage would be integral to this changed mind-set.

Notes
1 Of course, some physical impairments, diseases, and accidents have remained
consistent through history. But the nature of others has, to some extent, changed
over time. Two hundred years ago, incapacitation and death came early and was
often from infectious diseases, malnutrition, and injuries. In the industrialized
world today, people live longer and suffer from heart disease, strokes, and a variety
of conditions often connected with old age.
2 Although high-profile reformers like Florence Nightingale worried that seriously
ill patients “get no good by going through the air, and being jolted up and down
 ORIGINS OF A MISFIT DESIGN 43

stairs” (Florence Nightingale, 1858: 84), most architects and administrators

took for granted many features that would later prove to be barriers for
access. The most up-to-date hospitals always featured a “fine and spacious
entrance hall” graced with “tolerably wide” entry stairs; these functioned partly
as airshafts and partly because “they must afford space for carrying up the
patients” (Oppert, 1867: 16). Typically, patients were put in chairs and carried
up and down these staircases, though, as one Victorian-era author admitted, “I
have sometimes seen patients carried up who groaned from pain caused by the
uncomfortable chairs which the porters use in some establishments” (Oppert,
1867: 16).
3 Most nineteenth-century wheelchairs lacked even the most simple safety
mechanisms like brakes. Visiting Russia in the 1840s, Mary-Ann Smith observed
a memorable moment in wheelchair safety when visiting the Tsar’s wife,
Alexandra Feodorovna, in her private quarters in St. Petersburg’s Winter Palace.
The invalid empress approached in a wheelchair that two of her younger sons
began pushing across the palace floors, “propelling the Tzaritza at unwonted
speed.” Then their father entered the room, and with military discipline, the
boys immediately moved to salute their father, letting go of the chair. The
Tsarina continued to speed across the elegant anteroom outside Alexandra’s
private apartments, coming to a rough stop in front of a range of chairs set
against a distant wall (Smith, 1859: 108, 109).
4 See, for example, Horace Swete’s account of the tools and equipment necessary
for a well-functioning clinic (1870).
5 Toombs had already designed a number of accommodations in Warm Springs,
FDR’s rehabilitation center in Georgia. The president had numerous ideas
and special requests when Toombs designed his Hill Top residence; in fact,
Toombs would later claim that FDR should be noted as architect, not he (see
correspondence, Henry Toombs to M Le Hand, 1938, Franklin D. Roosevelt
Library).
 2
Fitting In (1945–1961)

In 1950 Marlon Brando hit the big screen. Standing at the cusp of a critical
career in film, his best-known performance until then was his searing
portrayal of Stanley Kowalski in Tennessee William’s 1947 Broadway plays
A Streetcar Named Desire. But Brando was persuaded to come to Hollywood
and star in The Men (1950), the tale of a veteran embittered by paraplegia
(Figure 2.1). Studio publicists held Brando in ambivalent admiration
and struggled to sell such a dark film to the public. As he prepared for
the role, Brando was shadowed by LIFE magazine, whose correspondent
documented him eating, drinking, and living with paraplegic veterans in
Los Angeles’ Birmingham Veterans Hospital during the four weeks before

FIGURE 2.1  Marlon Brando practicing for his role as a paraplegic veteran in The
Men, 1950. Ed Clark/Life Picture Collection/Getty Images.
46 DESIGNING DISABILITY

production began (Cosgrove, 2014). A state-of the-art facility, the hospital

was filled with Everest & Jennings’ (E&J) new wheelchairs. Brando slowly
learned to use one. The young and physically active Brando went to great
lengths to pass as one of the guys. When LIFE’s photographer caught up
with the patients on an outing, Brando suddenly pulled back from the
studio’s scripted press event, reverting to his mischievous, bad-boy image.
In an impulsive rush, he comically took his chair over a specially ramped
sidewalk curb only to take a pratfall in front of the magazine’s camera. As
Brando performed for the camera, a group of patients gathered around the
actor and laughed appreciatively at his stunt. But to them, the mishap was
all too familiar.
The Men focused on the psychological state of men with little chance of
returning to their former lives, but it also revealed how simple daily actions
like mounting steep sidewalk curbs dogged them day in, day out. Ultimately,
critics praised The Men as “extraordinarily fine” (Crowther, 1950: xi),
but the film was as earnest as the LIFE photo-op was light-hearted. The
Men ends on an ambiguous note. Newly married, Brando’s wheelchair-
using veteran Ken (“Bud”) Wilozek has misgivings on his wedding night.
Leaving his bride, he returns to Birmingham Veterans Hospital. Buoyed by
his comrades there, Bud finally sees the error in his way of thinking and
drives all night to find his wife. She has moved away and returned home to
her parents, who never approved of her marriage to a disabled veteran to
begin with. In the final scene, Bud struggles to get his folding wheelchair out
of the car and then transfers onto it. Proceeding up the path to his in-laws’
home, Bud makes it as far as the front step. Wheel to step, rubber to brick,
his progress stops short of the door. The wheelchair can’t go any further up
the short path; seeing him, his wife rushes out of the house. The film closes
with the pair embracing on the path.
Like the pratfall Brando took for LIFE, this closing scene reveals a
hidden truth—although it had been introduced some ten years earlier, the
modern wheelchair still had to be fitted into a world that was not built for it.
When LIFE published a photo spread promoting The Men, the magazine’s
editors breezily described Brando as learning the “technique of getting his
chair up an incline, which looks deceptively easy” (Anon., 1950a: 132). No
doubt, E&J folding wheelchair had the potential to change lives. But it was
also a very demanding device. Even as the doctors at Birmingham treated
veterans and the government provided them with lightweight, chrome-
plated wheelchairs, these chairs were useful only if the spaces in which they
moved were accommodating.
Like Brando, the veterans at Birmingham Hospital quickly learned that
little problems—steps, curbs, uneven surfaces, narrow doors, and a host of
impediments small and large—conspired against them. In fact, wheelchair
mobility and access slowly brought to light a larger terrain in which physics,
philosophy, and social convention intersect. Bluntly put, wheels function
only under certain conditions. This chapter deals with the misfit between
 FITTING IN (1945–1961) 47

the modern wheelchair’s promise of mobility and the modern environment’s

inhospitability to it. For the modern wheelchair to function as designed, curb
cuts, ramps, and a variety of tweaks and adjustments had to be developed—
to this day they form the basis for the barrier-free access movement. But even
just recognizing the need to integrate these changes into the environment
was difficult; it was harder still for able-bodied people to understand that
the built environment was itself disabling. The modern wheelchair promised
far more mobility than anything offered earlier generations of disabled
people. But for it to be integrated into modern life, the modern environment
had to be changed to accommodate it.
Without a doubt, the disabled access movement has its roots in
the early postwar years, when the modern wheelchair first became
normalized. Returning veterans to civilian life was a chief concern in the
years immediately after the war. Part of this postwar adjustment included
integrating those returning with disabilities. Hollywood documented
this process in movies like The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), which
chronicles the adjustments of ex-servicemen, including one who lost both
hands during a shipboard accident, and Bright Victory (1952), the tale of
a soldier’s return after he was blinded by a German sniper’s bullet. White
canes, guide dogs, and hearing aids were all used in this process, but no
device presented a more striking visual symbol of these efforts than the new
and improved wheelchair. Veterans or not, it gave new promise to an entire
class of severely disabled people. But, having embraced the wheelchair,
the public—disabled and able-bodied alike—now had to be taught how it
should be used.
Reading backward from today, it is easy to see the roots of this change
in 1940s California, where thousands of veterans went to recuperate after
the Second World War. There, they encountered a rudimentary wheeled
culture of access organized around the car. Not coincidentally, this also was
where E&J was based. But this retrospective view is dangerous as it might
bury developments made in the middle of the country, at the University of
Illinois, where researchers began a rehabilitation program for veterans that
eventually transformed the entire campus into a kind of experimental test
site for disabled access. Nevertheless, it was only in the 1950s, when the
question of access was taken up in Washington, that the magnitude of the
problem—as well as possible solutions—became clear.

Accessing a culture on four wheels

When LIFE photographer Ed Clark arrived at Birmingham Veterans
Hospital for his publicity photo shoot with Marlon Brando, he caught the
actor and friends hitching a ride around the hospital grounds (Figure 2.2).
Rearview mirror, tail pipe, door handle, these wheelchair-using veterans
were grasping any part of the car they could; as the car accelerated, they
48 DESIGNING DISABILITY

FIGURE 2.2  Marlon Brando (far right) joking with wheelchair using veterans on
the grounds of Birmingham Veterans Hospital, Los Angeles, 1949. Ed Clark/Life
Picture Collection/Getty Images.

held on tight. This lighthearted gag caught Clark’s eye and he captured it on
film. While Brando’s pratfall was met with rueful smiles suggesting that each
wheelchair user recognized in Brando’s accident the new challenges they
would have to face, the actor’s hitchhiking stunt was different. Its seemingly
effortless bravado foregrounds a new form of liberation promised by both
the modern, collapsible wheelchair and the automobiles it was designed
to be used with. Nowhere was this pairing more apt than in Southern
California. Los Angeles presented, as commentator David Brodsly would
later observe, “a world that seems designed to run on four wheels” (Brodsly,
1981: 35). Though he was referring to cars, the patients at Birmingham
Veterans Hospital were on four wheels, too. In California, rolling—that is,
the autonomy of movement inextricably tied to the wheel—achieved iconic
status, and its culture of independent mobility based on the wheel facilitated
a kind of de facto access.
This was hardly happenstance. Los Angeles’ culture of the wheel provided
the critical impetus for the development of the collapsible wheelchair in the
first place. When, in the early 1930s, Herbert Everest and Harry Jennings
developed the folding wheelchair in Los Angeles, they had automobile
access squarely in mind. When Everest, a paraplegic, moved to Los Angeles,
he could drive himself all over the state, picking up jobs as an independent
 FITTING IN (1945–1961) 49

electronics consultant. He found the city’s car culture amenable enough to his
disability; however, he needed a wheelchair that could fit easily in the back
of his car. Folding wheelchairs had already been developed, and some had
even been patented. As early as 1894, Kansas native Sarah Potter developed
a portable invalid chair (Sarah A. Potter, December 25, 1894, patent No
531,330). In London, J. and A. Carter, specialists in “invalid furniture,” sold
a wooden wheelchair for travelers who wanted to avoid the “inconvenience
and annoyance of being carelessly moved about by Railway Porters” (Anon.,
1902: 163). By 1914, the popular magazine Scientific American described
at least one already in use in New York (Bond, 1914: 67). But Herbert
Everest imagined a wheelchair for the American car culture typified by Los
Angeles’ smooth and relatively barrier-free asphalt and concrete landscape.
With Jennings, Everest designed a chair that allowed him to drive his car
to work, park, take out, and unfold the chair, then roll into work, moving
seamlessly from car to parking lot, and then from lot into buildings. E&J
built a wheelchair empire based upon the personal mobility that coalesced
around the automobile.
Speaking broadly, car culture changed the American public’s attitudes
toward mobility in the early twentieth century. Fusing technology with
mass production, the first inexpensive cars brought speed, distance, and
independence to large numbers of people. At the same time as labor
was becoming more regimented by 9 to 5 hours, punch cards, and train
and tram schedules, the automobile offered a form of personal release.
The car allowed drivers “their own way, their own view, and their own
opportunities to interact with things. It meant freedom from railroad
timetables, certainly, and perhaps from the stranglehold of corporate
monopolies on time” (Gudis, 2004: 40). Propelling this novel sense of
autonomy was a new reality—car drivers could travel across the city,
state, or country, almost at will. Automobiles offered travelers a new form
of freedom.
This new mobility was also egalitarian. White and non-white, rich and
relatively poor, able-bodied and disabled all had access to the road, and all the
freedoms it implied. Entire communities grasped this potential. For African
Americans in the rural South, the advent of inexpensive automobiles helped
spur the Great Migration. Disabled people, too, benefited from the advent
of inexpensive automobiles. Amputees who could operate an automobile,
for example, could take care of errands across town, or take a camping
trip across the country. An Alliance, Ohio, man born with no legs and one
arm became a racecar driver (Anon., 1919). A boy who lost both hands in
a train accident went on to become a Dallas County judge, clocking 1,500
miles behind the wheel (Anon., 1920). In 1920, the Literary Digest reported
“there are a dozen other cases I could mention of those cripples who are not
cripples; of physically handicapped men whose handicaps vanish into thin
air the moment they are seated in the driving seat of a motor-car” (Anon.,
1920). Later, of course, FDR would take great pride in driving his own
50 DESIGNING DISABILITY

specially adapted cars, including a sporty four-door Plymouth PA Phaeton

he kept at Warm Springs and that allowed him to travel around the Georgia
back roads unencumbered. Less well-known disabled drivers experienced
a similar sense of pride. On a lark, a recently discharged First World War
veteran named Paul L. Bolin, who lost a leg fighting at Chateau-Thierry,
drove a car across the continent to San Francisco (Anon., 1920). In each
instance, the car did not solve the problem of impairment, but it did begin
to give some disabled people a new sense of mobility and freedom.
When Herbert Everest moved to Los Angeles in the early 1920s, his
situation was more marked than some, but to a greater or lesser extent
everyone in far-flung, loosely populated Southern California experienced
a problem with mobility. In the years shortly after the First World War,
Los Angeles’ strong attachment to the motorcar began to take shape. The
population was scattered and, as cars were gaining in popularity, citizens
eagerly advocated for an extensive infrastructure—unconstrained by the
horses, pedestrians, and the trolleys that filled ordinary city streets— to
support them. Carving divisions through the city, planners structured
the region around automobile transport. With visionary fanfare, the
first freeway opened in 1940. Where large cities like Chicago and New
York were vertically oriented, Los Angeles was horizontal. Expanding
on a grid of local streets, boulevards, and avenues, a spidery network of
freeways connected far-flung corners of the city. By the 1930s, regional
architecture was designed and built with wheels in mind. In this uniquely
auto-friendly city, asphalt and concrete streets were routinely intercepted
by the sloped aprons of driveways and driveways. These led, in turn, to
large parking lots, which themselves connected to adjacent sidewalks.
One-story buildings were constructed on flat, concrete pads that rested
directly on the ground. The result was a built infrastructure that was—
often enough—step free.
The Men depicted some of this terrain and the ways in which it
accommodated and presented obstacles to wheelchair users. All the
wheelchairs used in the film were made by E&J—this point was emphasized
even before the film was released, when the film was featured in hospital
journals (Anon., 1950b: 5). It highlighted the facilities at Birmingham
Veterans Hospital, one of only a few places built to treat spinal cord injury.
The sprawling hospital campus was constructed of one-story brick and
stucco buildings like much the rest of the architecture around town. Although
The Men was largely filmed at Birmingham Hospital itself, the film offers
glimpses of the access available to Bud in Los Angeles. At key moments in
the film, Brando’s character tests the world outside the hospital. He goes out
to a restaurant with his fiancée, and later accompanies other wheeled vets
to a bar. Though his wheelchair makes him a source of constant—and often
unpleasant—attention, it also allows him to roll through Los Angeles’ flat
environment with relative ease. It is only in the film’s final scene, when he
 FITTING IN (1945–1961) 51

leaves Los Angeles to visit his in-laws in their neighborhood of multistoried

houses and stepped brick paths, that he confronts a physical barrier.
Given that, in California, access to four wheels meant mobility to disabled
and non-disabled people alike, driving was encouraged as part of veterans’
recuperation. Largely at the behest of veterans’ groups, the state was ahead
of the nation when residents argued that automobiles were essential to
morale and even aided faster convalescence. By 1944, California’s American
Legion Auxiliary launched an independent initiative to raise $10,000
to help disabled veterans purchase their own cars. This initiative quickly
gathered national attention; by August 1946, backing came from Congress,
which authorized the purchase of cars for disabled veterans nationwide.1
Several major automakers concurred, with Ford and Oldsmobile providing
adaptations to some of their most popular automobile makes. At Birmingham
Hospital the program was so successful that the patient parking lot was
informally dubbed “Oldsmobile Row” (Banks, 1997: 1). (Brando was meant
to drive a specially equipped Oldsmobile in The Men and one appears in
the LIFE magazine profile.) But no matter how many specially equipped
Oldsmobiles were on the road and however many E&J wheelchairs were
given to returning veterans to use with them, plenty of barriers remained,
even in wheel-friendly Los Angeles.
Then in 1946, just down the highway from Birmingham Hospital and a
stone’s throw from E&J headquarters, the University of California at Los
Angeles admitted four veterans, all wheelchair users, as students (Anon.,
1948: 66). That year, the school took a calculated, pragmatic stance and
admitted thousands of decommissioned soldiers on the 1944 GI Bill.
But they also took a gamble, and included the quartet from Birmingham
Hospital. To date, wheelchair users like Herbert Everest found Los
Angeles’ wheel-friendly environment accessible, though on an individual
basis. But this was an attempt to integrate larger numbers of disabled
people into institutional life beyond that of infirmaries. It was a leap into
the unknown. And, although the city provided more access than many
environments at the time, the university was different. No one, after all, had
taken into account the campus’ distinctive architecture, including its neo-
Romanesque towers, grand staircases, and elevated cloisters. In contrast to
a regional architecture that favored flatness, UCLA’s monumental campus
mimicked the majestic campus architecture of New England and European
universities.
When the first group of chair users arrived, not everything went well. The
campus proved so unaccommodating that a local group of veterans had to
carry them into its most inaccessible classrooms (DeLoach, 1992: 37). But the
plan continued. Over the next year, the university grew its Veterans Affairs
Department and began strategizing better adjustments and modifications. Just
as FDR relied on special accommodations, the school built special ramps and
widened classroom doors to accommodate their wheelchair-using students
52 DESIGNING DISABILITY

(Browning, 1947). By 1948, disabled students were permitted to park in a

central lot reserved for faculty; UCLA had its own Oldsmobile row in the
heart of its campus. But other accommodations came more slowly. When,
for instance, administrators realized that the campus veterans’ services office
was up a flight of stairs, wheelchair-using vets had to be enrolled in the
parking lot behind Murphy Hall (Figure 2.3) (Anon., 1948: 66).
In a certain sense, the increasing numbers of injured veterans elicited a
genuine interest in change. Historian David Gerber reports that by 1945,
about 671,000 soldiers had been wounded, and 300,000 seriously enough
that they needed long-term care (Gerber, 2000: 73). Generally speaking, there
was a governmental and social commitment to ensure that all veterans “lead
useful, reasonably normal lives” (Gerber, 2000: 331). This charge extended
to profoundly injured veterans who, benefitting from improved medicine
and treatment, were increasingly able to survive their wounds. Now, too,
civilians who were living longer with the aftermath of diseases like polio, as
well as conditions like cerebral palsy and muscular dystrophy. Anyone could
see that the nature of these impairments was hugely varied, and so too were
the approaches toward integrating these veterans and civilians into society.
For all these purposes, in 1945 President Harry Truman instituted a national
Employ of the Physically Handicapped Week; the next year he inaugurated
the President’s Committee on Employment of the Handicapped. Together,
both initiatives were continued under President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who
actively supported vocational rehabilitation legislation. Yet presidential
advocacy does not imply that American leaders or the public understood
how profoundly access shapes disabled people’s lives. Wheelchair users were
uniquely able to do just that.
Although veterans, like those at Birmingham Hospital, used the same
wheelchair as Franklin Roosevelt, their attitude toward it was fundamentally
different. Rather than hide their chairs, they organized their lives around
them. Special groups for disabled people, for example, the American
Federation of the Physically Handicapped that was founded in 1940, already
advocated strongly on labor issues. But the Second World War veterans also
organized through informal channels like newsletters and physical therapy
programs and met at the hospitals where they convalesced. They founded
groups like the Paralyzed Veterans of America (PVA), whose informal motto
was “empowering veterans lives.”
However, even in wheelchair-friendly California, the notion of wholesale
accommodation was new. These wheelchair users, historian Guy Tremblay
insists, were “pioneers” of a new sort. This generation was unwilling to
stay at home, using their wheelchairs to venture out into the world and
forcing access to be an issue (Tremblay, 1996). What they discovered was
that wheelchairs were not enough; the problem of access was pervasive,
and it played out most visibly in institutions of education, where a serious
commitment was made to accommodate returning GI veterans. A new
approach toward environmental infrastructure was needed.
 FITTING IN (1945–1961) 53

FIGURE 2.3  Paraplegic veterans registering for classes at the University of Califor-
nia, Los Angeles,1947. John Florea/Life Picture Collection/Getty Images.

The Nugent ethic

When most students applied to enter the University of Illinois’s flagship
campus at Champaign-Urbana, they mailed in an application. But in March
1949, when a group of fourteen wheelchair users sought admission, they
54 DESIGNING DISABILITY

FIGURE 2.4  A semi-permanent wheelchair ramp constructed at Lincoln Hall, Uni-

versity of Illinois. Students staged a protest here in 1949, erecting an improvised
ramp into the building. By 1956, the year this photograph was taken, a sturdier ramp
was constructed, 1956. Courtesy University of Illinois.

went straight to campus and used 2 × 8 planks taken from a painter’s

scaffolding rig. The students were already enrolled at the university’s
Galesburg campus, where the Mayo Army Hospital had turned part of
its wheelchair-friendly complex into a division of the University of Illinois
(Brown, 2008). This trial program was brief. Opened in October 1948, it
was forced to close almost immediately after it opened; the state government
wanted to repurpose the campus as a research center for medical care of
the elderly. Many of Galesburg’s more able-bodied students transferred to
Champaign-Urbana. But the paraplegic students were not included. Dubious
university administrators suggested that the main campus could not provide
the same medical facilities as the Mayo Army Hospital. They proposed
other solutions, including the completion of two years of college work by
correspondence or the establishment of an “isolated ward” for paraplegic
 FITTING IN (1945–1961) 55

students in the new medical center planned for the Galesburg site (Roberts
and Criggger, 1949). Rejecting these suggestions, the disabled students and
the chief administrator of their program, an educational psychologist named
Timothy Nugent, joined forces. Together, they organized a rally at the main
campus.
This protest quickly transformed into a demonstration of accessibility.
Arriving at an imposing lecture hall in the center of campus (Figure 2.4),
the students found some wooden planks and rapidly erected their own
makeshift infrastructure; as Nugent would later recall, they laid these planks
“up over some steps to show that these guys in wheelchairs could get into
that building” (Nugent, 2004–2005: 63). With Nugent, the students proved
how the campus could accommodate their chairs’ needs. The Galesburg
wheelchair users prevailed, and were allowed to attend school on a trial
basis (Nugent, 2004–05: 63). But what began as a test, meant to integrate
disabled students into existing classes, became instead an experiment in
access. And it turned the campus—and later the small college town around
it—into a space where disabled students could flourish. The planks that the
Galesburg students used at Champaign-Urbana helped students “fit” into
their environment or, to be more accurate, made the environment fit the
needs of disabled students.
The program at Champaign-Urbana had few precedents. In the century
prior, there had been little systematic knowledge about accommodating
wheelchairs. At best, isolated individuals pushed as they could for small
changes to help them function better. A feature in the 1883 issue of Building
News, for example, noted that a Liverpool nursing home placed an “inclined
plane” onto its terrace, “to allow of patients wheeling themselves about the
grounds in their Merlin chairs. A second inclined plane was added to the
patients’ entrance on the west side of the building, to allow easy egress in and
out of the building, too” (Anon., 1883). In a 1916 issue of Popular Science
Monthly, a column for handymen demonstrated how a simple “inclined
sidewalk” could be added to even modest homes and assist a wheeled invalid
chair. For an even fuller environment of accommodation, one had only
to look at FDR’s Warm Springs hospital in Georgia, where a consciously
designed environment of access included ramps and wider doors, but also
electrically operated doors that swung open automatically when a beam
of light detected movement (Watson and Woods, 2005b: 99). These cases,
however, were still limited in their scope and ambition—especially when
compared to the efforts that began to unfold at the University of Illinois.
This marks a profound shift in the very conception of access. The academics
at Champaign-Urbana did more than simply bring a group of wheelchair-
using students together. They also began remaking the built environment
on campus. In the first year of the program, adjustments for wheeled access
included the installation of ramps to seven buildings across campus (Nugent,
1950). And certainly, in the next several years, parking facilities were made
available to disabled students, and classes moved from inaccessible spaces
56 DESIGNING DISABILITY

when necessary. But it was still more than that. In those first years, a series
of narrow doors, smaller elevators, too high water fountains, and too small
toilets all needed to be replaced. In at least one structure, a second-floor
window was converted into a doorway; stretching up to it, a wheelchair
ramp was joined to the new opening, allowing wheeled access to the
building’s upper floors. At first, the university committed to making changes
incrementally. Campus-wide, for instance, when sidewalks became damaged
and needed repairs, curb cuts might be added for wheelchair access. Some
of this has assumed a mythology of its own. When the campus moved too
slowly for Nugent’s taste, recalled the activist and U of I alum Fred Fay, the
“ingenious” Nugent and his physical therapist Chuck Elmer “got up in the
middle of the night with a sledgehammer and destroyed curbs, and then the
next day report them as needing ramps” (Fay, 2001). Like all the activity at
Champaign-Urbana, such treacherous zeal was shaped by a broader set of
assumptions: given good training in a friendly environment, even severely
disabled students could attend university, receive an education, and lead
successful lives.
Given such aspirations, Tim Nugent would insist, the University of
Illinois program could not be limited to making buildings, sidewalks, and
curbs accessible. The goal was to naturalize wheelchair use and disability
itself. Nugent’s own father was hearing and vision impaired, his sister would
eventually be diagnosed as legally blind, and he himself had been diagnosed
with a heart condition when young (Nugent, 2004–2005). As someone
already familiar with disability, Nugent understood that wheelchair
users’ problems were not solved through new technologies, like the E&J
wheelchair, alone. In many ways, the built environment—and by extension
society as a whole—plays a profound role in determining who can access
spaces, and who cannot.
For his part, even as he recognized this environmental misfit, Nugent
also argued that disabled people should do everything possible to “fit”
social expectations. The question of social fit and misfit had haunted
disabled people at least since Joseph Ashby-Sterry proposed that someone
write a “Rules for Behaviour in a Bath-chair.” Yet the reality at the
University of Illinois was much clearer. Nugent insisted that students in
the school’s rehabilitation programs fit into a certain attitude of mind and
spirit. Nugent’s program was thus a remarkably astute social mirror of the
rest of campus, simply reimagining student life as carried out on wheels.
Submitting to the task of assimilation, wheelchair-using students were
taught how to spread picnic blankets so they could eat fried chicken dinners
on the ground; they also organized their own dance parties (Brown, 2008).
Wheelchair sports thrived at Illinois, the school becoming well known for its
excellence in wheelchair football, basketball, baseball, and bowling. What
is more, wheelchair cheerleaders promoted the men’s teams at home and
on the road (Figure 2.5).2 With its sports, cheer squad, and dances, Illinois’
incoming disabled students were urged to fit into this parallel campus
 FITTING IN (1945–1961) 57

FIGURE 2.5  Male and female cheerleaders, affiliated with the University of Il-
linois’s wheelchair basketball program, accompanied the team at home and on the
road, 1955. Courtesy University of Illinois.

society as completely as possible, yielding to what would retrospectively be

called “The Nugent ethic” (Goldsmith, 1983: 201). Nevertheless, it was a
method that gained attention and the university’s rehabilitation department
saw its numbers swell as it enrolled not just military veterans but students
with a variety of impairments ranging from polio to cerebral palsy and
muscular dystrophy.
This approach was in some ways forced, and graduates of the program
would look back on it with mixed feelings. Some imbibed its positivism, and
took it deeply to heart. Graduate Fred Fay recalls how “Nugent brought
this can-do philosophy and this spirit of competition to the campus that
was really refreshing. … Having that kind of dominant role model really
shaped the attitudes of a lot of students there” (Fay, 2001: 26). But others
like former activist and U of I student Kitty Cone “had felt totally controlled
and manipulated by the Rehabilitation Center. It was run by able-bodied
people for people with disabilities” (Cone, 1996–1998: 81). Recalling her
days as a wheelchair cheerleader at Illinois, Mary Lou Breslin remembered
just how hard it was to be oppositional and resist the program’s insistence
that everyone participate in campus life. “I bought into the whole gestalt of
U of I once I got there. I did not stand back and say, this is a terrible idea;
let’s reform the place. It was just the opposite: I thought, oh, yeah, I’m one
of the insiders” (Breslin, 1996–1998: 47). It should be clear that this was,
however, too simplistic a view.
58 DESIGNING DISABILITY

For one thing, from its start the program did accommodate students
with various impairments, but its main emphasis was on wheelchair users.
The members may have had diverse attitudes, priorities, and expectations,
but because the program itself was rooted in Mayo Hospital’s spinal injury
unit this early focus is not surprising. Nugent was energetically committed
to the group, but he was originally hired as head of students’ corrective
physical education and therapy—essentially a rehabilitation program.
Since the 1920s, the “rehabilitation” of disabled people meant that medical
specialists identified various impairments, and then aimed to treat them
through therapeutic interventions. As scholar Nora Groce notes, “blindness,
deafness, mental retardation and mental illness were not usually included
within the realm of ‘rehabilitation’ programs” (Groce, 2002: 4) as conceived
after the Second World War. The latter were “often represented by people
and organizations whose constituencies were concerned with specific
disability groups—‘the blind, ‘the deaf’ and so forth” (Groce, 2002: 4).
When the University of Illinois started the Galesburg program in 1948,
almost all the two dozen students were in wheelchairs (Nugent, 2004:
25). By the time Kitty Cone arrived at the Champaign-Urbana campus in
1962, that emphasis still predominated. As she later recalled, “they had, I
think, between 100 and 200—I’m not sure—students in wheelchairs. That
was really the focus” (Cone, 29). Though there had been several hearing
and vision-impaired students enrolled in Nugent’s program in the 1950s,
it wasn’t until the 1960s that the program began formally accepting and
accommodating them.
Whatever the nature of their disability, Nugent expected all of his
students to fit in. Writing in the 1955 issue of Sigma Signs, the newsletter
of the U of I program’s service fraternity, a student-reporter pointed to this
neat assimilation, swearing that a “stranger to the campus can’t help but
be struck by the fact that even though these people are in wheelchairs or
on crutches, they have the same bright, cheery, attitude, the same calm, but
very obvious self-assurance visible in any student in the great university”
(Anon., 1957b: 10, 11). Mary Lou Breslin, another program graduate, put
it more bluntly. The goal was to create “people who can fit in” (Breslin,
1996–1998: 48).
Nugent’s notion of a good fit was environmental as well as social.
Buildings, Tim Nugent came to believe, were designed for healthy, non-
disabled, young but still adult bodies. He gradually rejected this older habit
of thinking, insisting it too simplistic. Instead of looking at a relatively
narrow norm, Nugent reasoned, “it’s a matter of considering all people … It’s
a matter of conceptualization not just prescriptions or statistics or figures”
(Nugent, 2004–2005: 157, 158). Society has given the real range of bodies
and abilities very little thought. But, baldly put, any sizeable group of people
is going to have a varied set of needs. On the other hand, he observed, able-
bodied persons have long been given helpful accommodations. Imagine,
he suggested, reaching a lecture hall on a second floor. How did you get
 FITTING IN (1945–1961) 59

there? Architects solved this problem millennia ago by providing steps or

staircases. Nevertheless, Nugent recognized, most able-bodied users “don’t
realize that they’re getting in on steps, but somebody had to design and
build those steps” (Tim Nugent, 2004–2005; 138). Stairs, he explained,
are an architectural convenience based on centuries of social convention,
yet they are now so naturalized that we scarcely reflect on them long
enough to realize that they are an accommodation. At the U of I, Nugent
argued, “There’s nothing special about what we’re doing except that we’re
considering the whole population and not just a segment of it” (Tim Nugent,
2004–2005: 138).
Nugent spent little time speculating on how and why architects and
designers had arrived at the standards in place; instead, his focus was on
changing the world around him. And in the 1950s, that world was the
University of Illinois campus. His administrative records in the early years
of the 1950s reflect a flood of problems related to wheelchairs and access.
A door in the basement of the Mathematics Building would not open fully
enough to allow easy passage. An elevator in the same space was inaccessible
from all parts of the building. Ramps were needed in another building.
No doubt a great deal of the problems faced by the wheelchair-, brace-,
and cane-using students were created through oversight, and were simply
added reflexively. Most were also easily fixed. Nugent understood that if the
built environment could be tweaked and adjusted, disabled students could
function in it. But he gradually arrived at a larger truth; ultimately, he began
to argue, lack of access could be hunted down and tied to the minutiae of
design. These he began to call “barriers” (Nugent, 1960: 51). Staircases,
too narrow doorways, and uneven surfaces on floors—it didn’t matter. All
obstacles were barriers not only to access, but also to his students leading
normal lives.
Throughout the 1950s, by subtly widening doors, lowering drinking
fountains, and generally altering the built environment to be accessible to
wheelchairs users, Nugent staked out a new kind of “barrier-free” public
space. His approach was not without critics; some doctors and parents
consistently complained that Nugent’s sink or swim approach was too
cavalier or heavy-handed, particularly for the youngest paraplegic students
who enrolled in his program.3 Nevertheless, by the late 1950s Tim Nugent
started to win attention—and money—for his work. Funds were donated
through the national Polio Foundation, the Cancer Foundation, and the
Paraplegia Foundation. Slowly, through these groups, Nugent secured an
audience for his approach toward disability. But Nugent wanted more. He
began to advocate for his broader goal—nothing less than a barrier-free
world. But as support for and attention on Nugent’s program grew, he was
forced to confront a more fundamental problem: how could specifications
for wheelchair access be codified? It took a 69-year-old insurance executive
to answer this query, bringing the question of access to the attention of the
political establishment in Washington DC.
60 DESIGNING DISABILITY

An attack on barriers
In photographs taken when he met President Dwight D. Eisenhower and
was named the 1956 Handicapped American of the Year, Hugo Deffner
barely registers the ordeal he had just experienced. The award was given
by the President’s Committee on Employment of the Handicapped, a
postwar organization formed in the fall of 1947 and whose very existence
indicated changing attitudes toward disability. The committee was formed
not only to help the many disabled veterans returning from war, but also
to take advantage of the “new methods for rehabilitating and employing
the handicapped (that) had been forming for several decades” (President’s
Committee on Employment of the Handicapped, 1972: 1). Created in 1951,
the award brought attention to disabled people in the community, specifically
those “who not only surmount their own handicaps but also facilitate the
employment of other handicapped persons” (President’s Committee on
Employment of the Handicapped, 1972: 13). Deffner’s efforts to advocate
for ramps, elevators, and other accommodations in Oklahoma led him to be
recognized by the Committee as “a one-man campaign for the elimination
of steps in public buildings” (Banta, 1957: 10).
To accept the award, Deffner, a polio survivor and wheelchair user, had
traveled from his native Oklahoma to Washington DC. But this was possible
only after the president placed a call to the head of American Airlines,
insisting that Deffner be allowed to fly with his wheelchair. A taxi driver
at the airport then had to be bribed to help lift him into a cab (Nelson,
1986). Once Deffner arrived at the stately Willard Hotel in the capital, he
couldn’t climb the steps at its entrance and had to be carried into the hotel
(Nelson, 1986). All of this was just a prelude to the difficulties that awaited
Deffner when he arrived at the awards ceremony held at the Department of
Labor.
While President Eisenhower waited on the stage, ready to make his
presentation, Deffner waited outside on the sidewalk, unable to mount a
staircase and enter the building. Eventually, two burly Marines, dispatched
from the ceremonial Marine Corps band, went outside, picked up Deffner’s
wheelchair—with him in it—and carried the award recipient inside.
Only then did they discover that there was no access to the stage, where
Eisenhower was waiting. Deffner had to be carried there also, in front of
the president and audience alike (Goldsmith, 1997: 12–13). Once he finally
reached the stage, the ceremony proceeded. Deffner gave a short speech,
describing his own experiences when, as a polio victim, he could not attend
high school. “Safety begins at the front door,” he said, “and nobody is going
to be hired that can’t get in the door” (President’s Committee on Employment
of the Handicapped, 1972: 30). Trying to minimize the embarrassment,
Eisenhower alluded to the stairs when he told the assembled crowd that he
congratulated Deffner on his drive to “make every building in the United
 FITTING IN (1945–1961) 61

FIGURE 2.6  Himself no stranger to a wheelchair, two years before Dwight D.

Eisenhower met disabled activist Hugo Deffner the president rolled into a press con-
ference at Fitzsimmons Army Hospital after suffering a heart attack, 1955. Courtesy
Bettmann/Getty Images.

States accessible to one who possibly cannot climb stairs. And I hope that
he is having success in that effort, because sometimes they do seem steep
even to me” (Eisenhower, 1960: 413). Indeed, Eisenhower was no stranger
to wheelchairs. A little over a year earlier he’d been treated by a team of
doctors based at Fitzsimmons Army Hospital (Figure 2.6). But with Deffner,
things were different. The miserable awards ceremony shamed the President’s
Committee on Employment of the Physically Handicapped, the 1,000 or so
delegates attending the group’s annual meeting, and Eisenhower himself.
Astonishingly, all of this happened in a city that, only ten years earlier,
had placed ramps in front of public buildings, making special access for
FDR. These had since been taken down. Of course, Roosevelt was extremely
sensitive about his disability. Yet the president and the Secret Service also
went to great lengths to hide his need for special modifications. And so, by
1957 few federal buildings in Washington offered the open accommodations
common at military hospitals in California and on the campus of the
University of Illinois. Arguably enough, Roosevelt’s secrecy also meant
62 DESIGNING DISABILITY

that few people were aware of the accommodations made to help him
and how—if kept in place—they might help others. Even as ideas about a
disabled person’s ability were changing at institutions across the country,
acknowledgment was slow in coming to Washington. This was precisely
what Hugo Deffner wanted to change.
If any delegates at the 1956 meeting where Deffner was given his
award were not already aware of the problem of “barriers,” they were
quickly educated. His ordeal helped him perform the problem in front
of an audience. (Although it can be tempting to think that Deffner’s
fumbled presentation ceremony was stage-managed, there’s no evidence
to prove it.) Not only did the event point to an enormous environmental
oversight, but also it highlighted how disability might be acknowledged
and an individual celebrated, even as environmental barriers to his
functioning were entirely overlooked. The committee changed its
orientation after this. It began advocating for something like a national
project, recognizing and researching what it would take to create a truly
barrier-free society.
After Deffner’s troubled appearance in Washington, the President’s
Committee on Employment of the Physically Handicapped held an executive
board meeting and quickly opened discussions on how best to take national
action (Goldsmith, 1993: 12). Of course, as its name indicates, the committee
had been formed to deal with one form of barrier—namely getting jobs
for disabled people. In this much, the committee was organized as little
more than a “nucleus” that would coordinate the efforts of voluntary, state-
led committees composed of figures from business, industry, labor, and the
government; they meant to educate and promote the activities of vocational
and rehabilitation agencies on a state-by-state basis (President’s Committee
on Employment of the Handicapped, 1972). To date, their efforts were
diluted to an almost disheartening degree. But together, Deffner and Nugent
shifted and expanded the discussion. Rather than helping specific people fit
into the workplace on an individual basis, Deffner and Nugent asked how
not just the workplace but the world might be fit to them.
With the verve and gusto of a military campaign, this committee and their
advocates—many of whom were disabled veterans—began to advocate for
change. They framed their strategy as a national “attack” on a world in which
most forms of impairment were still characterized as “abnormal,” and disability
was long associated with dependency and weakness. Deffner’s campaign caught
the attention of the Paralysed Veterans of America (PVA). Citing Deffner’s
efforts in their newsletter, the PVA trumpeted his work. It declared him an
“enemy of steps and stairs,” and urged readers “to help Mr Deffner in his
campaign to eliminate the step” (Editorial, 1955: 2). This militaristic phrasing
both recast disability groups as powerful, and also offered a reminder as to
how so many of these men had become disabled in the first place.
The operation was successful. The President’s Committee on Employment
of the Physically Handicapped formed a battle plan, allying themselves with
 FITTING IN (1945–1961) 63

a variety of civic and national organizations, including the PVA as well as

specialized charities like the National Society for Crippled Children and
Adults, as well as the Veterans’ Administration itself. Going on the offensive,
the committee began to outline the first building guidelines to recognize
questions of access for disabled persons. What would become the American
National Standards Institute 117.1 (ANSI 117.1) was introduced in 1960 as
“A National Attack on Architectural Barriers” (Nugent, 1960: 51).
Developing building standards was a challenging endeavor. Existing
information and empirical research was limited. Henry Toombs, the New
York–based architect hired by Roosevelt to adapt Warm Springs Institute, had
long been studying these issues; as early as 1931, in the Institute’s in-house
newsletter The Polio Chronicle, he published a short series of columns that he
modestly titled “Architectural Suggestions” (Toombs, 1931a: 1). For the next
thirty years, these low-key writings made him one of the country’s principal
experts on the subject. In the late 1950s, Tim Nugent was the other expert.
By 1956, when authorities at the U of I decided to make all of the campus’
more than 200 buildings wheelchair accessible, Nugent had begun producing
reams of data regarding the necessary width of a door or grade of a ramp.
It is thus no surprise that Deffner and Nugent consulted regularly by phone,
and, following Deffner’s 1957 trip to Washington DC, Nugent was invited to
produce the first federal accessibility guidelines (Nugent 2004: 128).
From its compelling subtitle to its detailed guidelines, the American
Standards Association’s final report, called the “Attack on Barriers,” is
suffused with Nugent’s ethos (Chatelain, 1961). Ingenuity, independence,
and access itself—the ideas that shaped this program—gird ANSI 117.1.
In his earlier reports, Nugent laid out his agenda. “Contrary to what most
people think,” Nugent contends, advancements like the wheelchair did
not decrease the nation’s sense of disability, but rather “tend to magnify
the problem of increased numbers of the disabled” (Nugent, 1960: 51).
Recent medical advances, he would argue, as well as new innovations like
the wheelchair, allow disabled persons unprecedented opportunities. And
yet, due to environmental barriers, a disabled person is prevented “from
pursuing his aspirations, developing his talents, and exercising his skills”
(Nugent, 1960: 51). Though the guidelines were meant to include the semi-
ambulatory, the vision and hearing disabled, and others who didn’t use
chairs, Nugent’s recommendations were once more focused on wheelchair
accessibility. They would define conventional building standards, including
sidewalk widths, building entrances and exits, doorway clearance, floor
surfaces, toilet stall design, and most construction in the United States and
elsewhere for the next quarter century.
Nugent had a vision of a barrier-free world and the recommendations
Nugent drafted had the potential to benefit millions. But, for many reasons,
these recommendations were difficult to enact. The federal government
attempted to adopt them, with varying success. Some states and local
governments also incorporated them into building codes, but only for new
64 DESIGNING DISABILITY

construction. Though never enforced as law, Nugent’s building standards

had a host of implications. Echoing other efforts in this period including
the rise of anthropometrics and ergonomics, the building standards aimed
to measure and quantify the human body.4 Taking the E&J wheelchair as
the standard, Nugent replaced the normalized body with the normalized
wheelchair. Though ANSI 117.1 never mentioned signage, Nugent’s
research, with its emphasis on the E&J chair, nevertheless set the stage for
the soon-to-come wheelchair emblem used in the International Symbol of
Access (ISA).

Notes
1 Noting that “thousands of incapacitated men complained that they would miss
driving a car more than anything else,” California’s director of the Department
of Motor Vehicles began a program which trained disabled drivers and then
granted them driving licenses (Anon., 1945: A1). The push for this came from
veterans and their advocates; it was argued that returning veterans who were
variously disabled were more easily assimilated if they could drive cars.
2 Initially, groups of veterans played in exhibition wheelchair basketball games.
Quickly, however, wheelchair teams of students began to be developed at colleges
and universities across the country. Timothy Nugent encouraged this development
by helping found the National Wheelchair Basketball Association in 1949.
3 Nugent himself reported that doctors sometimes criticized him as too rough on
some students, especially those with spinal cord injuries. He was also taken to
task by some parents, who were especially upset by his desire to see even the most
disabled students function without any kind of caretakers (Chamberlain, 2014).
4 See, for example, Flinchum (1997).
 PART TWO

Redesigning
Signs and Space
(1961–1974)
 3
The Personal Politics of Signs
(1961–1965)

In October 1961, Timothy Nugent, University of Illinois professor, coach,

and herald of a new approach toward disablement stood before a symposium
audience in Stockholm to introduce an international audience to the new
American building guidelines for barrier-free access. Nugent received a
warm welcome in Sweden, where he met with eager government officials and
designers. He was even awarded the inaugural Patrik Haglund Lectureship
from Sweden’s Central Committee on Rehabilitation. Unlike in the United
States, where easy access was spearheaded by disabled people and related
organizations, in Europe, government welfare and health authorities were
equally invested in bringing services to their disabled citizens. For instance,
projects were under way in Sweden and Denmark, where sociologists and
architects worked to perfect kitchens and bathrooms with particular focus
on assisting the special needs of wheelchair users. But neither these programs
nor others like them had conceptualized the vast scope of what Nugent was
proposing: a barrier-free world. One observer reported that when Nugent
described his work in Illinois during that first lecture in Stockholm, it was
like a bomb went off in the room (Goldsmith, 1997: 17).
Nugent’s conception of disability upended European assumptions.
Nugent claimed disability as a condition that included the vision and hearing
impaired, as well as those with mobility impairments. But he made his case
especially forceful by asserting that “alarming as it may seem, approximately
one out of every six people in the United States has a permanent disability”
(Nugent, 1961: 51). For Selwyn Goldsmith, a British architect and recent
polio survivor who would go on to become one of the principal theorists of
designs for disability in the UK, Nugent’s lecture was life changing. Aside
from the limited experiment enrolling paraplegic veterans at UCLA, few
programs had been instituted. But Nugent’s work stretched much further. In
addition to giving a transformative lecture, Goldsmith reported, Nugent also
“came bearing with him the final draft of a document that was to change the
68 DESIGNING DISABILITY

world” (Goldsmith, 1997: 7). That text, of course, was the sum of Nugent’s
work at Illinois toward barrier-free access. For Goldsmith, the document
and the meeting were revelatory: “I was unprepared for the explosive charge
that Tim Nugent detonated” (Goldsmith, 1997: 17).
Now, as Nugent was speaking, the barrier-free architecture movement
was just beginning to get widespread attention in the United States; but in
Europe—as in the United States almost a decade earlier—the notion that
the environment itself could be disabling was entirely new. It represented
a significant reconceptualization of disability itself. Following Nugent’s
presentation in Stockholm, the argument quickly spread throughout
Europe. And why not? In Europe, as in the United States, during the years
after the Second World War, more and more disabled people lived longer,
benefited from more sophisticated medical treatment, and began to use
newer assistive devices like the modern wheelchair. For the first time,
disabled people were increasingly present in public life. To be sure, some
innovations—like the modern wheelchair—at first began to appear slowly
(the Everest & Jennings (E&J) wheelchair, for example, was never used
extensively in the UK, and it was only in the mid-1950s that a similar
design was developed by the British Ministry of Health) (Woods and
Watson, 2004a).
Gradually, in Europe as in the United States, between the 1940s and
1960s, the modern wheelchair would gain real force not only as medical
hardware but also as an agent of social, cultural, and political change. Amid
this cultural shift, the very notion of an environmental misfit—for chair
and user—and the introduction of “barrier-free architecture” as its solution
was as welcome as it was revolutionary. And there was no precedent for it.
When Nugent developed this approach in Illinois during the 1950s, it was
in relative isolation. And so, when he arrived in 1961 at the International
Society for Rehabilitation of the Disabled in Stockholm, his work and point
of view seemed strikingly new. But, rather than accept his ideas wholesale,
some aspects of his thinking were transformed. Spurred by the logic of the
social welfare state, there developed a somewhat different approach to
disability and access itself.
As it happens, in the United States Nugent’s findings were becoming
increasingly entrenched. In October 1961, after the Society for Crippled
Children and Adults in the United States published Nugent’s findings
from his work at Illinois, Nugent’s ideas gained authority when they
were adopted by the American National Standards Institute, a private
group responsible for setting non-binding industry standards. The
Society issued 50,000 copies of the guidelines, with 14,000 alone going
to members of the American Institute of Architects. Now known as ANSI
117.1, Nugent’s findings acquired the imprimatur of official acceptance,
and were promoted by diverse organizations from labor unions like
the AFL-CIO to assorted church councils. His specifications were seen
as the impartial, scientific, and definitive solution to the question of
 THE PERSONAL POLITICS OF SIGNS (1961–1965) 69

disability and environmental change. They became a model for builders

and architects. By 1967, the approach was so well established that the
Times of London referred to Nugent’s approach as a kind of “orthodoxy”
(Anon, 1967c: 10). In the United States, the authority of Nugent’s ideas
was enshrined in 1968, when ANSI 117.1 became the core of the US
Architectural Barriers Act.
And yet as Nugent’s recommendations were becoming evermore
entrenched, some of his supporters in Europe became less and less enamored
of his ideas on access. Of course, Nugent’s 1961 “Attack on Barriers” was
strident in his support of access for all. There, he stressed that “the severely,
permanently, physically disabled can be accommodated in all buildings
and facilities used by the public … independently and without distinction”
(Nugent, 1961: 59). In the service of assimilation, Nugent implicitly argued,
environmental changes were never announced publicly or marked explicitly.
At the University of Illinois’ huge campus, for instance, disabled students
were expected to navigate the sprawling grounds without any form of
signage marking accessible paths through buildings or between them. ANSI
117.1 detailed the width of doors and the grade of ramps, but nowhere in the
entire document was there any provision for explanatory signs identifying
facilities provided for disabled users.
Selwyn Goldsmith was one of Nugent’s principal supporters in
Europe. And yet, for his part, Goldsmith increasingly found Nugent’s
ideas on access deeply unsettling. As it was, by the mid-1960s Goldsmith
became increasingly obsessed with the issue of signage, and its cultural
significance. At first, Goldsmith interpreted the failure to take signage
into account as simply an oversight on Nugent’s part. But the more he
studied Nugent’s recommendations, the more he came to believe this
oversight epitomized a more fundamental problem within the entire
American approach to disability (Goldsmith, 1983). In contrast to what he
called the almost secretive, “self-help” design culture of the United States,
Goldsmith developed what has come to be called the “architectural model
of disability,” an approach stepped in the socially minded ideology of the
welfare state (McIntyre, 2013). Applied to Europe and especially the UK,
he went so far as to argue, these recommendations were, themselves, a
cultural and political misfit.

What a good sign can do

Just how much should the built environment announce that it has been fitted
to the needs of disabled people? A 1960 snapshot of the converted military
barracks housing the University of Illinois’s rehabilitation program—the
hub of the disabled community on campus—demonstrates one approach to
answering this question. In the photograph, a well-placed ramp leads to the
program’s headquarters; low-key administrative placards announce by name
70 DESIGNING DISABILITY

FIGURE 3.1  Ramped entrance at the first Rehabilitation Center on the campus of
the University of Illinois. In spite of its wheelchair-accessible entry, the building was
marked by minimal signage, c. 1956. Courtesy University of Illinois.

the offices within (Figure 3.1). Nowhere are there access signs identifying
the ramp, the best route to take inside, or any of the other accommodations
available in these unassuming buildings. The same was true elsewhere
on campus; curb cuts were ever-present and telephone booths and water
fountains were uniformly lowered, but nowhere were these accommodations
given signs. In Tim Nugent’s scheme, the integration between disabled
persons and the world around them should be seamless. There should be
no demarcation of accommodations, nor should there be any kind of misfit
between the students in his program and the general student body. But this
led to a somewhat harsher reality. A small number of initiates—the students
in Nugent’s program—knew of the campus’ special access. But, without
signage, a casual observer might not. And, in its own way, Illinois’s lack
of access signs reveals a deeper truth. Signs make information public, and
information is power.
In many ways this tactic was indicative of a broader approach to disability
and design then taking shape in the United States. Even before the war,
the United States embraced the notion of useful disablement (Rose, 2017).
Above all, the ability to fit into the workforce was highly valued. Advocacy
groups, for example the American Federation for Physically Handicapped
Persons (AFPHP), were founded on this idea. AFPHP helped establish the
 THE PERSONAL POLITICS OF SIGNS (1961–1965) 71

national Employ the Handicapped Week in 1945 and campaigned under

slogans like “Hire the Handicapped—It’s Good Business.” Herbert Everest’s
development of the folding wheelchair is emblematic of this attitude; Everest
wanted to work, found mobility in his automobile, and made a wheelchair
that could be used in tandem with his car while on the job. As the field
of “rehabilitation medicine” gained force in the United States immediately
after the Second World War (and large numbers of disabled veterans, polio
survivors, and other impaired people were seeking treatment), its ambition
was to help affected individuals fit back into “normal” society. Put simply,
the goal was “to return affected persons to their own homes and back to
their usual activities and to employment” (Verville, 2009, 3). Behind the
orthotics, prostheses, speech pathology, and other aspects of rehabilitation,
“vocational productivity through employment … gave rehabilitation
medicine its creditability” (Verville, 2009: 4). At Illinois, too, Nugent’s
program aimed to make “it possible for the talents and resources of millions
of physically handicapped individuals to be put to use for the betterment of
mankind” (Nugent, 1960: 53).
For Nugent and others in the United States, integrating those with
disabilities to “normal life” meant finding them work and helping people
with disabilities to blend in. Fundamentally, environmental access was
touted not to draw attention to disability, but, rather, to make it less of
a practical impediment in day-to-day life. In theory, the goal was to de-
emphasize its impact. In effect, many of the accommodations on the
University of Illinois campus were hidden in plain sight. The unmarked
ramp and access route in front of the school’s rehabilitation program were
only the beginning. Students like alumna Mary Breslin were puzzled by the
circuitous “routes to get to classes.” Breslin recalled that “some of them
were just amazing because you’d have to go in some back door where they
figured out some way to get the ramp in, doing these very elaborate numbers
with three elevators and a surface elevator and a freight elevator and a this
and a that” (Breslin, 1996–1998: 56). Other concessions at Illinois were
equally unobtrusive. In 1954, the school acquired two buses equipped with
hydraulic lifts to help students move between dorms, distant classrooms,
and the campus rehabilitation center. But the buses passed unmarked,
had no publicly announced schedules, and generally traveled through the
campus unobserved. Unpublicized accommodations or hidden routes of
access were not only common on the University of Illinois campus. Across
North America, they were the status quo.
Usually disabled people were responsible for finding forms of access
on their own. Returning to Toronto at the end of the Second World War,
the wheelchair-using veteran Ken Langford was encouraged to leave the
hospital where he was recuperating and “experiment with going out into
the community.” In downtown Toronto, for example, he found that “there
were usually level entrances somewhere. Certainly in hotels, theatres ...” But
often these paths were private or unmarked, not to mention circuitous. For
72 DESIGNING DISABILITY

example, Langford recalled the difficulty of attending veterans’ reunions at

Toronto’s Royal York Hotel; it “isn’t the easiest place to get to because there
are steps at every entrance. But the initial technique was that we would park
at the back and go in through the service or garbage entrance, in through the
kitchen and take the service elevator” (Tremblay, 1996: 161). The entrance
for wheelchair users was so complex that no casual visitor could have
guessed its existence.
Selwyn Goldsmith later discovered similar unpublicized accommodations
while conducting an access study of the small English city of Norwich. Here,
too, many older buildings were made inaccessible by steps or stairs. But at
some, like the Norwich County Hall, the city library and the local Cathedral,
intrepid wheelchair users willing to search out alterative entrances might
find them down alleys, on side streets, or off to the side of the main doors
(Goldsmith, 1969b: 42, 43). And yet, even if access were possible, a problem
remained. These routes were hidden and went unmarked. With no apparent
indication otherwise, the structure’s main entrances made the buildings
seem inaccessible. And so, Goldsmith argued, they simply went unused
(Goldsmith, 1965: 974).
Of course, there was one fundamental difference between the roundabout
accommodations at Illinois, and the quirky, unmarked routes wheelchair users
discovered elsewhere. In most places, these simply provided unplanned—if
de facto—access. But at Illinois, hidden access was premeditated. Ironically,

FIGURE 3.2  A two-storied wheelchair ramp leading to a second-floor window at

the University of Illinois, 1956. Courtesy University of Illinois.
 THE PERSONAL POLITICS OF SIGNS (1961–1965) 73

at the sprawling, yet well-ordered Illinois campus there was no lack of

signage. Postings urged students to put trash in receptacles, directional
arrows pointed them toward academic buildings, and ubiquitous placards
showed the way to fallout shelters. Convenience and clarity ruled, except
when it came to guiding disabled students to accommodations. Access signs
for disabled students simply did not exist. Of course some structural changes
were hard to miss. In one building, an otherwise inaccessible second-floor
classroom was connected by an outdoor wheelchair ramp that led to a
modified, second-story window (Figure 3.2). A point of personal pride,
Nugent frequently guided visitors here. But while a sign identifies a trashcan
next to the ramp, the ramp itself, spectacular as such things go, remained
unmarked. Sheila Wolfe, a reporter from the Chicago Daily Tribune, visited
campus around this time. Like a fine coat, she noted how unobtrusively
the environment was “tailored” to the needs of the students (Wolfe, 1961:
B17). But these changes were never trumpeted. Noting this approach, one
British observer remarked that the object here was “camouflage rather
than exposure” (Tomlinson and Stevens, 1972: 107). The ramps, curb cuts,
and the rest were not hidden per se, but passed without recognition. At
the University of Illinois, signage was everywhere. Ironically enough, the
annual newsletter published by the Disabled Students Organization was
titled Sigma Signs (Figure 3.3). But signage to announce accommodations
for disabled persons was entirely absent there; even if special signs had been
used, they would not “fit” the physical nor ideological landscape of the
school.
As such, it’s important to remember that Nugent had greater goals;
for him, the Illinois campus was an example of what could be achieved
anywhere, if only architectural barriers were abolished. Searching in a
thousand ways, he aimed for an understanding of the world that could, on
the one hand, speak to disabled students trying to comprehend their place in
postwar society and, on the other hand, to colleagues struggling to integrate
them into an often-inaccessible environment. By his lights, Nugent thought
the problem lay in millennia of architectural conventions shaped around
the needs of an idealized human body; designers provided a “fit” for able-
bodied individuals, but in so doing also made others “misfit.” If builders and
architects simply stopped incorporating steps, too narrow doors, and other
inaccessible features into their construction, he rationalized, people with
disabilities could lead their lives much like anyone else.
Of course, much of Nugent’s time was spent sorting and negotiating
the needs of his disabled students, but he always refused to consider them
“special.” The problems they encountered were simply more evidence of
a broader population that campus architects had, to date, ignored. At the
same time, for Nugent, there was nothing extraordinary about the students
themselves. In a 1961 television interview, the plainspoken Nugent put it
more directly: “The word special bothers me” (Nugent, c. 1963). It troubled
him so much, in fact, that over and over, Nugent would describe an incident
74 DESIGNING DISABILITY

FIGURE 3.3  Cover of Sigma Signs, journal of Delta Sigma Omicron (the rehabilita-
tion service fraternity at the University of Illinois), 1953. Courtesy University of Illinois.
 THE PERSONAL POLITICS OF SIGNS (1961–1965) 75

that had occurred early in his career. At a conference in Cleveland, he

recounted, when he had just finished giving a lecture on the accommodations
at Illinois:

there was a question- and-answer period, and one smart aleck got up and
he said, “Yeah, Professor Nugent, you say all these things, but you’ve got
special ramps, you’ve got special buses, you’ve got special this, you’ve
got special that,” and he thought I was going to argue with him. So I
said, “Well, just a minute. How did you get in this building?” He said, “I
walked in.” I said, “Well, how did you get from the sidewalk to the door.”
He said, “I climbed up the steps.” I said, “Oh, wouldn’t you have looked
like a jackass crawling up the face of that wall if someone hadn’t thought
of those steps first?” (Nugent, 2004–2005: 138)

At Illinois, he reminded other rehabilitation professionals, “The only thing

‘special’ about this whole scheme of things is that it is relatively new in its
total format.” Nevertheless, he proclaimed with characteristic optimism, “it
will, in the relatively near future, be taken as much for granted as we take
the wheel” (Nugent, 1963: 10).
Yet many things about Nugent’s new “format” were, in fact, special.
There were special ramps, special doors, special paths, special parking spots,
special keys. And disabled students learned about how to find, recognize, and
use them during their own special orientation. Called Functional Training
Week, incoming disabled students were brought to campus a week before
the school’s official orientation. Meant partly to introduce students to the
campus’ special accommodations, it also was intended to wean students—
many of whom had never lived unassisted—from their families. Many
disabled students arriving for the first time were extremely dependent on
assistance from family, and when they arrived at the University of Illinois,
they were expected not only to clothe, bathe, and feed themselves with little
to no assistance (students accustomed to help, for example, were taught
how to transfer from a chair to toilet stool and back again or how to dress
and undress themselves), but they also learned to navigate the campus on
their own. Reflecting back on the program years later, Nugent would recall
how staff “would take them about the campus and show them the entrances
and the pathways from this place to that place and the bus stops and things
like that” (Nugent, 2004–2005: 70).
In essence, Nugent’s thinking began from the position that there was
no real difference between students enrolled in the program and the rest
of the student body. And, once accommodations were in place, a kind of
parity could easily be established. Distinctive signs pointing to accessible
facilities would imply that disabled students were different when, in fact, no
real distinctions existed. Yet, with no signage of any kind directing them to
accommodations, these instructions were essential to students. This meant,
as Gloria Chin would later recall, getting “acquainted with the buildings in
76 DESIGNING DISABILITY

which our classes would be held, learning the secret formula of operating
the elevators” (Chin, 1959: 7). In some ways, it could be argued, making
students learn a “formula” that was often hidden to the casual observer
left them heavily dependent on Nugent’s program. To the new enrollees,
independence on campus had to be learned. It also meant following closely
the established parameters of the program put in place.
Reflecting back on Nugent’s program, many graduates were laudatory.
Like Marshall Wall, some even hailed the Illinois campus—and the access
it provided—as a kind of “utopia” for disabled people (Wall, 2007: 106).
And many individuals would agree with Fred Fay, who insisted that Nugent
“shaped the attitudes of a lot of students there. … [bringing] this can-do
philosophy and this spirit of competition to the campus that was really
refreshing” (Fay, 2001: 26). Some of the students even referred to Nugent as
an almost mythic figure, calling him the “Great White Father” (Wall, 2007:
98). But there were also critics, even from within the program. Mary Lou
Breslin, a graduate from the program at the same time, lamented its insistent
idealism, and Nugent’s emphasis on fitting in. As she recalled years later,
“they should not have permitted this patriarch [Tim Nugent] this fanatical
person to determine and direct so many people’s lives” (Breslin, 1996–1998:
54). Kitty Cone put it more definitively: “All the disabled students went
through the rehab program. They were like the personal property of the
director, Tim Nugent. You had to do what Nugent said or you were out
on your ass” (Cone, 1996–1998: 30). In a way this applied to access and
functionality on campus too. If you were in the know and followed the rules,
you could find your way around. Otherwise, there were no signs around to
guide you. In effect, not making this information public also meant students
followed a series of tightly configured attitudes and values.
The absence of signage kept accessibility hidden in plain sight for two
potential audiences—first, those disabled students who relied on signage in
order to identify accessible spaces, and second, for those able-bodied people
who did not rely on it but would still have seen it anyway. The dearth of
signage was, in some ways, a larger disservice. Except for those rare moments
when the rehabilitation program was profiled in the press, it received scant
attention on campus. For years, Illinois’ rehabilitation services were self-
funded and Nugent struggled for recognition from campus administrators
(Nugent, 2004–2005: 113). Moreover, with total student enrollments
exceeding 30,000 in the 1950s, it was easy enough for the hundred or so
disabled students on campus each year to disappear in the crowd. With little
fanfare and no environmental signage, the rest of the university’s students
were unaware that they were living on a vast testing ground. In his memoirs,
the film critic Roger Ebert recalls growing up in Champaign-Urbana, where
his father worked at the university’s electrical plant. His family “would
often go for dinner at a cafeteria on campus in a Quonset hut that had
a wheelchair ramp. Here were budget-priced meals for faculty, staff, and
war veterans in wheelchairs.” When the young Ebert asked about the ramps
 THE PERSONAL POLITICS OF SIGNS (1961–1965) 77

here and elsewhere on campus, his father didn’t mention the cutting-edge
program, the years of attempts to make the entire campus accessible, or
any other conscious efforts to accommodate wheelchairs. Instead, he rather
laconically observed, Illinois’ wheelchair users “like it here because they
don’t have to wheel those chairs up and down hills” (Ebert, 2011). To be
sure, Walter Harry Ebert was right—the campus was as flat as the cornfields
surrounding it. But the disabled students who flocked to the university came
because of its rehabilitation program, not its terrain. On a more personal
note, I should add that my own parents were enrolled at the University
of Illinois in this period, and I was born and lived in Stadium Terrace, the
ramshackle Parade Grounds where the university placed married students
and also housed the rehabilitation program; to this day my parents recall
nothing of Nugent or the hundreds of students he ushered through that
campus, even though, apparently, they were our close neighbors there. And,
to this day, I consider it an educational opportunity missed. While Nugent’s
efforts to promote access were profoundly influential, the question of
visibility at Illinois was an unresolved problem. Since at least the nineteenth
century, disabled people were largely segregated in society and remained
invisible; the Illinois program hardly addressed the problem of visibility.

Down the “welfare path”

When Tim Nugent’s “Attack on Barriers” was first published in 1961, it was
circulated both in the United States and in Europe. Some of his European
readers were incredulous. The Italian politician and union leader Raimondo
Magnani recalled that he and countrymen were astonished to read American
disability statistics revealing that one in every six persons could benefit by the
elimination of architectural barriers (Nugent, 1960: 51). Several wry Italian
observers suggested that disability might be a uniquely American problem.
Puzzled, these critics speculated that perhaps this happens only “in America.
Here, we do not see many of such disabled” (Associazione nazionale mutilate
e invalidi del lavoro, 1965: 32). In some ways, the critics were right. Disability
was not a uniquely American concern; there were plenty of disabled Italians,
but they were out of sight and seemingly out of mind.
In the postwar years, Italy struggled to emerge from Mussolini’s shadow.
The fascist leader respected former soldiers like these disabled German
veterans who saluted him from their Bath chairs when the Italian leader
visited Berlin in 1937 (Figure 3.4). But, among the general populace, he
had little use for “nonproductive citizens,” a vast category of persons
encompassing not only disabled persons, but also homosexuals, criminals,
and dissidents (Knittel, 2015: 21). Magnani was silent on this legacy,
but quick to address lingering assumptions. He alluded to these larger,
problematic preconceptions when he stressed that “in Italy, we cannot
see many handicapped in rolling chairs for many reasons. First: because
78 DESIGNING DISABILITY

FIGURE 3.4  Mussolini giving a fascist salute to a group of disabled veterans on a

visit to Berlin, 1937. Istituto Nazionale Luce/Alinari/Getty Images.

they hide themselves or else they are hidden. Second, because if they made
any attempt to enter into others’ lives, they would be rejected or carried
away” (Associazione nazionale mutilate e invalidi del lavoro, 1965: 32).
No doubt Magnani shared with American reformers like Tim Nugent and
Hugo Deffner a pent-up frustration, but he was addressing a different set
of concerns. In postwar Italy the government was weaving a vast social net
meant to benefit all of its citizens from cradle to grave. It was one thing for a
laissez-faire approach toward disability to develop in the United States. But
in Europe and Canada, supporters argued, things should be different. Here,
there should be no shut-ins or misfits.
The postwar settlement, what Selwyn Goldsmith would later call “the
welfare path” adopted by many countries in Europe (Goldsmith, 1997: 19),
meant not just designing the built environment but also reconceptualizing
how society itself was structured. In the general reckoning and reorganization
of postwar Europe, a variety of approaches to policy and governance began
to emerge. But generally, there was a move—gradually in some places and
rapidly in others—toward states taking responsibility for social ills (Briggs,
1962). Governments were expected to identify and serve people needing
help. In the United States, people like Tim Nugent and Hugo Deffner
emphasized personal empowerment. The goal was equal—not special—
treatment. In much of Europe and especially the UK, Selwyn Goldsmith
would later claim, different social goals began to emerge. By the mid-1960s,
 THE PERSONAL POLITICS OF SIGNS (1961–1965) 79

FIGURE 3.5  A 1976 invalid car issued by Britain’s National Health Service, 2000.
Courtesy National Motor Museum/Heritage Images.

he insisted, European countries had developed an approach to disability

that highlighted the “social welfare cultural values of compensation, special
treatment and pragmatism” (Goldsmith, 1983: 200). To Goldsmith, this cozy
culture of social welfare was more than rhetorical: it laid the groundwork
for assertive, unapologetic signage that advertised special fittings, ramps,
and other accommodations for disabled persons. While the specifics varied
from country to country, Europe’s “progressive” and “modern” states took
a hopeful but also pragmatic attitude toward social change.
Northern Europe was especially proactive in its efforts to transform
the resources available to those with disabilities. To be clear, the barrier-
free access movement came to Europe with Timothy Nugent. But there
were already a number of lively, government-sponsored initiatives to
create housing and other services for disabled people. For example, in the
Netherlands there already existed a robust “social insurance system,” and
there soon developed a network of residential centers and independent
housing programs overseen by the nation’s various entitlement programs
(DeJong, 1984). In Sweden, housing was also of great interest and Fokus
or cluster housing specially designed for disabled people was then just
beginning to take shape (Brattgard, 2002, 1972).
In Goldsmith’s native UK, the Ministry of Health was rapidly
developing its own disability culture. That agency oversaw not only a
sprawling new National Health Service (NHS), but was charged with
providing surgical, medical, and other appliances free at the point of
use. Almost inevitably, it also led to a number of design-led initiatives
80 DESIGNING DISABILITY

for disabled people. One of the most visible developments of this type—a
fine example of the complex social and design work being done under the
auspices of the postwar welfare state—was the new “invalid car,” a design
for the mobility impaired (Figure 3.5). Often known as the “invacar,”
“noddy car,” or “trike,” the diminutive three-wheeled vehicle was first
distributed in the years immediately after the Second World War (and
lasted some thirty years; the program was closed down amid a call for
better safety regulations and production ended in 1977). It was not
available commercially, but provided and maintained by the government,
free of charge, to injured ex-servicemen as well as other disabled people.
Originally introduced by Oscar “Bert” Greeves, a struggling motorcycle
designer, the first model was designed for a disabled cousin. Greeves found
that this makeshift endeavor had a ready market and, after the Second
World War, quickly won a government contract for production (Sparrow,
2014: 10, 11). It was meant to hold a single person and their wheelchair,
which could be carried behind the driver’s seat. Vaguely resembling a
motorized—and enclosed—Bath chair, the tiny car came with a lightweight
shell and its engine allowed the car to accelerate up to 80 mph. It was
substantial enough to be driven on highways, and small enough to be
used on footpaths as well. Clearly distinguishable at a distance, and at
one time quite ubiquitous, the “invalid car” made a strong statement for
the government’s sweeping new approach toward healthcare. Even its
distinctive color was nicknamed “Ministry Blue” after the Ministry of
Health. As journalist Tudor van Hampton insists, the “existence of invalid
cars is a reminder of how far the British government once took its health
care services” (Van Hampton, 2009: 8).
Oddly enough, while the invacar was highly visible on the roads and
streets of the UK, the lowly wheelchair was of relatively little interest to
the NHS. As scholars Brian Woods and Nick Watson observe, innovation
came slowly to the NHS and more modern wheelchair designs seemed “a
relatively small thing in itself at the time” (Woods and Watson, 2004a:
554). As it was, E&J’s lightweight folding wheelchair began being
imported only in the mid-1950s; collapsible, self-propelled chairs were
not available through the NHS before that (Tremblay, 1996: 165). Instead,
as the government was the industry’s only client, in the years after the
Second World War the Health Ministry maintained a near-monopoly
over British wheelchair design and production (Woods and Watson,
2004a: 39). Through the 1950s, the government’s hospital specialists (a
group of physicians and bureaucrats who worked together to determine
many of the NHS’s policies toward disabled people) decided what types
of wheelchairs were issued, and who was entitled to use them (Woods
and Watson, 2004a: 556). For their part, these experts—especially those
working in the Hospital Services Division—believed that wheelchairs
were too expensive, overprescribed, and too often used as a nicety rather
than for genuine need (Woods and Watson, 2004a: 564). To be sure, the
 THE PERSONAL POLITICS OF SIGNS (1961–1965) 81

NHS could supply as many as twelve types of wheelchairs during this

period (Woods and Watson, 2004a: 551). But most NHS issue designs
were woefully out of date; several wood and rattan models remained little
changed since the nineteenth century. At first, E&J chairs were regarded as
a luxury, something like the “Rolls Royce” of chairs (Woods and Watson,
2004a: 562). Only in the late 1950s and early 1960s did UK wheelchair
users begin to organize and assert that such chairs were a necessity (Woods
and Watson, 2004a: 564). Special groups, especially invacar users who
banded together as part of the Invalid Tricycle Association (ITA), argued
that newer designs meant greater access, but the prolonged struggle for
better wheelchairs continued in the UK through the 1960s. Little wonder,
then, that Nugent’s ideas about wheelchair access seemed earthshaking
when Selwyn Goldsmith and others in the UK first heard them. At the
same time, the British situation provided a different—and arguably much-
needed—context in which to understand changing views of access (and the
need for special signage).

The ideologies of “self-help” and

“social welfare cultures”
By 1961, the year that Selwyn Goldsmith heard Tim Nugent speak on barrier-
free architecture in Stockholm, there was already a division leading to two
very different approaches toward disablement. On the one hand, Timothy
Nugent was working in a world where the modern wheelchair was widely
used. And he saw no fundamental difference between the disabled students
who used it at Illinois, and other students at the University or in the world at
large. Thus, Nugent took as his starting point the belief that conventionally
designed buildings and facilities—not impairments—inhibited disabled
people. If only the environment were more inclusive, he would argue, even
seriously impaired persons could live lives like those of their peers. Given the
right conditions, everyone, Nugent believed, was capable of taking care of
his- or her self. Nugent was sweeping in his view, and strident in his idealism
(Figure 3.6).
On the other hand, in Selwyn Goldsmith’s world, disablement was treated
thoughtfully as well, but in a more traditional and pragmatic way. Within
Britain’s social welfare system, there were a different set of attitudes. Until
very recently, wheelchairs were meant for only the most severely disabled. In
the early 1960s, lightweight, collapsible—modern—wheelchairs were only
just beginning to be introduced; unsurprisingly, the institutional culture
that hesitated to develop and widely distribute these designs focused little
on changing public space. Instead, devices like the invacar were used to
help disabled people adapt to the environment. Few people believed that it
should be adapted to them.
82 DESIGNING DISABILITY

FIGURE 3.6  The Chair of Champion Athletes (advertisement for Everest & Jen-
nings’ wheelchairs), 1963. Courtesy of University of Illinois.

When Goldsmith first heard Nugent’s lecture in 1961, he found the

approach breathtakingly different than anything he’d encountered in the UK
to date. Nugent’s ideas were so striking that, the following year, he was asked
 THE PERSONAL POLITICS OF SIGNS (1961–1965) 83

to speak to the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) in London. Other

listeners were equally transfixed. The wheelchair user Nancy Bull knew little
of Nugent or the University of Illinois. But, writing in the Invalid Tricycle
Association’s newsletter the following year, Bull reported excitedly that

I cannot speak, of course, for any other person who heard that lecture.
I cannot know if it made the same deep impression on any other minds.
I only know that it gave me, personally, an entirely different slant on
the whole idea of disability. My world changed suddenly, in the kind of
way, which sometimes happens through the exigencies of religion or love.
(Bull, 1963: 12)

In a sense, Nancy Bull, Selwyn Goldsmith, and many others in Nugent’s

audience were converted. Looking back years later, Goldsmith called it
“a landmark in the history of designing for the disabled in Britain and
Europe” (Goldsmith, 1997: 7). After that talk, he explained, Nugent and
the United States “set the mould for controlling the accessibility of the
built environment on behalf of disabled people [and] Britain attempted
to follow the path which America had taken” (Goldsmith, 1997: ix). Yet,
over time, Goldsmith’s conception of disablement would gradually change.
Framing himself as a supporter of the welfare state, Goldsmith began to
scrutinize Nugent’s ideas, not to venerate and improve, but to revise and
displace. By the mid-1960s, Goldsmith still approved of barrier-free access,
but claimed that many of Nugent’s assumptions did not translate to the
UK. Goldsmith did not move methodically from one position to another.
But, by 1965, he claimed two strikingly different ideologies of how society
deals with disability, one based on ideas of “self-help” and the other on
concepts related to “social welfare.”
Goldsmith saw things as if across a great divide. On the one side lay the
ramps, buses, and elevators mustered by Nugent, all meant to empower
the disabled students at the University of Illinois’ rehabilitation program.
The whole point, Nugent would argue, was to help them help themselves.
On the other side, there was a strong sense of mission and steady belief
that society should help and protect its weakest members. As Goldsmith
modestly insisted, “my decent English view … was that disadvantaged
people should be treated with concern, kindness, sympathetic understanding
and compassion. Disabled people were individuals who were to be helped
by dealing with their particular needs” (Goldsmith, 1997: 17). Of course,
Goldsmith may have insisted that a deep chasm divided these views. But
he probably exaggerated. Many questions of social responsibility, personal
freedom, and political will all overlapped. But out of this friction, one new
thing clearly emerged: the need for a universal access sign.
For his part, beginning in the mid-1960s, Goldsmith began campaigning
for access signage with a surprising kind of obsessiveness. Less than ten
years earlier, he’d been lackadaisical about his career. On graduating from
84 DESIGNING DISABILITY

Cambridge, he began to work as an architect. After contracting polio in

1956, while on holiday in Italy, however, he became partially paralyzed.
Goldsmith left professional practice and began working in the public sector.
He made this choice at a remarkably good moment; in 1960 the British
government launched a decade-long drive to build and fund a series of new
hospitals around the country. Goldsmith joined the South-East Metropolitan
Regional Hospital Board as an architectural advisor and researcher. He
quickly discovered that designers had no experience with disabled people,
especially those using wheelchairs. Britain’s Polio Research Fund agreed.
Goldsmith went to Stockholm in 1961, hoping to gather information for
a treatise on architecture for people with disabilities. When he returned,
he began advocating for an architectural guide on barrier-free access. The
Polio Research Fund, along with the Royal Institute of British Architects
(RIBA), commissioned Goldsmith’s seminal study of accessible architecture:
Designing for the Disabled (Goldsmith, 1963). In the end, this text was
remarkably timely. In fact, the modern wheelchair was just being introduced
in the UK, and Goldsmith’s book was written with this technology in
mind. But it was also the first practical application of Nugent’s ideas and
focused, unsurprisingly, on wheelchair access. Goldsmith’s text spelled out
the practical minutiae of wheelchair access, from forms of tactile paving
to height criteria for building fixtures and fittings. Beyond disseminating
information about how to widen doors and build ramps, Goldsmith’s text
also propagated Nugent’s idea that persons with disabilities were very much
like all others.
Before hearing Nugent, Goldsmith would recall, “It never occurred to me
that anyone could be provoked and angered by [stairs], could insist that they
were universally removable, could show how that was to be done and could
assure me that he was not a crackpot” (Goldsmith Designing, 1997: 17). But
Goldsmith, who came of age in the postwar period, was profoundly shaped
by his training, his profession, and his own wheelchair use.1 After hearing
Nugent’s Stockholm speech, and for several years thereafter, Goldsmith was
one of the American’s leading British converts. Yet, even after publishing
Designing for the Disabled, Goldsmith’s own occasional reliance on a
wheelchair and also his acquaintance with other disabled people in Britain
continued to nag. Nugent’s work at Illinois didn’t square with Goldsmith’s
own experience.
In 1964, at the small city of Norwich, Goldsmith decided to conduct the
first-ever, long-term study of disabled wheelchair users. He hoped to learn
more about their needs in advance of writing a British building code to
mirror the US ANSI 117.1. What he found instead was “a wealth of evidence
that to my mind made Nugent’s stance insupportable” (Goldsmith, 1997:
20). Working off government information, interviewing users of government
services, and collaborating with government officials, Goldsmith gradually
developed a different picture of wheelchair usage than the one painted by
Nugent. Over the course of his research, Goldsmith was welcomed into
 THE PERSONAL POLITICS OF SIGNS (1961–1965) 85

people’s homes and he spent time with their families. He slowly discovered
that most wheelchair users rarely went outside. In his study, he found only
one person, a woman, would leave her home alone in her wheelchair—and
that was to go to a neighborhood pub (McIntyre, 2015: 91). Goldsmith
came to believe that these shut-ins, simply put, were “not independent” at
all. Instead, he argued, they have acute needs, wanted “someone to push
them around and help them in and out of the wheelchair when necessary”
(Goldsmith, 1965: 971). In the end, he began to reason, most wheelchair
users needed more help than Nugent’s cohort of young and highly motivated
college students. Furthermore, the Norwich study suggested that disabled
persons would not benefit from barrier-free access accommodations alone.
To this day, Goldsmith’s ideas remain controversial.2 In retrospect, both
his and Nugent’s studies seem self-contained and hermetic. But also, it was
as if they found complete opposites in the range of potential wheelchair
users at the time. No doubt, Nugent’s college students at Illinois were an
exceptionally motivated and ambitious cohort. But Goldsmith’s sample
was notably restricted in other ways. Because he was working with local
officials, Goldsmith limited his study to wheelchair users who received their
chairs free from the British government. By definition, they had already
passed a rigorous vetting process instigated by the government’s medical
establishment, were considered severely ill or impaired, and were almost
always elderly. Indeed, the year before Goldsmith started his study, some 75
percent of people receiving NHS wheelchairs were over fifty-five (Woods and
Watson, 2004a: 555). Furthermore, the nature of the NHS and its allocation
of wheelchairs at that time must be taken into account; many of these stay at
home wheelchair users were still using the older, more rigid, and antiquated
chairs favored by the NHS. And the latter were so rickety and out-of-date,
they almost proscribed any kind of use out of doors. At Illinois and across
the United States, on the other hand, the E&J wheelchair was in widespread
usage. Moreover, it was considered so successful that many semi-ambulatory
people at Illinois were encouraged to use wheelchairs rather than crutches
or other assistive devices.
But Goldsmith scarcely reflected on these subtleties; instead, he was
struck by the obvious results of his research in Norwich. First, he chided
Nugent for taking an overly optimistic point of view. Goldsmith admitted
that even he initially felt the seductive pull of Nugent’s “wheelchair students
cavorting on the campus of the University of Illinois.” After hearing Nugent’s
1961 lecture in Stockholm, Goldsmith left the meeting understanding
that there were “hundreds of active young paraplegics frustrated because
architectural barriers stood in the way of their aspirations” (Goldsmith,
1997: 22). Certainly, the image of an active, fun-loving wheelchair user was
embraced on the Illinois campus. As pictured in an E&J ad run in the Illinois
program’s annual newsletter, Illini wheelchair users were “champion athletes
and brilliant scholars” (Figure 3.6). And, of course, what Goldsmith found in
Norwich was something quite different. Neither accomplished sportspersons
86 DESIGNING DISABILITY

nor sage dons, most wheelchair users in Norwich were elderly and the vast
majority relied on others to help them get around.
By the time Goldsmith issued a second edition of Designing for the
Disabled in 1967, he felt his research in Norwich necessitated a different
approach. Revising his earlier arguments, Goldsmith began by insisting that
well-adjusted disabled people are dependent. In fact, he argued they must
“accept the fact that they cannot be treated in the same way as everyone
else.” In this insistence, Goldsmith found a new voice. Calling American
efforts “well intentioned but misguided,” Goldsmith picked and prodded at
Nugent’s line of reasoning. He argued as well that the American Standard
Building Code was “dogmatic” as well as “impractical and unrealistic”
(Goldsmith, 1967: 388).
As a clear cleavage developed between Goldsmith and Nugent, the dispute
was all the more bitter because the distance between the two men was still
relatively small. Both men, for example, still agreed that special provisions
like ramps in place of steps, wider doorways, and other accommodations
for wheelchair users were important. But Goldsmith argued that disabled
people and their supporters should recognize “physical independence is not
a critical necessity” (Goldsmith, 1967: 387). It is clear, Goldsmith insisted,
that society must “treat people differently according to their differing needs.”
We must, he argued, also offer “opportunities for dependence” (Goldsmith,
1967: 389).
Boiled down to mundane specifics, Goldsmith’s argument revolves around
the minutiae of daily life. Practical things, for example, public toilets, should
accommodate disabled wheelchair users who arrive with an assistant or
caregiver (Goldsmith drafted the British Standard building code as provisioning
at least one unisex disabled toilet wherever there were public toilets; also,
the latter was decreed nearly twice the size of its American counterpart)
(McIntyre, 2015: 55). However seemingly commonplace, for Goldsmith
these provisions carried a heavy moral weight. Architects, Goldsmith insisted,
have “a responsibility to accommodate disabled people who are dependent as
much as those who can be independent” (McIntyre, 2015: 55).
The most controversial matter at the time, though, was Goldsmith’s
insistence that special features not be hidden or denied; on the contrary,
Goldsmith argued, attention should be drawn to them. On this point,
Goldsmith admitted that “there are different points of view.” But he
held his ground, insisting that specially adapted or otherwise “suitable
facilities should be brought to the attention of disabled people.” If
not, he observed, “the people for whom they have been designed will
be unaware of their existence, and they will be valueless.” To do this,
disabled people needed specially designated signage. Seen this way, he
reasoned, “the signposting of special facilities for disabled people is a
rational and entirely appropriate thing to do” (McIntyre, 2015: 55). To
refuse signage in favor of normalizing disability was, he insisted, a fool’s
errand (Goldsmith, 1967: 33, 34).
 THE PERSONAL POLITICS OF SIGNS (1961–1965) 87

Breaking barriers
Even before Goldsmith made a formal call for signage in the second edition of
Designing for the Disabled, the problem was clearly on his mind (Figure 3.7).
In June 1965, he tracked Timothy Nugent down at a conference in Oxford
and precipitated a full-blown confrontation. Face to face with the American,
Goldsmith explained that “I could not sympathise—or empathise—with Tim
Nugent’s radical vision” (Goldsmith, 1997: 28). The two had a very public
argument, culminating with Goldsmith suggesting that “not all disabled
people were capable of doing wheelchair gymnastics” (Goldsmith, 1967:
389). But the rift that was developing between these two points of view
is exemplified in two striking symbols that were almost simultaneously

FIGURE 3.7  The No Barriers logo appeared on the July 1962–July 1965 Architec-
tural Barriers: Progress Report issued by the President’s Committee on Employment
of the Handicapped, 1965.
88 DESIGNING DISABILITY

introduced in 1965. One, which appeared on a report issued by Nugent

(Figure 3.7), strikes an oddly negative note. The other (Figure 3.8), designed
for publicity materials for an international conference spearheaded by
Goldsmith and held in Italy, is awash in optimism.
At the November 1965 meeting of the National Society for Crippled
Children and Adults (NSCCA) in Chicago, Tim Nugent electrified the
meeting when he delivered a report from the leading edge of the campaign
against architectural barriers. But, while Nugent’s work would form
the basis for American building standards for a generation, a different
discussion was taking place away from the main stage. Behind the scenes,
Selwyn Goldsmith reported, there were discussions on the very real need
for signage that could label these accommodations (Goldsmith, 1969b: 7).
The convention’s organizer, the NSCCA, already had a robust institutional
culture in which complicated diseases and conditions were communicated
to the public through modest, but powerful photographs and symbols.
The group is perhaps best known for their poignant, annual fundraising
campaigns featuring an impaired “poster child.” And much of their
financial support came from the simple, but religiously redolent, “Easter
seal” stamps they sold each spring. Recognizing the power of a modest,
effective symbol, the group used the distinctive, stylized lily logo for
fundraising initiatives as well as its own literature. (They soon identified
with this symbol so completely, the group even officially changed their
name to the “Easter Seals Society” in 1967.) Perhaps unsurprisingly, when
the group published Nugent’s report for the 1965 Chicago convention
(Slavitt and Pugh, 2000: 6), the organization dressed the report up, placing
a symbol on its cover.
Two striking features emerge from this little emblem (Figure 3.7). First, the
symbol was not tied in any way to the report’s contents. Although thorough
and exacting, Nugent’s report made no mention of any form of visual frippery;
nowhere in it is the graphic even mentioned. Second, although it represents a
flight of four steps, the image remains remarkably vague. Depicted in skewed
perspective, the step motif was published with a bold circle surrounding
it. The most striking feature of the symbol, however, is the bar that runs
across it, effectively stamping the stairs out. In handwritten letters the word
“ACCESSIBLE” appears above it. While it would be too much to say that the
rough little sketch was meant as a directional or wayfinding device, its anti-
stairs motif did convey the spirit of the campaign against architectural barriers.
Simply put, the little no-stairs logo is confusing. Was it meant as a kind
of “trademark” and intended to be used by supporters of the barrier-free
architecture movement (Goldsmith, 1969b: 9)? Or was it developed as a
visual illustration aimed at builders, urging them not to work with stairs?
Goldsmith himself complained that it was not saying “positively ‘this
is a usable facility.’ ” Instead, he insisted, it could be read as the visual
equivalent of a double negative. Rather than forthrightly stating what it is,
the symbol announces “negatively ‘this is not a facility which is not usable’”
 THE PERSONAL POLITICS OF SIGNS (1961–1965) 89

(Goldsmith, 1969b: 10). Goldsmith tells us that this image was consistent
with the rest of Nugent’s philosophy; the image was meant to avoid
“stigmatization” (Goldsmith, 1967: 389). But, he claimed, it was utterly
useless. After making this brief appearance in Chicago, the “No Barriers”
logo died a quiet death.
Prompted by Selwyn Goldsmith, and born in the rosy glow of Europe’s
developing welfare states, a clearer figure of disablement emerged on the
world stage at the June 1965 conference “Disabled People and Architectural
Barriers” (Associazione nazionale mutilate e invalidi del lavoro, 1965).
Sponsored by two quasi-governmental groups based in Rome3 and held
at Stresa in the Italian Lake District, the conference drew representatives
from the United States, Europe, and as far away as Chile and India.
Germany’s Parliament sent a special delegation. The chief architects from
several Scandinavian ministries also attended. It should have been an
international launching point for Tim Nugent’s ideas. But Nugent did not
attend and instead Edmond Leonard, from the US President’s Committee
on Employment of the Disabled, presented on ANSI 117.1 and the
University of Illinois studies. Yet the notion of barrier-free architecture was
overshadowed by Goldsmith’s presentation of his own text, Designing for
the Disabled. Though the second edition had not yet been published, he
was already conducting his study in Norwich, and having second thoughts
about Nugent’s proposals.
Instead of following the US prescriptions in an ad hoc manner,
Goldsmith insisted that attendees begin asking a new set of questions.
For Nugent and his US supporters, discussion boiled down to one issue:
just how much should the physical environment announce that it has
been fitted to the needs of disabled people? At the Stresa conference,
however, discussion took a different turn. Goldsmith and the other
European delegates in attendance asked: how can the government better
accommodate disabled people? Most attendees represented respective
government ministries and their answers centered on housing, sports,
and vacations for disabled persons. Here, the Americans were outliers.
Most of the conference attendees were after a response to disability that
mirrored the values and goals Europe’s welfare states. Although the
symbol was designed in advance of the conference itself, these discussions
also provided the stage for a new representation: the disabled citizen
(Figure 3.8).
Though seemingly straightforward, the figure introduced on the Stresa
event’s promotional materials does more than inform; it makes disability
part of the visual landscape. In fact, placed on the meeting’s public posters,
the wheelchair user here was depicted as if part of a traffic sign; the image
was placed on a pole, echoing the kinds of markers seen on the side of a
road. Shown in silhouette, the figure sits in an oversized wheelchair; in a
brilliantly humanizing stroke, the chair user leans forward and appears to
be addressing us with a hand rising in salute.
90 DESIGNING DISABILITY

FIGURE 3.8  A wheelchair logo was introduced at the 1965 International Confer-
ence on Barriers, held in Stresa, Italy, 1965.

Here was an admirable vision. Not only did the Stresa symbol give
disablement a human form, but it also brought the image into dialog with
broader communications systems that shaped modern design. In fact, the
Stresa figure is also a pictogram and derives from a lexicon developed in
the years immediately after the First World War, when international travel,
trade, and communications forced the development of broadly legible visual
language systems. Perhaps unsurprisingly, pictograms were identified as
particularly useful. For instance, though the League of Nations had already,
in 1931, introduced twenty-six designated road signs to facilitate global
mobility, by 1938, they were proposing the first human figure (a silhouette
of a motorcycle rider) during the Convention on the Unification of Road
Signals (Schipper, 2009). In order to draw attention to the graphic, this
figure was enclosed in a heavy black circle. Both the Stresa and the Chicago
symbols pick up on this convention, as a way to draw attention to their
respective icons and also to align with broader typographic and signage
trends. But their resemblance ends there.
In fact, the Stresa symbol is torn in its allegiance, owing as much to
politically charged graphics as the barrier-free architecture movement.
Through the middle of the twentieth century, researchers began to study how
abstract and pictorial symbols could carry meaning across language barriers
(Baker, 2011). Then, in the postwar period especially, Europe’s democracies
pushed hard for a kind of a visual Esperanto (Bresnahan, 2011). At the same
time, they aimed for forms of communications seemingly devoid of national
or ethnic messages. The conventions advocated here, namely pictograms,
form the core of the larger sign symbols systems we know today.
 THE PERSONAL POLITICS OF SIGNS (1961–1965) 91

FIGURE 3.9  A Statistical Chart developed by the British Information Services for
distribution in the United States. The chart uses abstracted human forms to demon-
strate economic and social conditions in Britain during the first three years of the
Second World War, c. 1942. Photo by FPG/Hulton Archive/Getty Images.

The Stresa figure, then, was a design that aligned with some of the most
idealistic graphic design traditions in the twentieth century. Vanguard
typographic movements, including De Stijl, Russian constructivism,
Bauhaus, and New Typography, all rejected historical styles and embraced
visual experimentation. But—most fundamentally—most aimed to
discover universal signs and symbols that could help “achieve international
communication and global peace” (Bresnahan, 2011: 7). The first extensive
theorizing on pictograms began in the 1920 and early 1930s, steeped in
92 DESIGNING DISABILITY

the idealistic, science-inflected socialism of red Vienna. Here, the Austrian

sociologist Otto Neurath developed a system of standard symbols meant
to convey social statistics. But he was also aiming for a kind of clarity,
something his collaborator Charles Ogden called “debabelization” (Ogden,
1931). Neurath even worked with the graphic designer Gerd Arntz to
develop a series of easily comprehended stylized silhouettes that included a
form of the human figure (Neurath and Kinross, 2009: 44). Steeped in ideas
of scientific socialism of the period, the figure was part of a system Neurath
called ISOTYPE (International System of Typographic Picture Education)
(Figure 3.9). In Neurath’s own words, he sought “a system of optical
representation … that would be universal, immediate, and memorable
… [ensuring] that even passers-by … can acquaint themselves with the
latest sociological and economical facts at a glance.” (Neurath, quoted in
Cartwright et al., 1996: 65)
Though development of such imagery came to a standstill during the
Second World War, after the war these efforts were continued and expanded
into public signage. Many graphic designers embraced the emerging
pictographic language in the 1950s and 1960s, adopting its lessons to
develop logos and corporate identity programs. Furthermore, a continuing
engagement with the theory and practice of communication prompted, by
the 1960s, a growing general interest in graphic symbols. In all, a steady
stream of different international bodies developed symbol systems for vast
governmental infrastructures, including highways, airports, hospitals, and
many other services and products.
But signpost imagery like that evoked Neurath’s simple figures and
reflected by the Stresa figure was just beginning to be standardized in
the 1960s. Only in 1963 did Willy de Majo, then president of the
International Council of Graphic Design Associations (ICOGRADA),
suggest developing a systematic “symbol language for directional signs
in-doors and out” (Bakker, 2013). He played a pivotal role through his
power and position, but it was behind the scenes that he first suggested
further collaboration with professional organizations such as the
International Chamber of Commerce and the International Union of
Official Travel Organizations. The latter was especially interested in this
effort as it impacted international trade and travel. Furthermore, these
efforts were not limited to Europe. In the United States, the industrial
designer Henry Dreyfuss was also interested. Indeed, his agency developed
machine operation symbols as early as the 1940s, and he developed his
own symbol sourcebook in 1972. Interestingly, however, while a number
of designers plunged themselves into these practical systems, developing
through the 1960s symbols for male and female figures, post offices
and mail, restaurants and coffee, in these early symbol systems neither
Dreyfus nor the European designers developed any kind of representation
of access for disabled people.
 THE PERSONAL POLITICS OF SIGNS (1961–1965) 93

Of course, there was every reason that these designers should be thinking
in such radically new terms. The Stresa symbol was not simply a new
image—it represented an entirely different way of thinking. By example,
signs and symbols would follow, but the really remarkable development
here was that a state of disablement was openly depicted on a public sign.

Notes
1 Later in life, in Designing for the Disabled, a New Paradigm, Selwyn Goldsmith
explained his increasing reliance on wheelchairs. Essentially a hemiplegic, he
underwent several hospital stays and used a wheelchair while convalescing.
Over time, as he aged, he came to use chairs more and more.
2 Never afraid of controversy, in the course of his career, Goldsmith changed his
position on the politics of wheelchair access several times. Although Goldsmith
supported Timothy Nugent’s ideas about environmental access initially, he
changed his own opinions after his studies in Norwich in the mid-1960s.
Nevertheless, later in life, Goldsmith would revise his opinions once again. For an
account of his evolving ideas, see Designing for the Disabled, a New Paradigm.
3 These were the Associazione nazionale mutilati e invalidi del lavoro (National
Association of Maimed and Disabled Workers and Invalids) and the Associazione
Italiana Assistenza agli Spastici (Italian Association for Assisting Spastics).
 4
Signs of Discrimination
(1965–1968)

“When they are planning buildings,” asked Selwyn Goldsmith in 1967, “do
architects continue to treat everyone in the same way, thinking of building
users in “normal population” terms, with the result that people who are
abnormal are not accommodated? Or do they treat people differently
according to their differing needs, designing buildings not only for a normal
population but simultaneously for a parallel abnormal population?”
(Goldsmith, 1967: 389)
Goldsmith posed these questions in the Journal of the Royal Institute
of Architects. By this point, Goldsmith had refit his entire career, becoming
a full-fledged advocate for disabled people and arguing for separate, but
equal, facilities for them. He even developed a special term for his approach,
something he called “positive discrimination,” and began using it in relation
to access signs (Goldsmith, 1967: 388).
In the 1960s, the notion of “positive discrimination” was relatively new.
Over several decades it had been used primarily in statistics, indicating a
kind of winnowing process in which only the best kernels of corn or military
recruits were found acceptable. But its meaning was never fixed. In the UK,
“positive discrimination” took a surprising turn when it began to be applied
to new educational initiatives in the 1960s. From “positive solutions” to
“positive attitudes,” the driving optimism of Britain’s social democrats
moved the term from numerical analysis to the very real world of schools
and classrooms; it meant to discriminate in favor of people with certain
characteristics (sex, age, religion, ethnic origins) rather than against them.
But in the United States, the notion of discrimination, be it positive or not,
carried a different set of associations.
As the Civil Rights movement gained momentum in the early 1960s,
unequal treatment and segregation in the United States were increasingly
criticized. In the midst of battles for voting rights and access to equal
96 DESIGNING DISABILITY

FIGURE 4.1  Segregation signs like this, photographed by Esther Bubley at a bus
station in Rome, Georgia guided people through the Jim Crow South, 1930. Cour-
tesy of Library of Congress.

education, this movement proved a powerful model for disabled people. But
the campaign for Civil Rights also brought into harsh focus an unequal form
of discrimination that led to separate, but unequal, facilities in the segregated
South. It also highlighted the power of prohibitory messages. Here, signs
often served to regulate—not liberate—a visible minority (Figure 4.1). Jim
Crow signs directed African Americans to backroom facilities and through
hidden points of access. Separate treatment, like backdoor entrances, distinct
water fountains, and basement toilets, haunted the North American social
imaginary and built environment alike.
Long familiar with messages like “Whites only,” “No Colored,” and
“Negro Entrance This Way,” in the United States some disabled people and
their supporters equated inaccessible spaces and barriers to access in a new
 SIGNS OF DISCRIMINATION (1965–1968) 97

way. For them, barriers in the environment seemed almost willfully designed
to be unaccommodating. They signaled a different kind of unspoken
segregation. To draw attention to the problem of architectural barriers, some
persons with disabilities began invoking the specter of negative, prohibitory,
and segregationist signage. Although no one was posting “no disabled” or
“handicapped keep out” signs across the walls of North America, disabled
activists argued that builders were actively designing inaccessible spaces.
They might as well begin posting such signs. Writing in 1965, Charles Caniff,
a wheelchair user active in the Paralyzed Veterans Association, found it hard
to miss the parallels:

At the present time there is an intensive campaign … to eliminate signs

and regulations in public buildings in one region of our country that
restrict entry or use for certain people. Yet in every city and community
in our country are buildings without signs, which have physical barriers
preventing free access for millions of citizens and taxpayers. (Caniff,
1962: 14)

Similar concerns began to be voiced elsewhere. By 1966, the physician

and rehabilitation specialist Howard Rusk compared lack of access with
the Jim Crow South. He insisted that there may be “no signs reading,
‘Handicapped Keep Out,’” but the “many thoughtless barriers—stairs,
narrow doorways, revolving doors, and unusable restrooms and elevators
… have the same effect” (Rusk, 1966: 87). Newly empowered disabled
students at Illinois used the same imagery when campaigning for local
business to eliminate steps. When in 1965 senior Fred Fay visited a new
shopping mall in Champaign, Illinois, only to discover 5-inch curbs at
every entrance, he complained to the mayor’s office. These new curbs, he
argued, were “just as effective as a sign saying, ‘Disabled, stay out’” (Fay,
1965: 22). In the United States, segregation signs were widely known and
haunted the collective imagination of disabled people; they illustrated how
written postings might be deployed to inhibit—not empower—disabled
people.
Of course, signs forbidding access to disabled people were never posted.
But, in conceptualizing the barrier-free architecture movement, Nugent and
his supporters were themselves wary of the idea of “special” treatment and
found the idea of discrimination of any sort worrisome. Certainly, from
the very start, the groundbreaking program at Illinois never conceived the
need for signage. But, as Goldsmith’s case for access signs began to win
followers on both sides of the Atlantic, the question of signage was more
openly discussed. But it also revealed a simple truth. North Americans
favored oblique, abstracting signage so enigmatic that its message of access
seemed hidden or “secret” (Goldsmith, 1969b: 10; Tomlinson and Stevens,
1972:  108). Arguing for a form of “positive discrimination,” in the UK,
Goldsmith led the way for something different—access signs that were
98 DESIGNING DISABILITY

more robust and much clearer. Above all, he argued for symbols based on
the human figure. In the end, the issue was seemingly swept aside in 1967,
when the first professional designers began to address the signage issue.
What emerged was not merely a simple directional sign—those existed
before then. Instead, Paul Arthur introduced a disabled access symbol that
fit into a larger system of communications for Montreal’s Expo 67; but the
problem of discrimination would return later, with reverberations to this
day.

The secret signs of disabled people

In 1965, the Canadian Research Council, a part of the subcommittee on the
National Building Council, introduced a circular form as part of its symbols
for directional signage (Figure 4.2). Understood as one piece in the larger
puzzle of designing accessible environments, this logo was introduced to
the public in “Building Standards for the Handicapped,” a set of guidelines
intended to increase access in public buildings. Taken cumulatively, the
Canadian guidelines are very similar to the American specifications first
developed by Tim Nugent four years earlier. And, like the “No Barriers”
symbol introduced in Chicago, this image graced the cover of a report.
But there the comparison ends. While the “No Barriers” logo illustrated
an architectural barrier (steps)—and blocked it out—the Canadian symbol
effectively marked something different—an architecture of access. Its design

FIGURE 4.2  This abstract insignia was developed by Canada’s National Research
Council and adopted as part of the country’s Building Code in 1965. It was first distrib-
uted in the government publication, Building Standards for the Handicapped, 1965.
 SIGNS OF DISCRIMINATION (1965–1968) 99

relied on a stylized circle motif enclosing a zigzag line, and accompanied

by a directional arrow. It was conceived to remedy a larger problem, and
meant “for use as a directional sign to building entrances usable by semi
ambulatory and nonambulatory persons.” Most importantly, it was also
intended to serve “as an identification symbol on all facilities provided for
the handicapped” (National Research Council Canada, 1965: 2). And yet, it
is oddly obscure. To the art educator John Sevens, its abstract nature put it
in a class of symbols that “communicate only with the initiated” (Tomlinson
and Stevens, 1972: 106).
Modestly referred to as an “insignia’ rather than a “sign,” the
Canadian symbol’s innovations are easy to overlook. But this insignia
takes the image of stairs, and reduces the form to a simple zigzag. At the
same time, the symbol is embedded in a directional arrow, allowing it to
serve as a useful guide. Because it is non-representational, the insignia
can be hung in a variety of ways, allowing the arrow to point in any
direction. This aspect of the motif reflected a mixture of design cultures
that was, in its own small way, revolutionary. On the one hand, it follows
the advice of leading British access experts like Goldsmith. And it echoes
the environmental signage exemplified by the Stresa figure when it was
depicted on conference posters—that is, it functions as a signpost (and, of
course, this idea reflected Goldsmith’s advocacy for public signage). But it
was hardly explicit in its referencing. The symbol is a little antiseptic—as it
is, it includes nothing more than an arrow, the zigzagged line, and a circle.
In this regard, it masks its meaning and hides the implication of special
treatment. The Canadian insignia might suggest a sophisticated balance
between the US and British approaches toward access and barriers in the
public space. But it should also be seen against a backdrop of national
ambition.
To be sure, at this same moment Canadians were deeply immersed in
larger questions of symbols and their meaning. The entire country had
only recently hashed through the “Great Flag Debate” of the early 1960s.
Canadians were keenly aware of the power of graphic symbols when the
country prepared to replace the Canadian Red Ensign, that is, the Union Jack
and shield of the royal arms, with a new maple leaf flag; the latter was finally
accepted in 1965, when it was introduced at an official ceremony in Ottawa.
The building code insignia, in fact, shares its distinctly bold, graphic style
with the maple leaf symbol. Both followed what the historian and designer
of the Canadian flag, George Stanley, described as “simplicity—it should be
clean cut and not cluttered” (Stanley, 1964: 3).
But, where the national flag was meant to be easily recognizable and
iconic, the insignia was willfully covert. Its meaning, as one critic at the time
complained, was “cryptic,” and its vague symbolism presented itself as a
form of secret knowledge (Tomlinson and Stevens, 1972: 27). Was the circle
meant to represent a wheel? Was the zigzag line meant to connote steps?
If so, asked Selwyn Goldsmith, why “represent steps which handicapped
100 DESIGNING DISABILITY

FIGURE 4.3  The New York State Access Symbol began circulating in 1967 when
it was introduced in the brochure “Outdoors Recreation for the Physically Handi-
capped,” 1967. New York State Council of Parks and Outdoor Recreation, Albany.

people cannot manage? (If the latter is the intention it is not apparent
whether the arrow is pointing to a location where there are steps or where
there are not)” (Goldsmith, 1969: 9).
However puzzling its appearance, the Canadian symbol did fill a void. It
could label accessible accommodations and it might also guide disabled people
toward barrier-free routes and passageways. And it succeeded in attracting a
following of sorts. By 1968, an informal market for the Canadian insignia
stickers and placards developed in the United States. It was popular enough
that groups like the Massachusetts Association of Paraplegics unapologetically
began selling these as a “sign to indicate wheelchair facilities” (one was free,
two or more, twenty cents each).
At the same time, in 1967 New York State adopted its own symbol
(Figure 4.3). Officially issued by the State Council of Parks and Outdoor
Recreation, this symbol was a pet project of Governor Nelson Rockefeller.
It was quickly developed under the leadership of his younger brother,
Laurence, who had only recently been made Council chair. Born dyslexic, the
elder Rockefeller self-identified as disabled, and was an outspoken advocate
for accommodations. With a vision that stretched from Lake Erie to the
tip of Long Island, state parks bureaucrats introduced a symbol focused
on circulation and access provisions for both wheelchair users and semi-
ambulatory persons. To accomplish this, the 1967 park guidelines ordered
eye-catching signs to be “located at the park entrances plus literature
distributed at the entrance control station” to recreation areas (New York
State Council of Parks and Outdoor Recreation, 1967: 4). The New York
state symbol is a close cousin to the cryptic Canadian insignia. Resembling
 SIGNS OF DISCRIMINATION (1965–1968) 101

nothing so much as a spoked wheel, impaled by an arrow, it closely recalls

the bicycle-like wheels common to wheelchairs at the time. Like its relative
north of the border, its directional arrow could be shifted to point in
different directions. It’s worth noting that the New York symbol dropped the
Canadians’ puzzling zigzag line. But this didn’t matter to Selwyn Goldsmith.
Ever critical of North American attempts to introduce abstract symbols, he
argued that the New York sign looked “less like a sign and more like the
kind of ‘lovers’ graffiti’ one could find carved into a tree trunk.” Even “if a
less frivolous interpretation is assumed,” Goldsmith continued, the hapless
symbol might indicate “archery and William Tell” (Goldsmith, 1969: 10).
For better or worse, these symbols never gained wide circulation. In
the annals of graphic design, North America’s curious engagement with
public signage for disabled access might remain a strange footnote. But,
from across the Atlantic, both symbols spurred dismay. And Goldsmith’s
consternation went beyond peevishness. A wheelchair user himself, he
craved acceptance as much as clarity. Following trends in twentieth-century
signage, Goldsmith insisted that someone, somewhere could do better: an
access symbol needed to be clear, practical, and signal an open acceptance
of disability.

Positive discrimination and

the psychology of disablement
If he felt justified in critiquing the North American access symbols so
harshly, it was because, with the 1963 publication of Designing for The
Disabled in the UK, Selwyn Goldsmith immediately gained international
stature as an expert on the subject of barrier-free architecture. Standing at
the pinnacle of this growing field, he also embodied a kind of ideal—he was
an engaged and active disabled person. No wonder, then, that his rethinking
of these issues in the 1967 revision of Designing for The Disabled gained
so much attention. When he recanted his initial support of Tim Nugent and
the new barrier-free building code in the US, he called his earlier approach
“a mistaken policy” (Goldsmith, 1967). The London Times went so far
as suggest that Goldsmith’s change of mind “unleashed an international
controversy” (Anon., 1967c: 10). As one who was rapidly drifting away
from what the Times called the “orthodox” American approach, Goldsmith
made his case for something very different: “I want positive discrimination
to accommodate severely handicapped and disabled people.” But more to
his original point, he aimed to align positive discrimination with what he
called “the psychology of disablement” (Goldsmith, 1969: 11).
At the outset, it’s important to recall that Goldsmith stressed one
thing—there is no stigma to being disabled. Nevertheless, he insisted,
“physically abnormal people must be provided with special facilities that
102 DESIGNING DISABILITY

are supplementary to those needed by normal people.” He noted that

“This special treatment is positively discriminatory but it need not mean
stigmatizing treatment” (Goldsmith, 1967, 388). The examples he marshaled
were clear enough: “people who use wheelchairs need ramps in place of steps;
they need wider doors, larger lifts and larger w.c. compartments.” More to
the point, as Goldsmith supporters Nicholas Tomlinson and John Stevens
editorialized several years later, “it is impossible to design facilities which
are usable by everyone” (Tomlinson and Stevens, 1972: 108). Years later,
Goldsmith explained his position more fully. As he saw it, the American ethos
of independence—that is, of not accepting or needing help—was inconsistent
with what he called the “social welfare” policies of the British government
(Goldsmith, 1983). But Goldsmith also found the basic parameters of the
US approach suspect. At best, he proposed, it exaggerates the problem. On
the face of it, “the proposition that architectural barriers prevent disabled
people from using buildings sounds plausible. It is … easy to dramatize, for
example, the incompatibility of a wheelchair and a flight of steps.” But this
ignores, according to Goldsmith, the obvious solution—ask for help. Take,
for instance, staircases. Those who see steps as barriers ignore the possibility
of outside assistance. It is, Goldsmith asserted, a “simple fact that a person
in a wheelchair can be carried up and down steps” (Goldsmith, 1969: 14).
But Goldsmith saw a darker logic at work here, too. He argued that the US
approach fundamentally lacked moral authority. To Goldsmith’s mind, “the
architectural barriers campaign in the USA is being conducted not to enable
all physically handicapped people to participate in community life, but only
those who are of value—those who are potentially capable of contributing
something of material account” (Goldsmith, 1967: 389).
Invoking his research in Norwich, Goldsmith maintained that many
seriously disabled people simply could not be independent. Instead, “by
using their initiative (which means requesting assistance) they are able to
find their way into and around buildings” (Goldsmith, 1969: 14). Inspired
by the ideals of the welfare state (which itself drew on attributes like mutual
supportiveness, pragmatism, and compensation), he insisted upon suspending
“judgments that one individual is worth more than another are out of place.”
Goldsmith felt that the job of architects is “to accommodate disabled people
who are dependent as much as those who can be independent” (Goldsmith,
1967, 389). This marks a profound shift away from the US attitude. Nugent
would have insisted that the abolition of architectural barriers would allow
disabled people to live normal lives. But as Goldsmith told the London
Times in 1967, independence is “only a relative value” (Anon., 1967c: 10).
As he began to stake out his claims, Goldsmith insisted that we care
less about independence, and instead pay more attention to some basic
principles of psychology. Goldsmith acknowledged that able-bodied people
“attach immense importance on the attribute of physical normality  …
[and] a common supposition about the way that people react to disability
… is that disabled people aspire to be ‘normal’ and constantly seek
 SIGNS OF DISCRIMINATION (1965–1968) 103

normality [sic] goals” (Goldsmith, 1969b: 12). By contrast, he argued, a

well-adjusted disabled person may go through “an initial phase of self-
consciousness” and be embarrassed by his or her impairments. But, if
psychologically healthy enough, that person will become “accustomed”
to it. In fact, over time, disablement would become “an integral part of
the image which he presents to the world, and he looks upon it in the
same detached fashion as people regard their spectacles or false teeth”
(Goldsmith, 1969b: 12). For Goldsmith, acceptance of disability “without
embarrassment, shame or self-pity” (Goldsmith, 1969b: 12) was essential.
As Goldsmith’s supporters put it, “if he is able to adjust to the limitations
imposed by his disability as opposed to adopting a pretense of normality,
a disabled man can cope very successfully—without any embarrassment
or sense of inferiority” (Tomlinson and Stevens, 1972: 108).
The link between signage and this type of positive psychology was, for
Goldsmith, clear enough. If a person were well adjusted, there would be
no need for cryptic, abstracting, or “camouflaging” signs. As proponents of
Goldsmith’s position noted, the secretive approach suggests that physical
disability is a “ ‘tragic, calamitous and shattering experience’ and supposes
that disabled people must inevitably regard their handicaps in the same way.”
Such attitudes suppose that “disabled people must inevitably regard their
handicaps in the same way—that they can best be assisted by pretending that
the damage has never occurred” (Tomlinson and Stevens, 1972: 108).
The UK, Goldsmith insisted, needed a clear, practical access symbol
that would signal a positive attitude toward disability. By 1965, Goldsmith
developed one on his own and published it in the Architect’s Journal
(Goldsmith, 1965: 972), a publication that he helped edit. Complaining
that the Canadian symbol was a “puzzle to many people,” Goldsmith’s
introduction was entirely different—a silhouetted figure in a wheelchair.
The symbol drew from the Stresa figure, but more clearly articulated both
the human form and the chair on which it sits. When Goldsmith decided
to publish a second edition of Designing for the Disabled in 1967, he
went further, adding a new section devoted to “signposting of facilities
for disabled people” (Goldsmith, 1967: 155–157). Here he introduced a
newer, more abstract figure, who seems to roll along purposefully (Figure
4.4). This person pushes his or her own chair and looks directly ahead; as
opposed to the friendly looking Stresa figure, this person advances toward
some distant goal. At the same time, the depiction of this wheelchair is
remarkably detailed, clearly articulating a newer, collapsible chair, complete
with wheels—small in front and larger in back, seat, armrests, backrest, and
push handles at its back and push rims on its wheels.
At the same time, for Goldsmith the discussion was not just theoretical;
he meant to back his arguments up with solid facts. Careful research was
important to Goldsmith, as was the funding, structure, and backing that came
from the governmental and charitable support that his work received. Shortly
after the first edition of Designing for Disability was published in 1963,
104 DESIGNING DISABILITY

FIGURE 4.4  Access symbol from the second edition of Selwyn Goldsmith’s De-
signing for the Disabled, 1967. 2nd edition. London: RIBA Publications Ltd.
 SIGNS OF DISCRIMINATION (1965–1968) 105

Goldsmith moved to Norwich in 1964, where he began several research

projects (among these was a study of disabled drivers in Norwich; another
was a study of blind residents). But perhaps the most significant project was
a “pilot signposting programme” that Goldsmith carried out in Norwich
from 1967 to 1968. Subvented by the government, and administered through
the National Fund for Research into Crippling Diseases, it was intended to
concretize ideas of positive discrimination. As the London Times would later
report, it aimed to replace “abstract symbols to identify special facilities
(which are meaningless to the uninitiated) by pictorial signs” (Anon., 1967c:
10).
This “demonstration project” was run in collaboration with several
local agencies and institutions, including the Norwich School of Art and
the welfare and planning departments of the city government’s Norwich
Corporation. Their brief was to develop a system of postings analogous
to road traffic signs; simply put, they aimed to “point the way to the
whereabouts of specific facilities for disabled people” (Goldsmith, 1969:
18). The ambitious program aimed to put some thirty signs in public
places, alerting the public to access in theaters and movie houses, as well
as Norwich’s Cathedral, main library, and the County Hall. There were
also signs to indicate special parking spaces, as well as places that had
wheelchairs available on loan to the public. Developments were grounded
in a series of meetings between the designers (a class from Norwich School
of Art led by Peter Rea, a professional graphic designer then teaching at
the school as a visiting tutor) and a group of disabled people assembled by
Goldsmith himself.
Goldsmith decided that none of the symbols then in place were
satisfactory; the students were asked to develop “fresh” symbols and these
would be presented to a group of about forty disabled people (Tomlinson
and Stevens, 1972: 109). In the end, this group was asked to discuss
multiple variations of what to depict, including an empty wheelchair,
a crutch, a cane, as well as representations of people using chairs and
crutches (Figure 4.5). The group spent the most time discussing a modular
system, in which different pieces of information might be communicated.
For example, individual panels might be printed with a single symbol,
and the groups of symbols combined for different messages. Thus, a sign
depicting a man might be placed next to a second panel that depicts
a crutch and cane. This might indicate a facility appropriate for semi-
ambulatory users. If a sign showing an empty wheelchair was added,
the meaning would shift to indicate that the facility was appropriate for
wheelchair users as well. Placed together, like words in a sentence, the
composite of these three symbols would announce that a crutch, cane,
or wheelchair user could access these facilities. The group also discussed
three stylistic approaches to the images themselves. These included realistic
photographs of men, women, canes, wheelchairs, and other assistive
devices; a moderately abstracted set of forms, including a wheelchair
106 DESIGNING DISABILITY

FIGURE 4.5  These preliminary studies were planned for a modular range of sym-
bols designed by Selwyn Goldsmith, Peter Rea, and students at the Norwich School
of Art, c. 1968.

somewhat reminiscent of the earlier Architect’s Journal symbol and later

reprinted in the second edition of Designing for the Disabled1; and a third
group that veered closest, stylistically speaking, to the stylized silhouettes
introduced by Neurath some forty years earlier.
As the assembled test group ran through these images, however,
Goldsmith made several unexpected discoveries. First, the group
indicated that persons with invisible disabilities like pulmonary or cardiac
conditions ought to be included (Goldsmith, 1969: 20). Furthermore,
although some prevaricated, Goldsmith reports that they preferred a
“single symbol only to cater for all handicapped people, which would
probably be a representation of a person in a wheelchair.”2 Goldsmith also
found that, while he had proudly announced to the press that the signpost
project would prove that there is no stigma associated with disability,
 SIGNS OF DISCRIMINATION (1965–1968) 107

some “sensitive” disabled people “do not wish to be reminded” of their

disability and disliked any symbol that “focuses attention on the attributes
which they are anxious to disguise” (Goldsmith, 1969: 11). Others in
the group cared little about whether the symbol included a recognizable
person or not, while at least one person liked the abstract symbols in use
in the United States and Canada. Goldsmith treated the latter opinion as
an outlier and rejected it wholesale. He explained that this point of view
was advanced by a man who “had been severely handicapped since the
age of two, had always displayed an aggressive attitude toward disability,
was fiercely determined to operate as a normal person, and did not want
to be associated with any stigmatizing emblem which advertised disability
characteristics” (Goldsmith, 1969: 35). In many ways, this Norwich man
was seconding the attitudes of reformers like Tim Nugent. But, according
to Goldsmith’s report, most of the group rejected the “secret” symbols
outright. “There’s no need for it to be secret,” Goldsmith reports one
participant stating. “There’s no disgrace in being disabled” (Goldsmith,
1969: 20). Goldsmith agreed and believed an explicit symbol was
the best way to make this known. But many in the test group believed
that an empty wheelchair was enough, and that “the human figure was
superfluous. They rejected it, not because they had any inhibitions or
self-consciousness about personally associating themselves with it, but
because from a practical point of view they felt that it was unnecessary”
(Goldsmith, 1969: 22). This put Goldsmith in a bind, particularly because
the presence of a person in the signage reflected his understanding of
“positive discrimination.” Ultimately, Goldsmith turned to what he called
“the psychology of disablement” to deal with this.
For several years, Goldsmith had begun advancing the belief that “a
pictorial symbol … could make a valuable psychological impact on the
community as a whole” (Goldsmith, 1967: 388). Of course he was not alone
in this; Goldsmith’s interest in the psychological aspects of disablement
reflected broader trends in rehabilitation research. Indeed, as the fields of
medical and vocational rehabilitation started to be infused with government
funds after the Second World War, psychologists were increasingly consulted
on a range of disability-related issues.3 And so, in addition to the feedback
he received from his test group of disabled people, Goldsmith consulted
with a pair of authorities—two psychologists then practicing in Norwich.
He was eager to find reinforcement for his idea that representing a human
figure was psychologically important for a “healthy” acceptance of disability
(Goldsmith, 1969: 23).
Goldsmith reports that the two local psychologists (the pair remain
unidentified) each found the “without-figure” symbols “unsympathetic.”
Their critique was extended and troubling. One of the consultants determined
that any kind of figureless symbol would be “ambiguous,” “passive,” and
“non-informative.” The other said that it was “totally negative, dead, and
has no drive or motivation.” Worse still, “unlike the with-figure symbol, [the
108 DESIGNING DISABILITY

empty wheelchair] will not promote positive feedback” from the general
public. Instead, this expert continued, the figureless wheelchair symbol
attempts “to neutralize physical handicap.” They argued that it propagated
the “secret” knowledge of disabled users, “and its role is thus analogous to
reliance on the elimination of architectural barriers … which also attempt
to obscure disability characteristics” (Goldsmith, 1969: 23). Of course,
Goldsmith had already determined to make a symbol worthy of “positive
discrimination,” a symbol that disabled people might identify with. And
so, finding it “impossible to ignore [the] reactions” of these psychologists,
he discarded the vacant wheelchair symbol (Goldsmith, 1969: 23). In his
efforts to empower them, Goldsmith discounted the opinions of disabled
people and considered instead what the experts, in this case psychologists,
had to say.4
To this day, Goldsmith’s methodology seems vague and how he arrived
at his conclusions is sometimes elusive;5 above all, his conclusions supported
his belief that disabled persons were always in need of help. At about this
time—midway through the process—he began to reconceive the program’s
purpose and decided to make the project something other than a “signposting
system.” Only rarely did disabled persons actually need directional signage,
he concluded. Instead, they would benefit the most from “an information
system communicating equally to the general public and the disabled
people” where access—as well as helpful services like wheelchairs available
on loan—could be found. Thus a single image—rather than the modular
system combining different images—might work better (Tomlinson and
Stevens, 1972: 110).
Once he reestablished priorities, Goldsmith returned to the project with
new vigor. True, he allowed, “the whole character of the project had been
radically altered” by the feedback that non-ambulatory and semi-ambulatory
disabilities should be folded into a single figure; true, too, he now had to
reframe expectations and accept “that the concept of a signposting system
should be replaced by an advertising programme employing a symbol of
group identity” (Goldsmith, 1969: 23).
But, after this initial study, Goldsmith now felt justified that he could
“demonstrate the ‘differentness’ of disabled people, and ought not to
attempt to disguise, camouflage or conceal the nature of disability or to
pretend that disabled people are normal people” (Goldsmith, 1969: 24).
The symbol, he insisted, could make disability visible without rendering
individuals conspicuous misfits.
At the Norwich School of Art, students were given a new brief, and a
submission by student Phil Bush was chosen, then developed and refined by
the school’s graphic design tutor, Peter Rea (Figure 4.6). It would concretize
the idea of positive discrimination. Building off the Stresa and Architects
Journal symbols, they worked with a simplified silhouette, abolishing the
realistic details that Goldsmith himself described as nothing more than
“fussiness” (Goldsmith, 1969: 24). This simplicity also lent the symbol a
 SIGNS OF DISCRIMINATION (1965–1968) 109

FIGURE 4.6  In 1969 Selwyn Goldsmith, Peter Rea, and students at the Norwich
School of Art finalized a symbol that depicted both crutch and wheelchair users, as
well as those with pulmonary or heart conditions, 1969.

kind of “corporate identity,” and could, he argued, embody an affirmative

attitude toward disability itself. In a bid for inclusiveness, the symbol also
comprises another man standing with a crutch. A circle in his chest is meant
to symbolize cardiac and respiratory conditions. As it was, the wheelchair
was reduced to a single large circle, with the figure in it slanted at a 5-degree
angle “to enhance the impression that the wheelchair individual is exerting
himself and is mobile rather than static” (Goldsmith, 1969: 25).
Goldsmith reported that his group of disabled interlocutors accepted the
new symbol unanimously, as did the two psychologists he had consulted;
with relatively little fanfare the new symbol was distributed around
Norwich. But not everyone was satisfied. Some viewers were critical of
its legibility. At the Guardian newspaper, journalists eagerly announced
110 DESIGNING DISABILITY

that several employees got hold of the Norwich symbol and conducted
“a quick poll in the Guardian office.” A total of seven people understood
the Norwich symbol’s significance immediately, “but the rest saw a variety
of meanings in the design. These ranged from people playing stick and
hoop to a man sitting in a car, and a man who has got so well after a
hole in the heart operation that he is going to hit someone else with a
stick” (Bendixson, 1968: 9). And yet although the Guardian picked at the
symbol’s clarity, the newspaper recognized its importance. Above all, they
noted Goldsmith’s insistence that the symbol should unabashedly “indicate
special arrangements and special privileges for disabled people.” Certainly,
they acknowledged, Goldsmith wanted “to promote the status of the
group” (Bendixson, 1968: 9).
Ultimately, Goldsmith’s pilot project demonstrated that there are choices
in representing disabled people, and these choices were shaped by more than
legibility and convenience. The psychology of disability was also at play, as
was a growing sense of group identity. But Goldsmith was not the only one
learning these lessons. In fact, Goldsmith’s signs were quickly overshadowed.
At the same time, however, his ideas would persist long after the Norwich
project was forgotten.

Toward a universal sign

As it was, even after taking stock of all Goldsmith’s writings and
research, his carefully calibrated symbols are hard to measure against
Paul Arthur’s almost simultaneous introduction of a wheelchair access
symbol at Montreal’s Expo 67 (Figure 4.7). Though the Canadian
government  introduced its own anonymously designed access insignia
two years earlier, Arthur was the first professional designer to integrate
an access symbol into a larger system of communication. But the very
nature of this project was also significant. More than introducing signage
for a world’s fair, Arthur was sympathetic to the Expo planners’ real
aim—creating an ideal city. Although planned as part of this ambitious
scheme, Arthur’s symbol was developed and introduced rapidly; it was
implemented after Goldsmith completed his research for the Norwich
project, but before he wrote his final report. And though the two projects
were never planned or conceived as competitors, Arthur’s was better
positioned for international attention. First, it received a great deal of
press attention, primarily because it was part of a larger government-
sponsored push to bring disabled visitors to the fair (Anon., 1967d:
12). But Expo 67 also provided something that Norwich didn’t—an
experimental site where the success of a coherent pictorial system was
rolled out for a broader, polyglot public. And so, with the impetuousness
of an outsider, Paul Arthur jumped headlong into the broader access
signage debate.
 SIGNS OF DISCRIMINATION (1965–1968) 111

FIGURE 4.7  At Expo 67, Paul Arthur and Associates designed and issued a suite of
directional symbols, including a wheelchair access sign. The groups of designs were
issued to the public in a guide that urged viewers to “Observez le ‘code’/Watch for
these signs,” 1967. From Expo 67: guide officiel: 28 avril-27 octobre 1967, Mon-
tréal, Canada: chapitre spécial sur les fêtes du Centenaire.

For his part, the Canadian-born Paul Arthur had been converted to the
idea of universal of signs and symbols long before he joined Expo 67’s
design team. Arthur’s seven years working as an editor in Switzerland
during the mid-1950s left him well versed in Swiss multilingualism. But
it also introduced him to the visual panache and universalist rhetoric of
Swiss modernist typography. After returning to Canada in 1956, Arthur was
credited with bringing a “European influence” back with him (Elder, 2005:
42). Stridently modernist and unflagging in his ambition, Arthur approached
the fair’s organizing committee on his own, after learning that the event
would be held in Montreal. He presented them with a breathtakingly
comprehensive directional and information signage system for the projected
thousand-acre site. Arthur was lucky in finding that Expo 67’s planners
shared his vision. Norman Hay, for instance, coordinated design efforts at
Expo 67. He was already known as “a design missionary” and celebrated
for his clean, rational, and modernist work (Delaney, 1967: 21). His main
goal was not merely to recruit professional designers into the project, but for
a “unity” of design forms (Wainwright, 1967: 31). As the popular journal
112 DESIGNING DISABILITY

FIGURE 4.8  An abstracted depiction of a wheelchair was introduced by Paul Ar-

thur & Associates for Expo 67’s signage system, 1967.

Saturday Night gushed at the time, “Expo has developed a totally unified
system of design that covers everything from wastepaper baskets to signs
telling you where to park your yacht” (Delaney, 1967: 23).
For his part, Paul Arthur didn’t aim to reach a yacht-owning elite; he
wanted to create signage that was unified, but also legible. According to
him, “A good symbol must be concise and simple, its form must be easy
to understand and easy to remember” (Arthur & Associates, n.d.: 10). To
develop symbols for the Montreal fair he sought feedback from experts,
 SIGNS OF DISCRIMINATION (1965–1968) 113

including Martin Krampen, a semiotician and professor at Michigan

State University who had studied at Germany’s renowned Hochschule fur
Gestaltung in Ulm. Imbued with the school’s rationalist ideology, Krampen
argued that symbols should be created through a scientific method that
identified a “common stock of signs” that would clearly be understood by
both “sender” and “receiver” (Baker, 2011: 42). At Expo 67, Arthur applied
these principles; by taking a more precise approach, he aimed for more than
simply covering signs with words. “Typographic messages,” Arthur insisted,
“should be used when all other visual communication are inadequate”
(Arthur, 1967: 50). Communications, he rationalized, are based on mutually
agreed-upon conventions. They operate as a system of sounds and forms
that could unify cities, regions, or countries. Symbols could be used to calm
misunderstandings between nations, to facilitate the movement of goods,
and to assist and advise both strangers and residents of vast cities.
With this in mind, Arthur and Associates quickly rejected the Canadian
government’s access insignia by simply arguing that “as this was an
international exposition, Expo graphics had to conform to international
standards and the existing symbol did not meet those standards” (Canadian
Corporation for the 1967 World Exhibition, 1969: 2074). In fact, the Canadian
symbol—like the New York State symbol and other abstracting access
signage—was utterly out of step with the advice given by communications
experts at the time: international signage, they urged, should be consistent
with other symbols in use and also a degree of “recognizability.”6 By the
time that was done, the Expo 67 access symbol bore no resemblance to
its government-decreed counterpart (Figure 4.8). Where the Canadian
Building Code insignia was completely abstract, Arthur’s pictogram is
representational, literally depicting a schematic wheel and stylized chair.
In effect, both Arthur and Goldsmith were astute enough to realize that
the wheel was crucial to redefining modern mobility, and both build their
symbols off it. Arthur and his team did not, however, aim to humanize their
symbol. Nor is there evidence that they considered Goldsmith’s reading and
discussions of “the psychology of disablement.” Instead, they developed a
symbol reducible to logical, easily understood parts. Arthur may have been
visually summarizing Krampen’s arguments, but his symbol draws from
commonly used verbal expressions found in multiple languages (Bakker,
2013: 43, 44). And so, in spite of Arthur’s desire for nonverbal communication,
the Expo 67 access symbol continues to reference words, albeit ones that
exist in both English and French: it takes the word “wheel” or “rollant”
and “chair” or “fauteuil” and presents a graphic form for each. Of course,
this does not make for legibility at a global scale. Not all countries used the
word “wheelchair” (nor, for that matter, were wheelchairs commonplace
worldwide). But this approach was consistent with the broader system of
geometric symbols that Arthur and Associates introduced at Expo 67. From
their point of view, the brief was simple: to develop a series of forms capable
of reducing a range of visitor services to pictures (Figure 4.7). A stylized
114 DESIGNING DISABILITY

square with triangle on top and red cross within, for example, marked the
location of hospital services, a phone handset identified a telephone booth,
and a simple cup stood in for a coffee shop. Parts of human bodies, like a
raised hand, might indicate “stop.” Alternately, the symbol for a first aid
station was a hand with a bandaged thumb. All symbols were placed in a
grid and mounted on signs. Directions were ordered by combining these
pictograms with simple arrows. By the late 1960s, many designers agreed
with Arthur—coherent systems of communication like this would lead to a
more rational world.
Although Arthur could carefully justify this method, there is also
something immensely conciliatory about his approach. It speaks to Canadian
politics at the time, and stretches beyond the issue of multilingualism.
Beginning in the 1920s, Canada’s federal government began to create and
administer a series of social programs. By the mid-1960s, Canada was
unfolding its own version of a welfare state, covering employment insurance,
family allowances, old-age pensions, and hospital and medical insurance;
in many ways, these changes echoed those implemented in the European
welfare states for the purpose of increasing social services. Expo 67 was
originally planned to mark the centenary of the Canadian confederation;
the writer Robert Fulford called it “the greatest birthday party in history”
(Fulford, 1968: 201). But it was also meant to bolster national unity and
advertise the nation’s successes. For both Canadians and the world, Expo 67
represented, as historian Gary Miedema puts it, “a Canada that emphasized
inclusion, not exclusion; impartiality, not ethnic or religious prejudice; unity
and cooperation, not separation and division” (Miedema, 2005: 114). This
vision also meant to include—but not highlight—disability. When integrated
within a larger system of signage, the access symbol seems dispassionate and
routine.
Just as Arthur created a disability symbol that fit within a larger design
vocabulary, so too did fair overseers integrate access into the fair’s most
fundamental planning. Expo 67 made clear to even a casual observer that
organizers had rolled “out the red carpet for handicapped visitors” (Saxton,
1967: 13). They aimed at 80 percent accessibility for visitors in wheelchairs.
To achieve this, they distributed copies of the Canadian building code to
all builders involved, and strongly encouraged pavilion planners to follow
it (Francke and Francke, 1967: xxii); even seemingly inaccessible exhibits,
like the Pavilion of Guyana and Barbados, didn’t daunt visitors (Figure 4.9).
But most exhibits included a variety of accommodations and these were
widely noted. And, a journalist at the time reported, the provisions drew
“wide admiration.” Fair organizers even had a special coordinator who led
a small army of volunteers, “made up of Boy Scouts and women, many
of them housewives, helping out on a rotating basis” (Anon., 1967b: 12).
Some manned “La Balade,” a special trackless train that provided transport
around the park, while others served as escorts for disabled people.
Working off the premise that there is no stigma to being disabled, planners
 SIGNS OF DISCRIMINATION (1965–1968) 115

FIGURE 4.9  A wheelchair user passes in front of the Pavilion of Guyana and
Barbados, Expo 67, 1967. © National Archives of Canada.

also installed special ramps, elevators, and transportation all reserved for
wheelchair users. At popular exhibits, special privileges were given. For
example, wheelchair users always went to the front of the line. At a public
event where, as one disabled reporter explained, the “waiting time outside
the better exhibits ranges from one to six hours (that’s right—SIX hours—
and sometimes in the rain) … the privilege of going right into the exhibit
halls turns the fair from a vast waiting room into a wonder land” (Anon.,
1967e: 75). Taken as a whole, a different wheelchair user testified, Expo 67
was “much easier than negotiating any normal urban district of comparable
size” (Compton, 1967: 39). By September 9, 1967, some 16,000 disabled
people had officially visited the Expo (Anon., 1967b: 12). And yet, by the
time the fair closed a month later, it recorded some 50 million visits. This
does not imply that organizers efforts were in vain. By the standards of the
day, its acknowledgment of disabled needs was forward looking; the impact
of its design continued long after “La Balade” stopped running, and its Boy
Scout guides went home. Arthur’s wheelchair symbol was widely aired; in
an October article on the fair’s disabled access, for instance, the New York
Times accompanied the feature with a depiction of the symbol itself. It was
beginning to make visible a much larger—and hidden—problem.
That same success can’t be applied to the rest of Arthur’s Expo 67
pictograms. Most visitors were accustomed to a ragbag of public signage;
116 DESIGNING DISABILITY

traditionally, North American signs were casually conceived and almost

exclusively verbal. Arthur’s pictograms were a new idea. Some visitors
recognized in them a cheery echo of the contemporary art that sprinkled
the fair grounds. Robert Fulford observed that “the Pop and Op art signs
for things like hot dogs and souvenir stands … became a kind of signature,
a part of the mood of the place” (Fulford, 1968: 74). When Arthur’s team
introduced a system of animal silhouettes to appear on signs in the parking
lot, all to help visitors remember where they’d left their car, many fair-
goers were delighted (Figure 4.10). But some visitors were also mystified.
In a few instances, illegibility generated multilingual confusion. Recounted
by an Expo historian, Yves Jasmin, “One American visitor grew angry
after asking an Expo employee to explain her animal symbol to her. As it
happened, the symbol denoted a seal, and seal in French is phoque. The
employee obliged but evidently forgot to translate. ‘Madame,’ he said, ‘c’est
un phoque.’ The visitor gave him a hard slap across the face” (Yves Jasmin,
1997: 69). Instances like this suggest that in spite of Expo 67’s utopian
goals, the project of realizing a “universally legible” visual language was
difficult.
Confusion was only exacerbated by symbols that represented human
figures. Although almost universally understood today, Arthur used
silhouettes to distinguish between men and women for washroom signage.
There was precedent for this—pictograms differentiating men and women
were first introduced at the 1964 Tokyo Olympics with little fanfare.
Nevertheless, it was a novelty for North American audiences. Arthur’s
pictograms featured men in trousers, and women in skirts (their silhouette
vaguely resembled the modest stewardess-like uniforms of Expo 67’s
own hostesses). But many found their space-age sheaths hard to read.
Toronto’s Globe and Mail almost gleefully reported that “Expo officials
kept encountering that worried women [sic] who trotted nervously up to
a restroom door, examined the pictograph with some puzzlement, reached
for a handle, then retreated in blushing confusion as men appeared
from inside” (Plumptre, 1967). In fact, as Time magazine reported, “The
sophisticated silhouette pictograms intended to point the path to the
lavatories were so esoteric that many people could not tell what they were,
managed to find washrooms only after many desperate queries” (Anon.,
1967a: 70).
Given the confusion around the pictograms featuring human figures,
perhaps it is best that Arthur never even attempted to place a person in
his wheelchair silhouette. But, when Selwyn Goldsmith saw the Expo 67
symbol, he remained deeply unsatisfied. When he looked at it in detail,
he acknowledged that “aesthetically it is more successful than the official
Canadian symbol” (Goldsmith, 1969: 10). And this was all very nice, he
argued, but it was still too abstract. To Goldsmith’s eye, the Expo 67 symbol
remained too imprecise and “would be unlikely to be interpreted correctly
by the uninitiated lay observer” (Goldsmith, 1969: 10).
 SIGNS OF DISCRIMINATION (1965–1968) 117

FIGURE 4.10  Pictograms designed by Paul Arthur and Associates for parking at
Expo 67, 1967. Courtesy of Royal Ontario Museum.
118 DESIGNING DISABILITY

Goldsmith would later speculate that “Had the expo symbol been given
the opportunity to obtain general adoption, it could have become widely
accepted” (Goldsmith, 1969: 10). Arthur and the other representatives from
the Expo 67 Design division actually did try to introduce their design beyond
the precincts of Montreal’s fairground. After their initial pictograms were
drafted, Arthur and several other designers traveled to Ottawa in June 1966 to
meet with Canada’s Committee on Building Standards for the Handicapped;
they hoped that the Expo wheelchair symbol might be adopted in place
of the Canadian government’s 1965 insignia. On arriving, they were told
that many committee members actually “acknowledged that the [Expo 67]
proposal was superior” (General Report, 1969: 2074). Like overburdened
bureaucrats, however, the Ottawa government felt overcommitted to the
1965 insignia—it had already been published widely and could not be
changed. In the end, Arthur’s team learned a lesson. It is not enough to merely
design a symbol; clearly, there had to be widespread institutional support
for it as well. Similar bureaucratic pressures must be acknowledged. But
at the same time, something else was becoming clear. Someone somewhere
had to exert some kind of larger authority that transcended individual
governments; the sheer multiplicity of access symbols at this point was
becoming confusing.

Notes
1 The main change was that the figure was now made gender-neutral.
2 Goldsmith is not clear about the nature of this prevarication. At best, he asserts
that all preferred a single symbol at first, but when presented with information
that indicated how different disabilities call for different accommodations, he
claims that the group changed its collective mind. He notes that later in the
meeting, they revisited the question, and—although he does not explain why—
they returned to their earlier opinion (that one symbol should stand in for all)
(Goldsmith, 1969: 22).
3 After the First World War, the situation for impaired veterans returning
home was different. There was a high casualty rate and seriously disabled
soldiers had lower longevity rates. After the Second World War, many more
survived. More and more psychologists recognized this and began working
in the field. We can chart this rise with the flourishing of several international
graduate rehabilitation psychology programs (Wright, 1989, 1993) as well as
the founding of a number of professional organizations. These included, for
instance, founding a special interest group within the American Psychological
Association (APA) in 1949, which later became the National Council on
Psychological Aspects of Physical Disability in 1958, and then the Division of
Psychological Aspects of Disability in 1958.
4 Already in the UK, there were voices from within the disabled community who
spoke up against the idea of the psychology of disablement. Speaking at a 1964
symposium, The Wheelchair: The User’s Viewpoint, the founder and president of
the UK-based Invalid Tricycle Association noted,
 SIGNS OF DISCRIMINATION (1965–1968) 119

As one who goes about his daily life in a wheelchair I expect my chair to
be strictly functional, and I am not so concerned with the appearance of the
chair or the effect it has on others … I am delighted that this morning’s panel
of speakers does not include a psychologist to enlarge upon wheelchairs that
scream “disablement,” and the effect they have on wheelchair users, who either
regress to dependent childhood patterns and demand help on all occasions, or
become irascible and aggressive, refusing to accept any sort of help. (Denly,
1964: 42)
5 The main account of this process remains Goldsmith’s own 1969 book as well
as an article by Tomlinson and Stevens, written in 1972. Both leave holes in
their discussion, particularly as they report the feedback from the test groups of
disabled users.
6 The problem of forming an international system of signage was under extensive
discussion at this time, especially in graphic design circles. (For more on this see
Bakker, 2013.)
 5
A Design for the Real World?
(1968–1974)

Sunday morning, July 28, 1968, readers of Sweden’s biggest newspaper,

Dagens Nyheter, opened the weekend edition to find a full-page, centerfold
spread that showed a man in a wheelchair falling down a subway staircase.
Directly below that alarming image, readers were confronted with the
provocative question, “Is there democracy for wheelchair users?” (“Miljö
för alla?” or “Is the environment for everybody?”) (Anon., 1968c; 4)
That same morning, art students were gathering at Stockholm’s prestigious
school Konstfack, taking time out from vacation to attend a radical, two-
week-long summer seminar. They, too, were asking if democracy could truly
accommodate its disabled citizens. And so, too, just 20 minutes to the north,
in the leafy suburb of Bromma, the same question was being chewed over
at the new Institute for the Handicapped, a government-funded institution
that had opened its doors just four weeks earlier. This highly focused interest
in the intersection of design, disability, and social justice that summer in
Stockholm led to the earliest iteration of the access symbol. It was so
influential that it is still used today (Figure 5.1).
By 1968, as the barrier-free access movement had spread across Europe
and North America, it prompted a deeper reckoning of ideas of citizenship.
This also led to a proliferation of access symbols. Some were abstract, some
descriptive, some used wheels, while others showed wheelchairs, people
in wheelchairs, and others still represented persons using canes. Some
were intended as wayfinding, that is, to guide people by helping them find
accessible routes to where they wanted to go. Others were intended to label
accommodations. In the face of this variety, Norman Acton, Secretary-
General of the charitable organization Rehabilitation International (RI),
would later recall, “a number of different symbols were beginning to appear
and several of us could see a messy situation” (Groce, 2002: 52).
Taking into account the proliferation of interest in acknowledging and
accommodating disability, it is perhaps surprising that no universal approach
122 DESIGNING DISABILITY

FIGURE 5.1  An abstracted wheelchair served as the basis for the access symbol
designed by Susanne Koefoed at a 1968 summer seminar organized by the pan-Scan-
dinavian Design Students (SDO). The meeting was held at Konstfack in Stockholm
in July of that year, 1968.

toward access had yet developed. But professional graphic designers began
engaging ideas around access, disability, and their relevance to design only
in the late 1960s. At Expo 67, Paul Arthur introduced an access symbol
that was part of a larger communications system. The next year, a variation
on that symbol was developed by students in Sweden, under the influence
of designer and critic Victor Papanek. Responding to this cacophony of
signage, in 1968 Rehabilitation International (RI) stepped forward to
develop a single symbol. This long-standing charitable organization was
founded in 1922 as the International Society for Crippled Children.1 To date,
 A DESIGN FOR THE REAL WORLD? (1968–1974) 123

it focused largely on educational and employment efforts for disabled

persons.2 Nevertheless, the symbol project was prioritized and pushed
quickly through the organization. The final design incorporated a series of
unacknowledged, but implicit, tensions, but it was heavily promoted by RI
and quickly accepted internationally; it was officially accepted by the United
Nations in 1974.
This, of course, is the symbol still in use today. Few observers realize it,
but today’s wheelchair figure represents a rough and sometimes contentious
compromise. Acton authorized a committee within RI, the International
Commission for Technical Aids (ICTA), to rapidly develop an official
International Symbol of Access (ISA) that could be presented at the group’s
1969 World Congress. The resulting image—essentially a schematic wheelchair
with a circular “head” placed on its back—unwittingly embodies a series of
culture clashes; first and foremost it awkwardly expresses a conflict between
the goals of the student-activist designers who authored the symbol, and
the long-standing and rather conservative organization promoting its use. A
Danish design student—Susanne Koefoed—may have developed the original,
but before it was introduced at the 1969 Dublin conference, her figure got a
curious refitting. Koefoed’s empty wheelchair design was “fitted” at the last
minute with a “head” or circle added to it. This change is unintentionally
provocative. The urgent question of access, it suggests, is bound in conflicting
social priorities and practices. Nevertheless, when the loosely organized but
sprawling Rehabilitation International adopted it, the symbol was rapidly
implemented on a global scale. In this sense, the wheelchair figure is itself a
compromise between the “real world,” and the ideals that it represents.

A technical aid
In order to clean up the chaos created by multiple access symbols, Acton
turned to Karl Montan, a Swedish bureaucrat who headed the ICTA. A
serious and level-headed bureaucrat, Montan’s life work was developing
better medical and technical aids for disabled people. As a thinker, Montan
often provided modest answers to modest questions. His genius lay in
navigating entrenched bureaucracy while also creating change. By the
summer of 1968, after persistent lobbying by Montan on behalf of the
Swedish Central Committee for Rehabilitation (SVCR), the government
created the Swedish Institute for the Handicapped. The latter group was
tasked with research and development of technical aids for disabled
people, as well as their testing and marketing. With Montan at its head, the
institution would become an influential organization for years to come.
But Montan’s engagement with issues of disability was both professional
and deeply personal. Montan identified instinctively with disabled persons.
At age 11, he was involved in a tram accident in his native Helsingborg,
Sweden, and had a midfoot amputation. Drawing on what he called
124 DESIGNING DISABILITY

“lifelong experience,” he would later profess “a sincere interest to find an

optimal medical and technical service both for myself and the disabled”
(Montan, 2000: 85). Montan focused his early career on the development
of prosthetics, but gradually got more and more involved in administering
services for disabled people on a national and international scale. In the
early 1950s, for example, he became active in Rehabilitation International,
and beginning in 1951, he served as the official secretary at the Fifth World
Congress of Rehabilitation International held in Stockholm. Montan
easily fit in, negotiating between engineers and doctors, bureaucrats and
government ministers. Throughout his career, Montan maintained a strong
interest in rehabilitation engineering, and most notably in prosthetics
and orthotics; his was a deep lifetime engagement with what he called
“technical services,” as well as evaluating their “shortcomings and
successes” (Montan, 2000: 85).
But Montan was more than a specialist in prosthetics. Over time, he
also became deeply enmeshed in a drive to bring disability to the attention
of Sweden’s growing social welfare initiatives. He was aided in this pursuit
by the fundamental ideology that motivated Selwyn Goldsmith as well—
the promise of equality and societal support for all. In fact, by the late
1960s, Sweden was considered a leader within “the Scandinavian model”
of postwar state support delivered to those with physical and mental
impairments. In the two decades between 1951 and 1971, the amount of
money the government dedicated to these projects grew by more than 450
percent (Montan, 1974: 103). This growth reflects, in part, the country’s
deeper and deeper engagement with the social welfare of all its citizens. But
it also reflects the highly effective lobbying of bureaucrats like Montan and
the work done by the Institute he founded in 1968. Of course, policies and
programs intended to benefit disabled people weren’t entirely new. As early
as the 1950s, adapted housing was being designed for wheelchair users.
Beginning in 1964, the Swedish Fokus Society, a nonprofit organization
funded by the Swedish government, began to provide disabled people with
barrier-free apartments, as well as environmental and technical aids. Local
governments also began to provide disabled people with health services and
regional medical and social centers.
In many ways, Montan’s Institute for the Handicapped was itself deeply
enmeshed in the politics of the Swedish state. It was formed specifically to
carry out oversight, and tasked with developing and distributing technical
aids for the physically impaired. Reporting directly to the Swedish Parliament,
the Institute was meant to operate largely as a central coordinating agency,
but also conducted basic research (Montan, 1974). Technical aids for
disabled people were, at least in principle, free to all individuals, as was their
maintenance and repair. But a bureaucratic organization like the Institute,
the reasoning went, was necessary in order to “observe developments in the
field,” as well as to test and distribute them to the public (Montan, 1974: 4).
 A DESIGN FOR THE REAL WORLD? (1968–1974) 125

The Swedish Institute for the Handicapped was deeply enmeshed in a

wide range of technical aids and assistive devices designed to help disabled
people negotiate a world not built for them. Considered within this context,
a symbol meant to guide the mobility impaired to accommodations was
less a piece of graphic design than it was a technical aid akin to hearing
aids and prostheses. All three attempt to integrate disabled people into the
physical world around them. They also evince the Swedish government’s
serious and strong mandate to help disabled people. From Norman Acton’s
point of view, selecting Montan to determine the first international access
symbol must have seemed straightforward enough: Montan was to act as a
bureaucrat, a man capable of marshaling and coordinating design experts,
helping them shape a technical aid.
But the status of graphic design and its very conceptualization was
also beginning to shift during this period. By the 1960s, designers were
laying claim to their proficiency and technical knowledge; they were more
than commercial artists. The International Council of Graphic Design
Associations (ICOGRADA), established in London in 1963, clearly staked
out a professional space as experts in the field, arguing that symbols in the
public space should aspire to a degree of clear, visual coherence (Baker,
2011: 39). The group strove “to encourage the better use of graphic
design as a means toward the advancement of humanity,” and to “raise
the standards of graphic design and the professional status of graphic
designers” (Middleton, 1963: 12). Many people in architecture and design,
as well as government, began to listen. In fact, Paul Arthur’s success at Expo
67 indicates the rising professional profile of designers in organizing public
information symbols.
At the same time, neither Montan nor Acton knew much about this,
nor about graphics more generally. That is not to say that either man was
incapable of understanding the power of graphic design nor intuiting the
multiple meanings foisted on visual forms; but the development of technical
aids and the design of graphic imagery were generally recognized as distinct
endeavors that, for reasons of time, effort, or training, were difficult to
balance. Furthermore, neither man fully grasped the extent to which
Swedish design in particular was undergoing a period of soul searching and
experiencing a groundswell of change.

Man and the environment

This groundswell of interest in design for disability represents a clear and
significant shift in the discourse around Scandinavian design. After an initial
flush of postwar enthusiasm for furniture, clothing, and other consumer
items, by the mid-1960s the taste for Scandinavian design was fading as
patterns of consumption changed (Fallan, 2011; Lie, 2014). Many were
126 DESIGNING DISABILITY

beginning to question the character of “Nordic design.” This included the

pan-Scandinavian student design organization or SDO, an activist group
founded in February 1966 at a Stockholm meeting of student council
representatives from a number of different design programs in Scandinavia.3
The group pushed for a radical rethinking of design curricula in schools,
aiming to introduce more activist, anti-consumerist models and theories
into the academy (for more on these activities at Konstfack, see Widengren
1994). But they also wanted to develop practical solutions. To this end, in
the late 1960s they sponsored a series of annual summer seminars intended
to supplement teaching at conventional design schools.4 Led by forward-
thinking designers and theorists like Buckminster Fuller, the seminars were
marked by talks and also workshops that took up social issues. And it was
here, during the 1968 seminar held at Konstfack in Stockholm, that the
access symbol came into being.
The SDO’s 1968 Konstfack seminar seemed to reverberate with a kind
of electric charge felt around the city that summer. Victor Papanek, the
charismatic American design educator and reformer, set the tone for the
conference; almost immediately after arriving, he transfixed students and
the Stockholm design press alike. Dagens Nyheter’s design and fashion
correspondent Rebecka Tarschys interviewed Papanek shortly after he
arrived in Stockholm, and introduced him to her readers as a design
“prophet” (Tarschys, 1968: 7). Voluble and clearly excited by a recent
visit to Finland, Papanek told Tarschys about the portable play space for
children with cerebral palsy that he helped innovate there. Papanek even
gave the paper a photo of this portable gym, which Tarschys’ editor chose
to run alongside the interview. Prior to this interview, Tarschys’ writings
focused on couture dress. But the interview with Papanek prompted the
paper to publish its unflinching expose on the state of access and disability
in Stockholm soon after (Anon., 1968c: 4). At a moment when the Swedish
state was rapidly increasing its commitment to aid people with disabilities,
and when Karl Montan was establishing a government-funded institute
devoted to the needs of disabled people, the timing could not have been
better.
At the SDO’s Konstfack seminar, Papanek was one of a number of
speakers invited to lecture on the theme of “Man and the Environment.”
The roster of speakers focused on constituencies overlooked by commercial
design, including developing countries, medical patients, and the poor.
Different than in their regular classes, students looked to radicals like Che
Guevara for inspiration, and sought activist approaches to shape their
work. But to solve practical design problems, the assembled students also
split into smaller groups to work on practical projects revolving around
six working themes: morally and socially responsible design, housing,
communications, the environment, and disability. In many ways, the
multilingual, multinational SDO event was the perfect place to develop an
international symbol.
 A DESIGN FOR THE REAL WORLD? (1968–1974) 127

The focus of the group working on disability was carefully delineated from
the outset. In its early publicity for the event, SDO organizers described their
object in great detail, promising that this “team” would work to produce a
variety of “clothing and technical aids” (Anon., 1968b: 323). They expected
the students who eventually enrolled in this group to come from a variety
of backgrounds and, the SDO coordinators stressed, they were expected to
draw on their respective areas of expertise. Those studying textile design,
for example, were asked to create clothes that could be easily worn and
removed by disabled people. Furniture design students would work on a line
of furnishings and fixtures accessible to wheelchair users. Industrial design
students were asked to create kitchen utensils that were easy to hold and
use. For a radical student-run workshop, the SDO’s disability group was
pointedly practical in its focus.
In fact, this was not the first time design and disability had been discussed
at Konstfack. Several months earlier, Montan had participated in a three-
day seminar on the theme “Design for Disabled Children.” Participants
included psychological and ergonomic experts as well as several private
groups, including Montan’s SVCR (Swedish Central Committee of
Rehabilitation). Of course, the character of the SDO and Montan’s
Institute could not have been more different. The Handicap Institute was
a government-funded organization, while the SDO was a scrappy start-up
that characterized itself as a radical group formed in opposition to formal
educational and bureaucratic structures. (By the following year, at the 1969
meeting in Copenhagen, the student group collapsed under accusations
that it was “an inefficient organization with neither objective nor a long-
term program” [Lundahl, 1969: 372].) But the SDO seminar’s emphasis on
the development of “technical aids” for disabled people echoes Montan’s
broader project. This focus helped the Konstfack group coalesce. Very
rapidly, and of their own volition, the student group moved to approach the
problem that Montan had only recently been assigned by Norman Acton—
access and signage.
The SDO’s 1968 working group on disability had its own tensions,
but it was also more productive than most of the other workshops held
that summer. When FORM magazine sent a correspondent to “Man
and the Environment,” the reporter found that most of the discussion
remained “abstract, utopian and inclusive” (Anon., 1968b: 323). As it
came to actual practice, however, things became more diffuse. The reporter
observed that the members of the Communications group, for example,
spent much of their time arguing. With “major differences in educational
background, social aims, awareness of social roles,” the participants
struggled to find common ground (Anon., 1968b: 323). Meanwhile,
FORM magazine reported, the students in the disability workshop
watched several educational films about disability, and dismissed them
as too optimistic in outlook. The students rapidly moved to a broader
and more critical discussion, and experts—including a psychologist, a
128 DESIGNING DISABILITY

doctor, and an industrial designer, as well as a disability consultant—not

only joined them, but also introduced them to recent work on access and
signage. Norwegian sociologist and educator Olav Dalland also recalls
intense sessions of sharing. At one point he described his evening job as an
attendant at a rehabilitation clinic. He outlined for the group just “how
complicated it was to take disabled people to a shopping center, a cinema,
a theater or a restaurant. At the opera we had to use the lift behind the
stage” (Dalland, 2014). Similar personal experiences were incorporated
into the discussion, as was the need for coherent signage that could direct
people to hidden accommodations.
With their focus on tangible results, the group kept returning to the problem
of access and technical aids. Dalland recalls Danish graphic design student
Susanne Koefoed “drawing sketches” during their sessions (Dalland, 2014),
and soon she asked to work with another student to develop some kind of
symbol that would quickly identify wheelchair access. Enrolled at the time in
Copenhagen’s Art Industrial School for Women (later to become the Danish
Design School), Koefoed was one of the few in the group who specialized in
graphics. As she recalled later, the girl Koefoed was assigned to work with
became ill, and Koefoed “had to create a solution alone. Very quickly I got
the idea for the sign/symbol” of the wheelchair (Koefoed, 2012) (Figure 5.2).

FIGURE 5.2  Poster created by Susanne Koefoed (and others) for an art exhibition
held at Konstfack at the end of a summer seminar held by the pan-Scandinavian
Design Students (SDO), 1968. Courtesy Veryday.
 A DESIGN FOR THE REAL WORLD? (1968–1974) 129

In the end, Koefoed’s symbol was hardly unique. Because wheelchairs

were still so new, and since they encountered so many barriers in the built
environment, they were already represented on the proposed signage
introduced by Selwyn Goldsmith and Paul Arthur. Koefoed’s symbol was,
however, closer to Arthur’s than to Goldsmith’s. Introduced just one year
earlier, Paul Arthur’s wheelchair symbol for the 1967 Montreal Expo was
widely publicized at the time. Koefoed’s solution bears at least a passing
resemblance to that symbol—a schematic depiction of a simple wheelchair.
Both Koefoed and Arthur ignored the older “trike” wheelchairs (with two
big wheels in front a small one in the back) and focused on the skeletal
structure that to this day defines the modern wheelchair. Like Arthur’s
image, Koefoed’s figure is dominated by a large rear wheel (the hallmark of
modern folding wheelchairs). And both combine the wheel with a structured
seat, legs, and upright back. But with its clearly articulated seat and back,
as well as its foot and armrest, the Koefoed chair symbol is more legible.
Furthermore, Koefoed’s design simplifies the chair form even more than
Arthur’s, and placed the chair’s back and leg rest at a slight slant. Finally, in
a more realistic depiction of a wheelchair, it also includes the armrest and
footrest common to most modern wheelchairs.
Koefoed sketched the symbol on her own, presented it to the disability and
design group and then, in her own words, “cleaned it up” (Koefoed, 2012).
The chair image was highlighted at a final exhibition at Konstfack, mounted
at the end of the SDO seminar’s final day. Drawn on a hastily prepared poster,
the presentation embodies the radical, activist nature of the SDO seminars
themselves. Despite its later significance, the chair is nearly upstaged by the
slogans around it. Shunted to one corner, the wheelchair symbol pictured
next to the handwritten question “VAR FINNS ENTOALETT JAG KAN
ANVÄNDA?” (“Where can I find a toilet?”). Considering the institutional
power that it would soon carry, the scrappy, improvisational nature of
Koefoed’s symbol is all the more striking (Figure 5.2).
Koefoed’s design began receiving widespread attention in Sweden almost
immediately, and was featured prominently in FORM’s December 1968
special issue on “Living with Disability.” Koefoed’s symbol appeared on
the journal’s cover (Figure 5.3), and was then used again to illustrate the
editors’ opening statements. And yet, even as the symbol was being endorsed
in the popular media, behind the scenes some were angling to alter it.
Ultimately, it was a variation on Koefoed’s design that was finally accepted
by rehabilitation professionals worldwide.

A misfit head
In 1969, Rehabilitation International unveiled an access symbol at their
World Congress in Dublin. The icon was based on Koefoed’s design, but it
had been subtly altered in a significant way. A small circle had been added to
130 DESIGNING DISABILITY

FIGURE 5.3  The wheelchair symbol created by Susanne Koefoed in 1968 ap-
peared on the cover of Svensk FORM magazine later that year, 1968. Courtesy
Swedish Design/Centre for Business History.

Koefoed’s image of a wheelchair. Depicting a side view of the wheelchair, and

elegantly linking the wheel with armrest, Koefoed had introduced a carefully
calibrated pictogram. Encompassed in a single line, too, the chair back, seat,
and leg rest articulated a simple and direct symbol. Small as the change may
seem, setting a circle atop the chair’s back made the wheelchair into a person.
 A DESIGN FOR THE REAL WORLD? (1968–1974) 131

As Koefoed relates the story, she had nothing to do with this change
(Koefoed, 2012). In fact, once the SDO’s Konstfack summer seminar
ended, she was never told that the symbol was entered into Rehabilitation
International’s competition. According to Rehabilitation International’s own
records, Koefoed’s symbol was presented to an international jury of nine
professionals, and selected from a field of six entries, all of which were already
in use.5 Alongside the Koefoed symbol were two Canadian candidates—
Paul Arthur’s design for Expo 67 and the 1965 access code insignia; two
American entries—the New York parks symbol and a variant submitted by
a Pennsylvania-based organization, Open Doors for the Handicapped; and,
finally, Goldsmith’s Norwich design. The group chose the Swedish entry, but
its acceptance was provisional; Karl Montan, committee chair, suggested
that a head be added (ICTA, 1969; Ben-Moshe and Powell, 2007: 492).
Montan’s addition was officially explained as an act of simple, bureaucratic
pragmatism. In its official report, the competition committee expressed
concern that Koefoed’s original icon was too abstract. The problem, they
suggested, was “the equally thick lines,” which “may give an impression of
a monogram of letters.” In response to this, which Montan deemed but “a
slight inconvenience,” he added the circle (ICTA, 1969). In his stolid march
through the committee proceedings, Montan’s intervention is significant. He
is, in effect, the uncredited coauthor of this landmark design. And, through
it all, it is important to remember that Montan’s engagement with issues
of disability was deeply personal. An amputee, Montan himself used a
prosthetic foot. But he was also a specialist in technical aids for others,
specifically specializing in the fitting of prosthetics and orthotics. Much of
his career was spent researching and developing arms and legs, hands, and
feet—all meant to be assistive devices for impaired bodies. Of course, he’d
never before developed a prosthetic head. But, by choosing to change the
wheelchair—effectively adding an appendage to it—he essentially added
a prosthetic to the graphic symbol in question. Indeed, if we follow one
line of thinking to its logical end, disability itself can be cured by simply
adding something on and making up for a perceived lack or deviance from
normality. Essentially, he created a design misfit.
For those who argued for the professional integrity of the field, Montan’s
design intervention seemed hubristic. With the insertion of that small circle,
systems of graphic rationality clash with the more emotive realm of human
identity, and practical needs run up against idealized design conventions.
Koefoed’s earlier, starkly schematic form speaks the language of international
modernism. But the circle on its top subtly changed its formal impact and
the geometric harmonies implicit in the original figure. The new “head” is
disproportionately small when compared to the rest of the “body,” and it
rests awkwardly forward atop the wheelchair itself. By adding the circle,
Montan also forces viewers to reconceive the rest of the wheelchair shape.
The footrest becomes a foot, and the leg support reads as a lower limb.
Nevertheless, if the armrest becomes an arm, it has no hand to balance the
132 DESIGNING DISABILITY

foot. Not only does the final iteration compromise the integrity of Koefoed’s
original design, it also represents a compromise between a series of formal
questions and the desire to “humanize” the figure, giving it social and
psychological resonance. In the end, it’s neither an abstracted symbol of the
idea of access, nor is it an entirely recognizably human figure.
Koefoed has largely been forgotten as the designer of this symbol. Though
she received an award “for inspired leadership and outstanding achievement on
behalf of the handicapped around the world,” at Rehabilitation International’s
17th World Congress, held years later, in 1992 (Rehabilitation International,
1993: 45), the symbol is typically identified with RI. This is not only because
of Montan’s amendment to Koefoed’s design. It also owes to the fact that RI
was uniquely positioned to promote the wheelchair figure on a global stage.
And, as it turned out, developing an international icon of access started, rather
than ended, the process of introducing barrier-free architecture worldwide.

A positive step forward

In April 1970, Norman Acton announced that this would be “The Decade of
Rehabilitation.” In the London-based Guardian, he wrote that society must
“awaken rising public interest in the growing problems of disability and in
the economic and social advantages of solving them” (Acton, 1970: 17). He
anticipated that Rehabilitation International would lead the way. In some
ways—most notably the acceptance of RI’s new symbol of access—he was
right. Times were changing. But this was not entirely as Acton had envisioned
them. Rather than characterizing the new decade as one of rehabilitation (a
notion that was increasingly under fire), he should have predicted that the
1970s would be the decade of the ISA. The symbol rapidly gained credence
and visibility worldwide. When the Canadian Rehabilitation Journal
introduced it to a disabled audience in Canada, they unironically called it
a “positive step forward” [italics mine] (Anon., 1970a: 6). Ultimately, the
symbol took on a life of its own, becoming an object of identity, especially
for persons active in the Disability Rights Movement. It began to evolve
far beyond what Acton, Goldsmith, or any other early proponents could
possibly have imagined.
When the symbol—and the structural changes for access that it
represented—first appeared, many people who knew nothing about
disability took note. In the years immediately after its introduction, the ISA
was more and more embraced as a success. From Braille numbers on office
elevators, hearing aids on public telephones, as well as wheelchair ramps and
curb cuts, the idea of disabled accommodations gained currency through
the 1970s. Moreover, in tiny, far-flung towns across the United States and
Europe, the ISA spoke to a linked world of access.
However, not everyone accepted the symbol. Key figures in the design
community objected to it. Peter Kneebone of the professional group
 A DESIGN FOR THE REAL WORLD? (1968–1974) 133

ICOGRADA immediately registered the profound design “misfit” of the

head, remarking on “the wrongness” of the symbol and the method in
which it was designed. In the long run, he believed that “the situation is
sad” (Kneebone, 1969: 73). Selwyn Goldsmith called it “a crude device
with none of the graphic merit” of Koefoed’s original (Goldsmith, 1969a:
45). It’s difficult, of course, to evaluate the sincerity of this critique, and
to what extent it was motivated by the hope of having one of his own
designs adopted in its stead. In fact, even after Rehabilitation International
announced its acceptance and promotion of the new, “universal” symbol,
designers continued to introduce new symbols. Only in 1969, with the
publication of his A Symbol for Disabled People (Goldsmith, 1969b),
did Selwyn Goldsmith, for example, unveil his final version of a symbol.
Goldsmith’s symbol had the advantage of being based on the laborious user-
based studies he had already conducted in Norwich from 1967 to 1968. And
yet, he lacked the backing of Rehabilitation International and his symbol
was quickly forgotten.
After introducing the wheelchair figure in Dublin, Rehabilitation
International pledged to do “everything possible” to get the word out (Anon.,
1970a: 6); in so doing, it effectively pushed aside all other claimants. The
successful adoption of this symbol internationally rests almost entirely on
RI’s global ties and persistent advocacy. The group leaned on its professional
authority and its network of affiliated organizations worldwide. From Delhi
to Helsinki, RI instructed its regional partners to make copies of the symbol
available to the press and television networks. RI also recommended to
its affiliates that they provide it to architects, town planners, and others
interested in using the symbol. Many countries mounted a national
accessibility campaign through their branch of the international Red Cross.
In Belgium, for example, the group sent thousands of questionnaires in
French and Flemish to provincial, postal, and tourist offices, asking them to
self-evaluate their accessibility. ISA decals were awarded to those meeting
minimal criteria (International Society for Rehabilitation of the Disabled,
1975: 11).
The symbol was also promoted widely in American and British
professional rehabilitation, nursing, and medical journals like Nursing
Times (Anon., 1970b: 674). Popular medical journalists like Dr. Walter
Alvarez, who then wrote a medical column syndicated across North
America, also took up the cause. In the United States, Fenmore Seton, a
sign manufacturer and later president of RI, donated signs printed with the
symbol, as did the Minnesota-based 3M Corporation (which fabricated
self-adhesive decals and distributed them free of charge) (Rehabilitation
International, 2017). In 1972, the Electric Prosthesis unit of America’s
Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers spent the fall distributing
to its 400 affiliates special “information kits” that “contained information
on the international access symbol, the minimum criteria necessary
to display the symbol, and instructions on how to give the symbol as
134 DESIGNING DISABILITY

wide publicity as possible” (Jackson, 1973: 30). And in 1976, officials

at Rehabilitation International launched a letter-writing campaign to US
government officials requesting that postage meters in offices across the
country print postage in the form of the ISA (Council for Exceptional
Children, 1976: 237).
Rehabilitation International wanted more than to simply disseminate the
symbol; they wanted the wheelchair figure to be commonplace worldwide.
At the time, there were only two groups capable of setting international
pictogram standards: the International Organization for Standardization
(ISO) based in Geneva, Switzerland, and the United Nations. Even before
Acton had assigned Montan to the project, he had been in discussion with
the ISO. But the organization was primarily focused on construction, mass
manufacture, and engineering. Founded in 1947, their original mission was
to facilitate commerce and safety by ensuring standardized measurements
and the quality of commonly used parts including, for example, aircraft
and electronic equipment. Though the group began to discuss symbols
in the 1960s, it wasn’t until the early 1970s that they started to focus on
signage, after a majority of member countries asked the group to identify
and maintain a standard for public information signage (Bakker, 2013: 45).
They would finally adopt and register RI’s symbol as part of their Graphical
Symbols in 1984, as ISO Standard 7000 (ISO 7000. Graphical Symbols
for Use on Equipment, 1984, 1989, 2004). The United Nations, on the
other hand, issued a more rapid response. In 1974, its Centre for Social
and humanitarian Affairs sponsored an Expert Group Meeting on Barrier-
Free Design. The meeting resulted in a publication, “Barrier-Free Design”
(International Society for Rehabilitation of the Disabled, 1975), and also the
symbol’s adoption by the UN.
With its carefully hewn strategy for promoting the symbol, RI had every
reason to think that the 1970s would be the decade for rehabilitation,
especially in the United States. Already in 1968, a commission chaired by
former American Institute of Architects President Leon Chatelain, Jr. had
presented a three-year-long project report, “Design for All Americans”
(U.S. National Commission on Architectural Barriers to Rehabilitation
of the Handicapped, 1968). Based in part on Nugent’s barrier-free access
proposals, the Commission urged action. The same year, Congress translated
its recommendations into law, adopting the Architectural Barriers Act. And
a number of states sent representatives to RI’s 1969 Dublin conference.
Many of them were on a fact-finding mission, hoping to understand how to
enact the new federal law and even extend it on the state level. Through the
early 1970s, individual US states passed a series of new laws that addressed
issues of mainstreaming in schools and non-discrimination for jobs. In 1971
alone, 899 bills for education of disabled persons were introduced and
237 passed into law (Mental Health Law Project, 1973: 43; Stick, 1976:
638). They were followed by the 1973 Rehabilitation Act, which prohibited
discrimination on a national basis.
 A DESIGN FOR THE REAL WORLD? (1968–1974) 135

FIGURE 5.4  The President’s Committee on Employment of the Handicapped

aimed to promote the Rehabilitation International’s new wheelchair symbol in bro-
chures like “People are asking about displaying the symbol access,” 1977.
136 DESIGNING DISABILITY

Some states and cities had their own accommodations already in place,
and they continued using them for several years after these national efforts
were mounted. New York City, for example, and the state of New Hampshire
presented disabled drivers with a written card for their car’s sun visor and
granted them access to parking (Ranzal, 1973: 39). Similar privileges were
granted in California, where disabled people were given special license plates
that could be identified by police but not the casual observer (Anon., 1975).
Supporters of this system argued that criminals would be more likely to prey
on disabled drivers and thus their car marking should be as anonymous as
possible (Anon, 1977: GB6).
Especially in the United States, where secret knowledge had long
dominated disabled access, the new symbol was deployed to guide users
to accommodations, but also to raise awareness of the problems disabled
people faced in public spaces. Selwyn Goldsmith had long argued this point.
Describing the Norwich Symbol to journalists from the Guardian newspaper
in 1968, Goldsmith insisted, “One of the purposes of the symbol is that it
should indicate special arrangements and social privileges or disabled people.
What we want overall is to promote the status of the group” (Bendixson,
1968: 9). Although RI did not adopt Goldsmith’s symbol, it agreed with
his proposition. This line of thinking insisted that “the more it is used and
seen, so much more will the general public become aware of the problem
that design barriers present” (President’s Committee on the Handicapped,
n.d.: 4). For a time, the multiple goals for the symbol perplexed designers,
officials, and the public. Was the symbol meant to label facilities? Did it
function as a wayfinding device? Or was it meant to increase disabled
people’s visibility? ICOGRADA’s Peter Kneebone said as much in his critique
of the symbol. Beyond what he deemed the ICTA’s jury “arbitrary selection
method,” he also noted that they lacked “an extensive brief on the purpose
of the signs, and information on any research of findings relevant to the
signs” (Kneebone, 1969: 73). Even after the President’s Committee on the
Handicapped published a promotional brochure, “People Are Asking about
… Displaying the ISA” (Figure 5.4) which clarified the purpose, placement,
and usage of the symbol, larger problems loomed.

Notes
1 In 1939 it became The International Society for the Welfare of Cripples. After
the Second World War, in 1960, in an attempt to include veterans and other
adults, it was retitled The International Society for the Rehabilitation of the
Disabled. In 1972 the group was renamed Rehabilitation International.
2 After this division, the locally oriented branch renamed itself The National
Society for Crippled Children and Adults, later changing its name to The
National Easter Seal Society. The international segment kept as its name The
International Society for Crippled Children.
 A DESIGN FOR THE REAL WORLD? (1968–1974) 137

3 The original participating members were from Oslo’s Statens Håndverk-og

Kunstindustriskole (SHKS), Bergen’s Kunsthåndverksskole, Copenhagen’s
Kunsthåndværkerskolen, the Konstindustriella Läroverket in Helsinki,
Göteborg’s Konstindustriskolan, and the Konstfackskolan in Stockholm. Later,
Beckmanns in Stockholm and the Kunsthåndværkerskolen of Kolding would
join (Lie 2014, chapter 3).
4 The first large SDO event was held in the summer of 1967 at the international
design festival at Jyvaskyla, Finland. The next, held in July and early August,
1968, was split between Suomenlinna, Finland, and Konstfack’s College of Arts,
Crafts and Design in Stockholm. The final event was in Copenhagen in 1969.
5 These included the Swedish Typographer Bo Berndal; William P. Cooper of the
World Veterans Foundation; Manfre Finke, of the Fédération Internationale
des Personnes Handicapées Physiques (FIMITIC), Educational Rehabilitation
professor Alexander Hulek of Poland; the British cartoonist Peter Kneebone,
representing the International Council of Graphic Designers Associations
(ICOGRADA); Finn Esko Kosunen of the Krigsinvalidernas Brodraforbund;
William P. McCahill, head of the US President’s Committee on Employment of
the Physically Handicapped; French physician Alain Rossier, representing the
ICTA itself; and Austrian architect Karl Schwanzer for the International Union
of Architects.
 PART THREE

A Mark of Identity
(1974–Today)
 6
Signs of Protest (1974–1990)

In 1981, a group of disabled people wanting to use a public bus in Los

Angeles discovered that, although the United States could lift men to the
moon, city buses couldn’t lift a wheelchair a few feet into a bus. Twenty-odd
wheelchair users gathered at a bus stop to stage a protest. In an event covered
by the local press, Jynny Retzinger positioned her wheelchair in line with the
rear doors of an arriving Rapid Transit District (RTD) bus. Marika Gerrard,
a Los Angeles Times reporter, noticed that Retzinger was carefully aligning
herself “in front of the blue decal indicating access for the handicapped. The
doors slid open. ‘Can I get on?’ she asked. The doors slide shut.” Gerrard
noted that, although the door was marked with the access symbol, and
installed with a “specially designed lift built into the two-week old General
Motors Corp. bus, it was apparent that no wheelchair rider would be able to
board. An annoyed driver stepped to the sidewalk. Retzinger repeated, ‘Can
I get on the bus?’ With reporters watching, the driver testily replied, ‘No you
can’t’ ” (Gerrard, 1981: D3). Although the city had just purchased a fleet
of 940 new General Motors buses, their wheelchair lifts were determined
unusable; they took too long to use, and they would throw the buses off
schedule.
The International Symbol of Access (ISA) was, of course, adopted by
the United Nations in 1974, but recognition of the symbol and the access it
was meant to ensure was something else entirely. In the United States, after
years of discussion, and the passage of many local and state laws adopting
the building code initiated by ANSI 117.1, federal legislation affirming
barrier-free access as a civil right finally became law in August 1968. The US
Architectural Barriers Act required all new buildings constructed with federal
funds to be accessible. This included government-owned buildings like post
offices and federal museums like the Smithsonian, as well as National Parks,
federal prisons, and courthouses. It also applied to public housing and mass
transit systems that received federal funding. These laws were written to
ensure disabled persons’ access to buildings and the public services available
there. And the symbol was deployed here as a way to guide disabled citizens
142 DESIGNING DISABILITY

toward these points of access. In so doing, the wheelchair figure came not
only to label accommodations but, we might argue, also visualized a kind
of “fit” between citizens and the environment. Where the symbol appeared,
access was guaranteed. Or so was the promise.
In fact, the United States was progressive in conceptualizing the idea of
access, but here as elsewhere actual change came slowly, if at all. Though
federal law required accessibility, there was little effort to enforce it. There
were no inspections, nor were there any fines. Moreover, many types of new
construction, from private housing to public retail, were not covered by the
legislation. And older buildings and other facilities that predated the law were
not required to be retrofitted. Hugh Gallagher, an advocate for disabled access
and the congressional aide most responsible for the 1968 law, summed up the
palpable disappointment. In 1974, the year the UN adopted the symbol but
also six years after the US Barrier-Free Access Act had been passed, he observed
how few federal buildings were accessible. In a letter to the Washington Post
he pointed out that many Smithsonian museums, the Lincoln Memorial,
and most other public buildings in the nation’s capital remained off limits to
disabled citizens. “It is all very frustrating,” he wrote. “More than that, it is
thoughtless and stupid. It is cruel” (Gallagher, 1974: A31).
When Jynny Retzinger and nineteen other activists staged their 1981
protest at the Los Angeles bus stop, the problem was still quite common.
By this time, a second law, the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, had also been
passed. In that case, however, government officials moved slowly to
implement key parts of its legislation. This Act, for example, carried with it
a watchdog Architectural and Transportation Barriers Compliance Board,
but enforcement was still largely piecemeal. Retzinger’s protest marked a
different route to achieving access. Over the prior decade, many disabled
people staged protests modeled after the campaigns of the Civil Rights
movement. As Daryl Lembke wrote in the Los Angeles Times in 1975, “a
new political force is on the march in California and nationally, although
many of the marchers cannot even walk” (Lembke, 1975: B1). And the
symbol of access played a significant role in these actions. In some cases,
like that of the Los Angeles bus protest, it signified a promise made, but not
kept; it guaranteed to users a kind of environmental fit that was, in fact,
unavailable. But in many other situations, the access symbol was beginning
to serve as a mark of identity and solidarity. Disabled people with very
different impairments rallied around the design. They embraced its visibility
and used it as a symbol for self-representation.

“The Selma of handicapped rights”

Jynny Retzinger’s bus stop confrontation in Los Angeles was by no means
unique. She was inspired in part by activists in Denver who, three years
earlier, had protested the lack of wheelchair-accessible buses citywide.
 SIGNS OF PROTEST (1974–1990) 143

Denver had a small but active disability rights community centered around
Atlantis, an independent living community founded in 1975 by Wade Blank,
a former civil rights demonstrator and the Presbyterian minister who would
go on to form the activist group ADAPT (Fleischer and Zames, 2011: 82).
In Denver, reporters witnessed protests reminiscent of those led by Martin
Luther King a decade earlier; one journalist went so far as to call them “the
Selma of handicapped rights” (Tim, 1982: 54).
But the situation in Denver was symptomatic of both a broader problem
and the nature of the growing disability rights movement. Disabled people
began these protests in response to legislation that was unevenly implemented
and rarely enforced. In 1975, for example, an internal government audit
conducted by the General Accounting Office (GAO) admitted that not a
single “building inspected was completely free of barriers.” The report made
a laundry list of problems, which included curbs too high to negotiate, steps
to climb, restrooms with unusable toilet stalls, and elevators with controls
beyond the reach of wheelchair users. In sum, the report admitted, the
“Architectural Barriers Act has had only minor effect on making public
buildings barrier free” (GAO, 1975: 8). The GAO found a variety of reasons
why the law was not followed. Many offices were exempted through
loopholes in the law, which covered only government-owned buildings,
not those which had been leased. But also many architects, government
officials, and police didn’t understand the new regulations or were reluctant
to implement them.
These bureaucratic tangles had major ramifications for disabled people.
In the winter of 1979, wheelchair user Katy MacKay took a New York
Times reporter with her to go Christmas shopping. She chronicled a range
of obstacles at every turn. Stopped on the sidewalk, she remarked, often
“the people who put these curb cuts in don’t know why they’re doing it …
so they make them unlevel with the street and make them basically useless”
(Smolowe, 1979: 26). Old construction remained unchanged, and even in
new buildings contractors often ignored, misconstrued, or simply did not
understand what access meant. In Los Angeles, a new restaurant provided
a wheelchair ramp to its main entrance, but its door was too heavy for a
wheelchair user to open (Ward, 1975: SG1). In Chicago, the Furniture Mart
installed ramps and removed bathroom doors so Rehabilitation Institution
(RI) could hold a conference for thirty handicapped persons on site. But
when the conference ended, the ramps were moved and the doors replaced
(Oppenheim, 1975: 35). In New York, a newly constructed state university
built a music complex, which, as one reporter noted, “complied with the law
by constructing a long rambling ramp that led to the front doors where—do
you believe it?—wheelchairs were blocked by stairs!” (Little, 1977: 486).
A new, little known agency, the Architectural and Transportation Barriers
Compliance Board, was charged with ensuring that equal access was
possible in all federal facilities. But it was small, ill-funded, and only acted
on noncompliance cases specially brought to its attention. In a 1976 article
144 DESIGNING DISABILITY

on the Architectural Barriers Act, the Washington Post reported that “the
law has no teeth in it, so most architects and bureaucrats ignore it” (von
Eckart, 1976: B1).
Even when access was provided, builders often didn’t understand how
to use the ISA or frequently forgot to post it. Describing a new downtown
building, the Broadway Plaza in Los Angeles, in 1977 a local politician
and advocate for disabled people complained that “Technically, on paper,
it complies with the law … but a handicapped person needs an Indian
guide to get in. There’s a special entrance—but who knows where it is?”
(Green, 1977: 14). Of course in some instances, like that of Los Angeles’
bus fleet in the early 1980s, the access symbol was displayed even though
accommodations did not exist. This type of misuse happened often enough
that a 1977 brochure published by the President’s Committee on Employment
of the Handicapped was obliged to remind the public that using “this symbol
improperly or indiscriminately where a building is not genuinely barrier-free
is to play a cruel hoax on millions of persons” (President’s Committee on
Employment of the Handicapped, 1977).
This persistent and pervasive problem sparked protests across the
country. Many activists would argue that architectural barriers did more
than deny access. They also deprived disabled people of the full panoply of
protections and duties of citizenship. To be clear, such concerns were simply
not discussed earlier in the century. The disability rights protest movement
is important not only for connecting civil rights to barrier-free access (with
serious ramifications for physical mobility), but also because people with
disabilities were claiming the right to participate in the public sphere, as
well as to protections that they had long been denied. The symbol was not
just a functional disseminator of information about where there were access
points. It was also a marker of growing visibility.

Rights and protest

Jynny Retzinger’s 1981 stand-down with the RTD bus driver is only a
small part of a much broader history of disability rights activism. But many
other groups embraced a graphic symbol and deployed it publicly. Anti-war
demonstrators quickly co-opted the familiar “peace symbol,” for example,
from the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND). Meanwhile the Black
Panthers adopted two symbols—the clenched fist and the silhouette of a
prowling panther—to disseminate their cause. Just as major corporations
increasingly relied on a strong visual identity for corporate communications
and advertising, so too did late twentieth-century activists. Ultimately the
ISA filled a similar need for the nascent disability rights movement.
After the ISA was introduced in the 1970s, it came to play a curious
double role. On the one hand, it functioned as a wayfinding device, labeling
accommodations and pointing out routes of access. But it also stood in as a
 SIGNS OF PROTEST (1974–1990) 145

kind of visual shorthand, reminding disabled people and others of society’s

commitment to barrier-free access—that is, to the idea that disabled people
could be “fit” into contemporary society. For Jynny Retzinger and many others,
the wheelchair figure sometimes functioned as a “false” symbol, advertising
access that wasn’t actually available. The disconnect between promise and
reality pushed the symbol into a newer, more contentious direction. In this latter
mode, Retzinger’s protest is emblematic of a larger culture of demonstration
and protest fostered within the disability rights movement.
The drive for equal rights—and a good social fit—was hardly monolithic,
and began long before Retzinger’s confrontation in 1981. Most histories of
the disability rights movement point to the catalyzing efforts of a small group
of disabled students at UC Berkeley who gathered around the polio survivor
Ed Roberts. In 1962, after resistance from that campus’ administration,
Roberts was finally matriculated as a student but still was considered too
disabled to live in university housing. Instead, he was asked to take up
residence at the university’s student health facility. Roberts’ admission to
Berkeley gained national attention, and other disabled students joined him,
living in the dorms as well as student health services building there. This
loose group, self-styled “the Rolling Quads” after their wheelchairs, began
advocating for access across campus and in the city of Berkeley as well
(Shapiro, 1993: 45–49). By 1972, these students had joined forces with other
disabled people around the Bay Area to establish the Center for Independent
Living. Their efforts to gain greater autonomy and control in their own lives
became a model for similar efforts in both the United States and Europe.
To be reductive, what these disabled people wanted most was a better
“fit,” that is, to participate more fully in society itself. In order to achieve
this, they asserted their rights as citizens and, like African Americans active
in the civil rights movement and women involved with women’s liberation,
demanded the ability to live and work free of social discrimination. By the
early 1970s, several explicitly political groups of disabled persons began to
organize. The California Association for the Physically Handicapped and
Disabled in Action formed to address housing and transportation inequality
as well as civil rights issues and questions of political self-representation.
At the same time, activists were beginning to adopt change strategies like
demonstrations and sit-ins—all modeled on the civil rights movement a
decade earlier—to draw the public’s attention and force government action.
Particularly forceful in this, Disabled in Action (DIA) (a group of
students at the Brooklyn campus of Long Island University) formed in
1970, to advocate for the rights of people with disabilities. As an activist
organization, DIA was cast in a different mold from older “service” groups
like the March of Dimes, Easter Seals, and the American Foundation for the
Blind. The group also positioned itself as cross-disability (that is, inclusive
of people with vision or hearing impairments, and persons with mental
disabilities as well), arguing that older groups fostered overprotectiveness
and insensitivity.
146 DESIGNING DISABILITY

Back in California, Gerald Belchick from the state’s Department of

Vocational Rehabilitation began working with the Rolling Quads and
quickly noticed how the technical aids around disability could themselves
be deployed as political symbols. In the nascent disability rights movement,
as protesters began to agitate together, he observed something powerful.
Berkeley’s disabled students helped make

a very visible cause. It was everything—it would be an organizer’s

dream—because you didn’t have to depend on rhetoric; you could just
depend on what you could show. And, of course, this panorama of all [of]
them in wheelchairs … made all the papers, and it made it in grand style.
(Belchick, 1998; 189)

But it wasn’t just that the chairs themselves were gaining visibility
(Figure 6.1). As the embodiment of the right to access, the wheelchair symbol
was gaining a different kind of prominence; the disability rights movement
began using the access figure itself, as part of their own activism. At early DIA
rallies, the symbol became a unifying icon of protest. Founder Judy Heumann
was already active in Civil Rights circles and understood how demonstrations
functioned.“If we were going to have them,” she later argued,“we wanted fliers,

FIGURE 6.1  Senator Harrison Williams addressing protestors using wheelchairs

on the steps of the Capitol, Washington DC. Flanking the group is an American flag,
with its stars rearranged in the shape of the wheelchair access symbol, 1970. Bett-
mann/Getty Images.
 SIGNS OF PROTEST (1974–1990) 147

we wanted things that you could give to people that they could understand”
(Heumann, 1998–2001: 194). The wheelchair symbol helped them do this.
When, for example, disabled protestors converged on Washington DC on
May 5, 1972, for a rally and to mark “Advocacy Day for the Disabled,” they
reimagined the American Flag with the ISA figure in place of the traditional
fifty stars. The group, comprised almost exclusively of students, carried this
modified flag when they met with NJ Senator Harrison Williams, then head of
the Labour and Public Welfare Committee, on the Capitol steps. This revision
of the American flag became a standby at disability protests for years to come.
(One group, Americans Disabled for Accessible Public Transit, or ADAPT,
used it so frequently that in later years, it became known as the ADAPT flag.)
In this context, anchored in patriotism but also a set of political ideals, the
wheelchair symbol became a reminder of a constitutional promise—as US
citizens, disabled people were entitled to a series of legal rights. In effect, they
should “fit” into society better.

FIGURE 6.2  Button with the Disabled in Action logo, c. 1974. Courtesy American
History Museum Gift of Carr Massi.
148 DESIGNING DISABILITY

But Heumann’s DIA branch in New York also developed an entire logo
that used the ISA differently. Pat Figueroa, a DIA board member and part-
time graphic designer who used a wheelchair, designed a logo for the group,
riffing on the familiar ISA. Instead of placing a circle on the top of a wheelchair,
however, he articulated a stick figure that sits in—but is distinct from—the
chair. The imagery is somewhat reminiscent of Selwyn Goldsmith’s, or that
of the Stresa logo, in which humans are clear and distinctly present in their
chairs. The figure is separable from the chair, whereas in the ISA symbol, the
figure is the chair.
At the same time, however, Figueroa also added a second, more
provocative clenched fist to the image. It references the strident militancy of
radical activist groups in the late 1960s like the Black Panthers. The clenched
fist was a powerful image throughout the period. The Panthers especially
used the image as a powerful statement of self-assertion and autonomy. The
boldness of the fist helps redefine the seated figure. It fundamentally breaks
with earlier depictions of persons in wheelchairs. In the past, to talk about
disability almost always meant engaging ideas of weakness and dependency.
In this context the access symbol, and its evocation of individual identity
and independence, began to resonate with the larger goals of the disability
rights movement. Some protesters agitated for better access in urban spaces.
At Berkeley’s Center for Independent Living, for example, Hale Zukas and
others created a wheelchair-accessible route through the town of Berkeley,
linking the University of California’s campus to the greater community
(Zukas, 1998: 165, 166). Networks of young activists, often wheelchair
users with university connections, began to form advocacy groups in larger
urban areas like Boston, St. Louis, San Francisco, and New York. Their first
efforts may have focused on the removal of architectural barriers, as at
Berkeley, but disabled persons and their advocates moved rapidly to other
forms of autonomy, including the deinstitutionalization of disabled people,
the formation of independent living communities, and a range of broader,
access-oriented initiatives. Some asserted pressure via lawsuits, and other
forms of legal action. Still others mounted activist campaigns, using the ISA
to invoke society’s promise of a better social “fit.”
Of course, the ISA’s official status made it an especially useful symbol
of protest. With RI’s aggressive and widespread promotion, the wheelchair
symbol was becoming rapidly and widely known. But in the United States, it
also began to serve as a reminder of the series of legal reforms that promised
access, but then failed to make good. With hand-scrawled drawings on
cardboard and stickers affixed to poster board, disability rights protesters
claimed the symbol as their own. When in 1974, for example, disabled
people in Denver gathered outside the Colorado statehouse to advocate
for funding for independent living, they carried placards proclaiming “We
need your support … we count too!,” emblazoning their signs with the ISA
(Figure 6.3). They went so far as to use in their protests the same stickers and
signage issued by RI itself. In one sense those stickers carried with it a kind
 SIGNS OF PROTEST (1974–1990) 149

FIGURE 6.3  Disabled youths, most of them in wheelchairs, protesting inadequate

housing provided by the state, 1974. Bill Peters/Denver Post/Getty Images.

of official authority. The preprinted blue and white sticker was standard
issue and meant to mark restrooms and ramps across the country. Employed
at these early protests, its meaning was subtlety changed. Instead of marking
access, it worked to remind officials of their promise to help disabled people
fit into society as a whole.
Had political events not turned out as they did, this legacy might have
passed unmarked. That changed in 1977, when a series of groups coordinated
a nationwide push to have the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 implemented.
The law, which prohibited discrimination on the basis of disability by any
public or private entity using federal funds, was slow to be adopted. By
1977, four years after Richard Nixon signed the original bill into law, the
Carter administration was still delaying implementation of its strict non-
discrimination regulations (outlined under section 504 in the original bill).
By early April of that year, a national coalition of disabled people formed
and began mounting protests and sit-ins in offices of the Department of
Health and Human Services across the country. In San Francisco, protestors
staged a twenty-five-day sit-in at the local office of Health, Education
and Welfare, while others marched outside, carrying pickets reading
“Sign 504 Now!” (Figure 6.4).
The protests brought together a broad-based coalition of disabled people,
representing, for example, the interests of vision and hearing disabled
150 DESIGNING DISABILITY

FIGURE 6.4  Protest 504 poster drawn by activist Ken Stein and used at the twenty-
five-day occupation of the San Francisco HEW Building, 1977. Courtesy Ken Stein.

persons, as well as those with mobility impairments. And, for the first time,
national television reports broadcast images of these protests, bringing the
rhetoric—and images—of the disability rights movement into living rooms
across the country night after night. This coverage also introduced the
general public to many variations on the ISA. Some were idiosyncratic and
whimsical. At least one of these posters was distinguished by a wheelchair
figure that fills the “0.” Painted by Ken Stein, an early activist and advocate
at the Berkeley-based Center for Independent Living, his “Sign 504 Now!”
poster carries a subtler visual pun. Not only does the “0” duplicate the ISA
symbol, but it also carries its own sign reading “NOW” (Stein, 2016). Other
placards were more militant, incorporating, for example, the ISA with the
militant clenched fist of the DIA logo.
The Section 504 protests succeeded in so far as HEW Secretary Joseph
Califano signed into effect the regulations stipulated by the 1973 bill.
But they also helped establish the ISA as an emblem in cross-disability
protest; the question of visibility—and the fundamental issue of social and
environmental misfit—was forcefully brought into public view for the first
 SIGNS OF PROTEST (1974–1990) 151

FIGURE 6.5  Wheelchair users in Denver demonstrate the lack of access citywide
by making their own curb cuts at street corners and traffic intersections. As the pro-
testors arrived, they carried with them homemade placards bearing the wheelchair
access symbol, c. 1978. The Denver Post via Getty Images.

time. It also made clear that large numbers of disabled Americans with a
variety of impairments could wield more power if they worked together. As
one organizer told the Los Angeles Times in 1979, “The idea of a coalition
of groups of different disabilities is a new one—it used to be that people
grouped around a specific disability” (Cimons, 1979: B8). But, as grassroots
coordinator Fred Fay realized after 504 was passed, it was clear “how
much more effective we could be informally if we could act in coalition on
different issues” (Fay, 2001: 48).
Amid this bigger picture, of course, individual groups would develop their
own protest symbols. On the one hand, the wheelchair symbol continued to
hold relevance, particularly for mobility-impaired demonstrators. When, in
1980, demonstrators protested the lack of curb cuts in Denver, for example,
they brought picks, hammers, and handmade placards embellished with the
wheelchair figure (Figure 6.5).
But other groups began to develop more specialized symbols. For
example at Gallaudet University, the only higher education institution in the
United States devoted to people who are deaf or hard of hearing, students
developed protest emblems that depict a signing hand. In 1988, when
students protested the appointment of a non-deaf president of the university,
students developed a picture of a clenched fist next to a schematic depiction
of a human ear (Barnartt and Scotch, 2001: 209). After these successful
protests, the clenched fist symbol continued to be used within the Deaf
152 DESIGNING DISABILITY

Power movement. But in cross-disability protests in particular, the successful

lobbying efforts in 1977 helped cement the ISA as a unifying symbol for the
disability rights movement’s loose network of supporters and affiliates.
The dynamism of the US disability rights movement (shaped in the
wake of the American civil rights movement) sometimes overshadows
similar events elsewhere. But the question of disability and human rights
was percolating throughout the industrialized West at this time. In 1970, for
example, the British Parliament passed the Chronically Sick and Disabled
Persons Act. Unlike its US counterpart (the 1968 Barrier-Free Architecture
law), this legislation specified that “where any special facility was available
for a handicapped person, it had to be signposted prominently.” The clear
mandate for signage here might be attributed to Selwyn Goldsmith, who
of course advocated in the UK for special signage for several years before
that. But Goldsmith’s arguments for a uniquely “welfare state approach”
toward disability and his support for positive discrimination—along with a
kind of blunt, straightforward “tactlessness”—“brought him unpopularity
in some government circles” (Anon, 2011). Furthermore, Rehabilitation
International’s pull was strong and the British government never adopted the
access symbol that Goldsmith arduously developed while doing research in
Norwich. Instead, the ISA was heavily promoted throughout the country and
quickly adopted as an all but official symbol (Hodgson, 1972: 9) (Figure 6.6).

FIGURE 6.6  By the late 1990s, public signage for accessible accommodations for
wheelchair users was common not only in the United States, but across Europe.
Photo by Nitschmann/ullstein bild via Getty Image.
 SIGNS OF PROTEST (1974–1990) 153

All the same, British persons with disabilities began to chaff at the 1970
Act, arguing that it “won greater advances for professionals and specialist
services than for physically impaired people themselves” (Anon, 1981: 2).
As disabled activist Vic Finkelstein noted in 1975, “recognition of the need
for disabled people to be involved in their own affairs has by no means
been fully accepted by the medical profession” (Finkelstein, 1975: 32). As
in the United States, activists argued that disabled people should be de-
institutionalized and also given equal access to education, housing, and a
host of other rights. In 1972, Paul Hunt, a wheelchair user, invited disabled
people to join him to challenge the “patronising assumptions” being made
about them (Hunt, 1972: 5). Hunt proposed a Union of the Physically
Impaired Against Segregation (UPIAS) and the group quickly began using a
logo that imaginatively reworked the ISA to include the initials of the newly
formed British group. With the “U” turned on its side, the letter turns into
a wheel, while its “P” forms a body’s neck and head. Its “I,” “A,” and “S”
become the figure’s arms and legs.
In other European countries, the ISA and barrier-free access were also
rapidly adopted, but they were sometimes co-opted by activists there as
well. In postwar Germany, a number of laws focused on the comprehensive
rehabilitation and employment of disabled people (Geist, 2003: 563). But,
by the early 1970s, student-led human rights activism began to challenge
long-standing social stereotypes and indirect discrimination toward disabled
persons (Poore, 2007: 274). Here, too, the ISA was deployed as a unifying
symbol of protest. When, for example, in 1980 a group of disabled persons
organized to protest a Frankfurt district court ruling, they made banners
and pins depicting the wheelchair symbol. The legal judgment allowed a
local woman to sue the German travel company that booked her Greek
vacation. Claiming that the agency placed her at a hotel where a large
number of cognitively disabled Swedes were vacationing, she argued that
the experience ruined her vacation. The court agreed, noting that “there is
suffering in the world, and this cannot be changed. However, the plaintiff
is justified in not wanting to see it during her vacation” (Poore, 2007: 277).
Protestors gathered to assert what they felt was a dehumanizing ruling. And,
filling the streets to dispute this ruling, they gathered in front of the court,
at the city’s Fountain of Justice wearing handmade badges decorated with
the ISA or carrying signs and posters graced with the same image (Poore,
2007: 279).
Of course, the rapid and global adoption of the access symbol in the
early 1970s remains a notable achievement. But the scale of its adoption
tells a second story. Ultimately, the symbol escaped RI’s control. As late
as 2000, Acton still felt personally responsible for “shepherding the
International Symbol of Access through its conception, design, approval
and legitimatization.” Even after he’d retired, he still worried for its
“promulgation, promotion and defence against abuse.” Violations of “the
approved design,” he claimed, became “a major challenge over the years,”
154 DESIGNING DISABILITY

and Acton more and more found himself forced “to defend the integrity of
the design against deviations which, if permitted would (and in some cases
have) escalate to levels that destroy the universally recognizable symbol
that is so important” (Acton, 2000). Acton may have worried that the ISA
was being used to sell soap, furniture, and other commercial products.
But he also saw activist appropriations that staked out a political position
very different from Rehabilitation International itself. The organization’s
leaders considered applying for a patent for the design, but remembered
that patents must be enacted in individual countries. Moreover, patenting
the image would limit its usage—something that members wanted to avoid.
Ultimately, they decided to think of the symbol as “a gift to mankind”
(Rehabilitation International, 1978).
By the 1980s, the seed of an idea—access—grew in soil tilled by the
previous decade’s activists. As the idea slowly matured, it branched out,
touching in new ways law, education, health services, and also design. For
some time activists and experts alike argued that disability could result not
from impairments per se, but rather from society—and, by implication,
design itself. By the late 1970s, the rights advocate, architect, and professor
Ronald Mace began arguing that architectural and design barriers could
disable people If only architects and designers would design for a wider
range of human bodies and abilities, Mace insisted, disability might be
neutralized. With his consulting firm, Barrier Free Environments, Mace
was one of the first architects to actively argue that accommodations for
disabled people were more than an add-on for a small minority. Himself a
wheelchair user, Mace noted that features like curb cuts, automatic doors,
and elevators benefit a wide range of people, including those using strollers,
rolling luggage, carrying bags, and joining in a host of other activities. Larger
numbers of users—disabled or not—find easy access valuable.
Of course, earlier proponents of these design accommodations had, from
time to time, made a similar case. When Tim Nugent reconfigured the lecture
halls, dormitories, toilets, and buses of the University of Illinois, making the
campus more accessible to people with disabilities, he noticed that many
non-disabled students used—or even preferred—these accommodations.
For his part, Mace made access a cornerstone of his practice; by 1985, he
finally began calling the broader idea “Universal Design” (Mace, 1985: 148).
As a way of thinking, Universal Design deeply engages ideas of access but,
Mace argued, the “focus is not specifically on people with disabilities, but all
people” (emphasis his) (Mace, 1998). While Mace never addressed the access
symbol directly, the Universal Design movement spread a similar ideology of
inclusiveness. As scholar Amie Hamraie demonstrates, “Builder’s magazines,
newspapers, textbooks, and conference workshops began to tell a new story
about Universal Design: that this approach was not about accessibility for
disabled users at all, but rather about a common sense approach to ‘good
design’ for everyone” (Hamraie, 2017: 7). Universal design in architecture
and industrial design insists that buildings, public spaces, and products
 SIGNS OF PROTEST (1974–1990) 155

should account for the widest possible range of functional capacities as

possible. Mace himself helped draft the 1988 Fair Housing Amendment Act
and the 1990 Architectural Guidelines of the ADA. Mace himself focused
primarily on building design and construction, but his understanding
of Universal Design extended to design that impacted all aspects of life,
including transportation to homes, businesses, and schools. The broader
spirit of these ideas animated a variety of consumer products and services
in the late 1970s and 1980s; Marc Harrison’s original Cuisinart DCL 7-
PRO to Smart Design’s OXO Good Grips line of kitchen tools began to
spread the idea of universal design far beyond the movement’s original roots
(Williamson, 2012).
In many ways, these ideas culminated in the early 1990s with a series
of acts and legislation. In the United States, the ADA was signed into
law in 1990; in the UK, the Disability Discrimination Act (DDA) was
passed in 1995. In the case of the ADA, no other federal law aimed to
reshape physical space so completely. As a vehicle for change, the ADA
was sweeping in its vision, born of the political drawing together of
cross-disability activists over the previous two decades. It showed what
activism could achieve. Less directly, it was also a sweeping endorsement
of architectural access as broadly embedded in the Universal Design
movement. But the law’s posterity (sometimes called “the post-ADA
period”) (Hamraie, 2017: 198–199) would also prove the biggest
challenge to the access symbol yet.

Passing the ADA: Compliance and defiance

On January 26, 1992, much of the signage used throughout American office
buildings became instantly obsolete. Or so Richard Ellseby reported in the
trade journal Office Systems (Ellseby, 1995: 6). Of course, he exaggerated.
But there was more than a grain of truth here. Two years earlier, George
Bush had signed the ADA; at the time, it was lauded by many observers,
and even described “as the most decisive human rights legislation since the
Civil Rights Acts of the 1960s” (Busch, 1995). But it was—and remains—
an unusual piece of legislation. The idea of access is woven through the
warp and weft of this new law. Access to buses and trains, the enjoyment
of parks and pools, entry into stores and classrooms, the law covers huge
swaths of the world around us. The law also assumes that something
would mark the accommodations being legislated. In this way, the figure
in a wheelchair holds a prominent place in the design guidelines developed
for this legislation. Marking accommodations and/or pointing the way
toward them, the symbol itself was catapulted into the public consciousness
with new vigor. Little wonder that legislators gathering together for a
photo shortly after the new bill was signed were given T-shirts bearing the
wheelchair logo (Figure 6.7).
156 DESIGNING DISABILITY

FIGURE 6.7  Shortly after the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was signed,
United States legislators paused for a photographer. The gathered together, holding
T-shirts printed with the International Symbol of Access, 1990. The LIFE Images
Collection/Getty Images.

For many longtime activists in the disability rights community, the

new regulations were liberating. But for others, including a number of
designers, the legislation seemed challenging at best and superfluous at
worst. Until this point, design for persons with disabilities was conceived
as specialty work. The new laws, on the other hand, insisted otherwise. In
theory, many of the accommodations shaped by the ADA draw from the
Universal Design movement. But the law also demonstrated how the general
public was unfamiliar or uncomfortable with broader ideas of access and
accommodation. From facilities managers and small business owners
to many architects and designers, these regulations sometimes felt like a
creeping disease or, as one observer remarked, one long and continuing
“headache” (Doherty, 1995: 18). For at least one construction industry
trade journal, Buildings, it seemed more like “an epidemic.” Worse still, the
magazine continued, the problem “could take thousands of dollars to cure”
(Madsen, 2004: 94). The tumult was significant enough that, at one point
in 1994, the Wall Street Journal asked, “just how open are Americans to
people with disability?” (Pierson, 1995: B1). Many professionals grumbled
about the legislation; the boldest suggested it boiled down to a question of
compliance or defiance (Madsen, 2004).
 SIGNS OF PROTEST (1974–1990) 157

To the casual observer, the passage of the ADA would seem rather
unnecessary for Americans with disabilities. Long before it was passed,
several significant pieces of legislation mandated barrier-free access in the
United States. Through the 1960s, dozens of state and local laws aimed to
make the physical environment more accessible to disabled people. In 1968,
the Federal Architectural Barriers Act made access mandatory for buildings
constructed with federal funds. The Rehabilitation Act of 1973 (amended
in 1974) reinforced the 1968 legislation by introducing a watchdog, the
Architectural and Transportation Board, to hold hearings and issue orders
to ensure compliance. But the ongoing question of access also highlighted
the country’s uniquely conflicted position on disability rights; while national
legislation was liberal in asserting the civil rights of disabled people, there
were surprisingly few legal, social, and medical structures to ensure and
support those rights. Implementation and enforcement remained spotty at
best. Throughout the 1970s, architects and disabled people alike admitted,
“citizen attitudes and lukewarm or uninformed enforcement of codes
dilute the legal breakthroughs already attained” (Kliment, 1975). As Jynny
Retzinger demonstrated when the “accessible” Los Angeles transit bus
refused to pick up disabled riders proved in 1981, the various laws issued
until then were only of limited success. When it was passed in 1990, the
framers of the Americans with Disabilities Act were pushing for the kind of
universal barrier-free access first envisioned by reformers in the 1960s.
In fact, the ADA reached farther into American life than the older
legislation that preceded it. For years after the protests involving section
504, the language of unity knit disability rights activists together. With the
goal of broadening access, the medical understanding of disability, as well
as its legal definition, was shifting. The new law acknowledged this change
by encompassing both “physical or mental impairment.” Furthermore,
disability was defined as a condition “that substantially limits one or
more of the major life activities (that is one’s hearing, walking, speaking,
seeing, breathing, and learning).” Essentially a civil rights law that forbade
discrimination in employment and housing, the ADA promised equal rights
to services and programs. But these assurances were predicated on physical
access to the spaces that all able-bodied citizens used.
Though the changes promised by the ADA were sweeping, it took time
to develop specific regulations for reconfiguring the built environment.
By the middle of 1991, the Department of Justice published guidelines
called the Standards for Accessible Design (SAD). These went into effect
on January 26, 1992. They covered a host of specifics, including public
areas and institutions, but they were also applied to privately owned ones,
including hotels and motels, offices and commercial facilities, entertainment
and healthcare facilities. Furthermore, they applied to all new construction
as well as the old, all “to the extent readily achievable” (defined as “easily
accomplished without much difficulty or expense”). They addressed access
158 DESIGNING DISABILITY

for the mobility impaired, as well as for the hearing and visually impaired.
Indeed, many of the provisions focused on eliminating communication
barriers. Some types of signs, for instance, had to include Braille, while
others required a sharp contrast between characters-letters, numbers and
symbols, and the background.
When the guidelines were introduced, larger businesses, corporations,
and employers found it easier to absorb the costs of building ramps,
changing the grading of inclined paths, lowering water fountains, and
attending to other legislated changes. But many smaller businesses found
the SAD regulations hard to understand and expensive to follow. “After all,”
opined one industry magazine editor, “what exactly (italics theirs) is meant
by ‘readily achievable’ and ‘no undue hardship’?” (Leibrock, 1994: 56). Few
challenged the rules in open defiance. But so, too, did “few, if any, facilities
managers talk openly about how their organizations are complying with
Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).” Expecting a rush of new clients, in
the early 1990s some lawyers, architects, and designers formed consultancies
specifically meant to advise and oversee the expected scramble to comply
with the new law. They misjudged. Most builders, planners and designers
affected by this legislation “seemed to be ignoring it, almost hoping they
would go away” (Leibrock, 1994: 56).
Perhaps unsurprisingly, design professionals—even those who supported
disabled people’s right to access—also faced the new guidelines with
trepidation. When, in 1994, design journalist Akiko Busch interviewed
practitioners who embraced the new law, she “found that nearly all
designers initially greeted the ADA with everything from irritation to
outright hostility” (Busch 1994: 44). Resistance to barrier-free provisions
was hardly new to the worlds of architecture and design. In the 1970s,
many professionals dismissed ramps, elevators, and other accommodations
as both unattractive and stifling to the creative process (El Osman, 1975;
Morgan, 1976; Williamson, 2012). When the ADA was passed, this feeling
was only exacerbated. For design professionals, “access is a byword for ugly,
cluttering up lean pure spaces with hospital hardware, like grade-rails stair/
chair lifts and ramps” (Milner et al., 1991).
While some resisted the new regulations for aesthetic reasons and cost,
others were more practical in their concerns. Some questioned the most basic
premise of the barrier-free architecture movement: physical access would lead
to better opportunities for disabled people. Philadelphia designer Virginia
Gehshan voiced this uncertainty when admitting,“I have mixed emotions about
it … I’m not sure it was well researched. And even with the best of intentions,
it’s hard to legislate a social issue.” (Busch, 1995: 45) Others believed in the
spirit of the law, but felt these new regulations were too bureaucratic; in the
end, they failed to take practical considerations into account. Remembering
when the ADA was first passed, the designer Roger Whitehouse “groaned
about more mindless legislation” (Busch, 1995: 45). Some observers went
further, complaining that the laws were illogical, “put together largely by well-
 SIGNS OF PROTEST (1974–1990) 159

intentioned bureaucrats rather than users” (Busch, 1995: 45). Many dreaded
the 1992 deadline when ADA compliance went into effect. Some architects
even rushed to get any and all new work finished before they would be held
accountable to the new legislation (Busch, 1995: 45).
The new law may have posed major problems for architects, but it also
raised a number of questions for graphic designers. Before the ADA was
passed, graphic design had rarely been regulated, and few practitioners
had ever been forced to follow sweeping governmental regulations. But
the new law placed unusual emphasis on public signage, insisting that all
“permanent areas such as restrooms, lunchrooms and conference rooms
must be identified by signs that use internationally recognized visual
symbols” (Ellersby, 1995: 6). As designers started to examine the SAD
guidelines more closely, they discovered that parts contradicted popular
design wisdom. Paul Arthur railed against rules that “fly in the face of
‘what we think we know’ about legibility” (Arthur, 1993a: 16). As Roger
Whitehouse recalls, they “were nonsense.” That is, to his practiced eye, they
literally “made no sense” (Whitehouse, 2016). While some designers voiced
generalized fears, other concerns coalesced around specific worries. Arthur,
for example, derided “the insistence” on raised letters (and Braille) on
signage for the visually impaired when, he asserted, only a “tiny percentage
of visually impaired people … can actually make practical use of them”
(Arthur, 1993a:16). He also complained that these guidelines were poorly
written, and used “terminology that no one understands.” Arthur drew
particular attention to awkward neologisms like “simple serif” type styles
(Arthur, 1993a: 16).
In the early 1990s, unhappiness with the government’s SAD strictures
swelled alongside resistance to the ISA itself. Of course, long before the
legislation was even conceived, some communication designers harbored
a particular antipathy toward the wheelchair symbol. Now charged with
bringing it into widespread and consistent usage, architects and graphic
designers balked. Of these, some continued to bridle at the symbol’s hacked
origins. Robert Probst, a designer teaching at the University of Cincinnati,
called its odd assemblage of parts little more than “a life-less committee
job” (Pierson, 1995: B1). Publicly, Paul Arthur, who himself created the
stylized wheelchair symbol used at Montreal’s Expo 67, questioned its
design integrity (Arthur and Passini, 1992: 174). Privately, Arthur was more
specific, focusing his ire on Karl Montan’s last-minute addition of “the
extraordinarily ugly head” (Arthur, 1993b). At his most dismissive, Arthur
referred to the ISA as a “pollywog in a wheelchair” (Arthur, 1994a).
Some professional organizations, for example, the Society of
Environmental Graphic Designers (SEGD), took preemptive action and tried
to arm their members with comprehensive explanations of the new SAD
regulations. Of course, their members’ livelihood depended on introducing
signage into the built environment, and they were hired for their knowledge
and expertise. Above all, SEGD’s constituency was expected to produce
160 DESIGNING DISABILITY

designs in keeping with current legislation. The SEGD took the new law as a
call to action. The group introduced a regular column in the organization’s
quarterly newsletter and also offered members an ADA hotline to help
answer questions. The SEGD’s then-president, Roger Whitehouse, even
authored a white paper advising colleagues on how to deal with the new
signage needs. In retrospect, he calls this a “pre-emptive” action, meant to
intervene before the government dictated further strictures. But he quickly
found openness at the Department of Justice and elsewhere; they too didn’t
know how to enact the new laws (Whitehouse, 2016). In the end, the SEGD
tried to bridge the divide between the ADA’s government-mandated design
regulations and professionals in the field.
But these actions left many designers still unsure what to do with the
wheelchair figure itself. Even among those who reviled it, the symbol’s
sheer ubiquity made it difficult to tinker with. As Paul Arthur related to a
colleague at the time,

whatever you think of Susanne Kofoed’s [sic] symbol of accessibility,

screwed around with as it has been by the addition of a tadpole at the top,
it is not something [designers] should be wasting … time on redesigning.
I hate it, you hate it, but it’s there and neither you nor I nor anyone else
can “undo” it. (Arthur, 1994b)

Yet, not everyone shared Arthur’s frustration and weariness. Some designers
thought it was time for a redesign. SEGD members and others began to
toy with the access symbol. So too did disability rights groups. In fact,
as definitions of disability were beginning to change, many people with
impairments were reappraising the wheelchair figure, arguing that it was
an inadequate representation of disability. In the years after the ADA was
passed, designers and activists alike began to reject the ISA.
 7
A Critical Design? (1990–Today)

In 2013, Victor Calise, New York’s commissioner of the Mayor’s Office

for People with Disabilities, announced that the city would replace the
International Symbol of Access (ISA) with a new sign. Identifying the 1969
ISA as “stagnant,” he told reporters that it was too passive and lacked
“movement.” Worst of all, he claimed, “It makes people seem like they don’t
do much with their lives”(Baskin, 2013). This view, he suggested, could be
changed—and a more up-to-date vision of the wheelchair figure could do
it. Furthermore, Calise already had a newer symbol at the ready. Fusing the
dynamism of wheelchair sports (Figure 7.1) with the subversiveness of graffiti
art, the revised symbol seemed to break new ground (Figure 7.2). But really,
over the past two decades, the older ISA was on a collision course with change.

FIGURE 7.1  Louise Sauvage joins other wheelchair atheltes competing in a 10-kilo-
meter road race on Australia Day in Sydney, Australia. 1999. Corbis. via Getty Images.
162 DESIGNING DISABILITY

FIGURE 7.2  Brian Glenney and Sara Hendren hold their design, a new version of
the wheelchair symbol, 2011. The Boston Globe via Getty Images.

It’s a sign of how universal the ISA had become that Calise cared enough
about the symbol to even consider changing it. After the UN ratified the
symbol in 1974 and the United States passed the Americans with Disabilities
Act (ADA) in 1990, the symbol became ubiquitous. From parking lots to
parks, airports to children’s schools, the ISAs mark accommodations on a
global scale. Its staggering proliferation suggests a good social, cultural, and
environmental fit.
But, while all of this helps explain why the ISA flourished as a global
symbol, it doesn’t reflect changing views of disability itself. In the early
1990s, the ADA and a series of similar laws were enacted globally. At the
same time, just as the access symbol gained new authority, its imagery
seemed increasingly dated. Some critics even questioned the role, meaning,
and relevance of such signage at all. Of course, the symbol’s meaning had
evolved over time. Although it was introduced in 1969 as a directional or
wayfinding device, it quickly became a symbol of visibility and a marker of
identity. But it was still found wanting.
The access symbol continues to embody a series of internal compromises
and tensions—neither really a wheelchair nor fully a human figure, the
symbol remains a profoundly awkward figure. Moves to change or even
replace the ISA speak to a new criticality in both design and disability circles.
In the last twenty-five years, the “cold,” “rigid,” and vaguely “mechanical”
figure adopted in 1969 has undergone two serious makeovers in the United
 A CRITICAL DESIGN? (1990–TODAY) 163

States (Hendren, 2013). Even so, it has not kept up with expanding notions
of disability itself. Furthermore, the wheelchair figure was developed and
introduced by a charitable organization; the access symbol has never
fit easily within larger systems of visual communications developed by
professional designers. But also, unlike most wayfinding symbols, it bears a
heavy burden. Not only must it be highly functional but it is also a symbolic
and representational form.
Like it or not, with the passage of laws like the 1990 ADA (and the
subsequent tightening and enforcement of its compliance guidelines), the
symbol is an unavoidable fact of life for many architects and designers.
Keeping these facts in mind, Victor Calise participated in this ongoing
discussion, but was strategic in his approach. He proposed a plan in which
the City would gradually, not to mention unceremoniously, phase in a new
symbol. When old signs decayed, they would be replaced with new ones
featuring the updated symbol. After Hurricane Sandy hit New York in 2013
and destroyed a great deal of infrastructure, the timing seemed good. Perhaps
more fortuitously, when New York introduced a new fleet of accessible taxi
vans, the new symbol (showing a revised wheelchair figure hailing a cab)
was placed on the vehicles’ hoods. As word got out, other cities—large and
small—took the lead. But, opposition also began to mount. Critics objected
to the cost of replacing the old symbol, as well as its legality (the newer figure
had not been vetted by the International Symbols Organization). Others
questioned the newer figure’s legibility and meaning. In the end, New York’s
state government eventually bulldozed through the discussion; rather than
fretting about whether the symbol might be used in the City, two lawmakers
co-sponsored a bill that made the symbol legal throughout the entire state.
Nevertheless, the nature of these changes and the ideologies behind them
remain very much in question.

A cry for help

By the time New York embraced its newer, more dynamic access symbol, many
members of the disability rights community asked, “Why didn’t we do this
before, it makes so much sense?” (Baskin, 2013). In fact, since its inception,
professional designers have quietly updated the symbol over and over again.
But the 1990 passage of the ADA provoked a more fundamental rethinking of
the symbol’s design. The ADA’s tough new strictures regarding graphic design
caught many designers off guard.1 In what he called “A Cry for Help,” Paul
Arthur appealed to his fellow designers, asking them to conduct their own
research and determine what kinds of signage best accommodates persons
with disabilities (Arthur, 1993a: 16). Brendan Murphy, then a student at the
University of Cincinnati, took up that charge. But, in place of a single image of
access to replace the ISA, Murphy developed a series of symbols fitting better
with rapidly changing views of disablement, actual need, and identity.
164 DESIGNING DISABILITY

FIGURE 7.3  Access symbol developed by Don Meeker and Associates, for the
National Parks Service, c. 1985.

Murphy’s redesign built on earlier efforts. When, for example, Don

Meeker developed a pictographic signage system for the US National Park
Service in the mid-1980s, he and his team created signs that could wordlessly
guide visitors to activities and unify facilities scattered through large and
dispersed, not to mention often remote, park settings (Figure 7.3). Using a
unified aesthetic, they also aimed to visually link their signed vocabulary.
Meeker’s team didn’t accept the unbendingly rigid figures commonly used in
international signage at the time; instead they used the parks service signage
as an excuse for envisioning a series of schematic, yet congenial figures who
use their rounded bodies, legs, and arms to busily enjoy the outdoors. In
addition to figures biking, skiing, and swimming, this applies equally to
Meeker’s variation on the ISA figure; the parks service figure bears a close
familial resemblance to its athletic brothers and sisters. Where the older
 A CRITICAL DESIGN? (1990–TODAY) 165

symbol is little more than a stick-like figure resting on a wheel, Meeker’s

wheelchair user stands apart, with a more rounded, limber, and fluid body.
But there is one subtler, more profound difference: the parks service symbol
clearly distinguishes between user and chair. Meeker’s team never intended
the redesign as a statement in itself. Brendan Murphy took up that task.
An Irish-born graduate student in graphic design, Brendan Murphy
studied under Robert Probst and Alan Chewing, two designers with deep
ties to the professional community and particularly to the Society for
Environmental Design (SEGD). Even if Meeker had redesigned the ISA,
Paul Arthur’s “cry for help” made it clear that the symbol needed a more
ambitious makeover. When Murphy began to search for a thesis topic, his
instructors pointed out the problem of the ISA. The complaint wasn’t simply
that the ADA was mandating a vast system of accommodations, but that
the access symbol that announces them is ungainly and misleading. Murphy
recalls how his teachers at Cincinnati “encouraged me to do research, to dig
into it” (Murphy, 2016). He was given an SEGD scholarship to support this
effort, and a board of advisors drawn from the tightly knit design community
including renowned logo and environmental designers like Lance Wyman,
Roger Whitehouse, and David Vanden-Eynden. All he had to do was design
a new symbol (Figure 7.4).
Murphy found the whole process “liberating” (Murphy, 2016). As a
research project, he saw that “there were no rules … my job is to push the
boundaries” (Murphy, 2016). Rather than focusing exclusively on disability
signage, his own research was largely based on a broader study of symbols.
After “three or six months of digging into the history of symbols and looking
at the broader cultural landscape,” he also became “much more aware of
how society uses labels … [and how] a symbol can be a form of labelling.”
For example, the designer points to the culturally specific meanings of the
Red Cross, which may mean humanitarian aid today, but “which in 1665
symbolized the presence of plague” in a particular parish or district (Murphy,
1993: 2). Moreover, the deeper he dove into cross-cultural symbolism, the
more Murphy noted that symbols in one society shift meaning in another. A
finger tapped to the head may mean madness in one context, and signify the
use of a telephone in another (Murphy, 1993: 4).
Publicly, Murphy identified his touchstones as largely personal. That
it derives from Murphy’s Irish heritage was emphasized in press accounts
at the time. The very fact that he drew from stories of an impoverished
life in Dublin helped shape the discourse around his design. He would
also recall Christy Brown, the disabled Irish poet and close neighbor,
who was the subject of the Academy Award–winning film My Left Foot
(1989). Murphy admired how Brown “fought to be seen for his artistic
and intellectual abilities, and not to be defined by his physical disabilities”
(Murphy, 2016).
But more privately, through his research, Murphy also came to learn of
a shift in thinking around disability itself. For almost a decade, activists
166 DESIGNING DISABILITY

FIGURE 7.4  While at the University of Cincinnati, Brendan Murphy proposed a

revision of the International Symbol of Access, 1993. Courtesy of Brendan Murphy.

and scholars, fueled by feminist theory and identity politics, were recasting
disability; arguing that social forces could debilitate impaired people, the
larger disability rights community was undertaking a transformation of
thought. Rather than focusing only on medical assessments of how the body
functions, discussion turned toward the social factors that contribute to
disablement. The point, they argued, is that lack of education or employment
opportunities can profoundly shape disabled people’s access to spaces and
resources.2
While Murphy chose to play this more politicized discourse down when
he introduced his design, it should be understood as part of a broader,
 A CRITICAL DESIGN? (1990–TODAY) 167

rapidly evolving discussion of disability in the media. In 1993, the year it was
designed, a growing debate centered around depictions of disabled persons
on television and in film. Comedian Jerry Lewis’ yearly Labor Day Telethon
was particularly targeted; disability activists launched a critique of these
annual appeals, arguing against “the paternalism, reflected in the telethon:
the attitude that stresses that no matter what one does, life is meaningless in a
wheelchair” (Johnson, 1992: 232). The power of these accusations intrigued
Murphy, who worried that the comedian “has perhaps unwittingly crossed the
line from being a patron into being patronizing” (Murphy 1993: 3). Echoing
the arguments of disability rights activists, scholars, and theorists—and their
contention that disability does not signify an empty, impoverished, or defining
condition—Murphy began to experiment with the wheelchair figure. As
Murphy put it, “the person’s identity is not the chair” (Murphy, 1993: 7).
With this point in mind, Murphy decoupled his figure from its chair, but
he also pushed the ISA in a different direction (Figure 7.5). Murphy made the
symbol more human, but Meeker already did that, with the parks service signage,
a decade earlier. Murphy gave his figure agency. The very fact that he made
his figure less “rigid and helpless” illustrates a broader rethinking of disability
(Murphy, 1994: 15). Murphy’s working process and sketches show a move from
a static figure into someone “no longer imprisoned by the chair” (Murphy, 1994:
15) (Figure 7.5). Murphy’s thumbnail sketches set out to establish by experiment
which factors in the symbol might create dynamism. Thus, he experimented with
adding a hand and a foot to the seated figure. Although he would reject these
two details, he also aimed for a more dynamic and less passive form. In the end,
Murphy focused these ideas on the figure’s positioning. To imply movement, he
developed the figure on a diagonal and moved its arm backward. The angle of
the torso and the “pushing position” of the arm were essential to portraying an
active, independent person. Implicit in these changes was Murphy’s idea that
“designers can play a major role in how impaired individuals view themselves
and are viewed by the public” (Murphy, 1993: 5).
Noting the global ubiquity of the ISA—and its easy fit into built
environments—Murphy aimed not to undo the wheelchair symbol, but
rather to “evolve” its awkward appearance—effectively remaking its misfit
design (Murphy, 1993: 6). For one thing, even though it rejects the official
design, Murphy’s wheelchair symbol still takes the ISA as its starting point.
But by reworking the established symbol, Murphy’s may be tied to an
alternate tradition. Although he did not quote Selwyn Goldsmith directly,
Murphy’s bid for a humanizing symbol echoes Goldsmith’s call for an
image that that could echo the precepts of the postwar welfare state. Both
Goldsmith and Murphy embraced values of universal healthcare, support for
the unemployed, and a host of other services and supports for people with
disabilities. For Goldsmith, these values were all bound up in a figurative,
non-abstract symbol that would speak for itself, making it clear “that they
are people with special needs, and that someone is sufficiently concerned to
be doing something to help them” (Goldsmith, 1967: 389). Murphy claimed
168 DESIGNING DISABILITY

FIGURE 7.5  Early drafts of Brendan Murphy’s revision of the International Sym-
bol of Access, 1993. Courtesy of Brendan Murphy.

a similar set of values, readily asserting that his “access point is different
and socialist” (Murphy, 2016). But Murphy’s sense of inclusivity is, in fact,
different from anything Goldsmith anticipated.
After settling on this project, almost immediately Murphy identified a
second, more complex misfit. He observed that the image of a wheelchair had
little relevance for the vision or hearing impaired. In other words, there was
a basic misfit or gap between the symbol’s message and the varied contexts in
which it might be used. Murphy realized that the entire construct of disability
 A CRITICAL DESIGN? (1990–TODAY) 169

FIGURE 7.6  I am visually impaired button, 2017. Courtesy trend badges.

was expanding, and becoming more and more capacious. Of course, as scholars
Ben-Moshe and Powell have noted, the wheelchair serves as “the prototypic
representation of disability in Western societies” (Ben-Moshe and Powell, 2007:
497). Yet it really does denote just one kind of disability. Selwyn Goldsmith
shared a similar concern, but he was never quite able to shape his experimental
1969 Norwich symbol to express different ambulatory, respiratory, and cardiac
disabilities. It is possible to address this problem, Murphy reasoned, but he
needed more than a redesigned wheelchair symbol. Murphy’s mentors, Robert
Probst and Lance Wyman, encouraged experimentation, saying, “let’s see how
can far we push the idea” of access. They asked of the wheelchair symbol, “Is
this good for showing ALL access? What about others?” (Murphy; 2016).
Suddenly, as Murphy began to work on this project, the wheelchair became
but one symbol in an expanded series of glyphs, each separately addressing the
needs of sight-, hearing-, speech-, and mobility-impaired persons (Figure 7.7).
170 DESIGNING DISABILITY

FIGURE 7.7  Brendan Murphy designed a suite of signs, all meant to be alterna-
tives to the wheelchair sign, 1993. Courtesy Brendan Murphy.
 A CRITICAL DESIGN? (1990–TODAY) 171

FIGURE 7.7 (Continued)
172 DESIGNING DISABILITY

FIGURE 7.7 (Continued)
 A CRITICAL DESIGN? (1990–TODAY) 173

Murphy conferred respectability on the idea that three different symbols

might better serve disabled people, but he offered a curious fourth image
as well. The first three are, in fact, relatively straightforward, including not
only Murphy’s reworking of the ISA wheelchair figure, but also a hand
signing the motion OK, and a finger touching a dotted Braille script. But
the fourth glyph—a pictogram of an open door—represents a newer line of
thinking in terms of access and usage itself. This was, in fact, unrelated to
any recognizable disability. It was meant, instead, to suggest a “welcoming”
or “barrier-free” environment in a “strong, positive, symbolic connotation”
(Murphy, 1994: 15). Originally, Murphy thought to use a large letter “A”
for “Access” letter (recalling the “H” used to denote Hospitals). But, he
soon realized that such a symbol would resonate only with English speakers
(Murphy, 2016). But also, with the Open Door symbol, Murphy’s image
also recalls the earlier destigmatizing access symbol first introduced in the
United States during the 1960s. Of course, a number of North American
designs, including the Canadian building code “insignia” and New York’s
wheel and arrow form, also avoid reference to specific disabilities. Although
Murphy was unaware of these forerunners, his thesis advisor Robert Probst
described the open door symbol as “neutral” and even expressed the hope
that it “would not stigmatize and would not categorize the abled from the
disabled” (Johnson, 1995: 37).
The public unveiling of Murphy’s symbols was very different than the
highly orchestrated introduction of the wheelchair symbol at Rehabilitation
International’s conference in 1969 Dublin some twenty-five years earlier.
Murphy was invited to Seattle and took to the stage at the SEGD’s national
conference in August 1994. The reception to Murphy’s designs was mixed.
Many members concurred with Lyn Jeffery, SEGD’s education director, who
rushed to praise “a more sensitive and practical set of symbols” that seemed
to be “going in the right direction” (Busch, 1994: 45). But many more were
guarded. Susan Mampre, the SEGD’s communication director at the time,
was circumspect about the entire suite of symbols. “Some people think
they’re great,” she observed. “Some people think they’re not going to help.
But people are interested at the very least” (Johnson, 1995: 37). At the same
time, Murphy never stipulated how any should be used. Ultimately, the suite
of symbols failed to gain traction.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Murphy’s rendition of the more conventional
wheelchair symbol received the most attention. Whether part of the original
suite of symbols or not, Murphy’s moving wheelchair gave a conscious
nod to newer ideas of active disablement. Soon after it was introduced,
this updated symbol was adopted by a variety of organizations, from the
camping and outdoors outfitter REI to the city of San Antonio, Texas. But
the symbol’s reception was not that simple. Almost immediately, questions
about its message and efficacy were raised. When Belinda Carlton, director
of the Coalition of Texans with Disabilities, polled some fifty representatives
of disability groups across the state, she found solid opposition to Murphy’s
174 DESIGNING DISABILITY

active wheelchair figure. Many of these professionals were caught off guard,
and openly worried that the new “symbol’s not going to change society’s
image about people with disabilities.” Even at the state’s architectural
barriers office, staffers agonized that “it has taken this long to get the public
to recognize the current symbol. Why go through this again” (Pierson, 1995:
B1). Other critics were concerned that having “two symbols for a long period
of transition … could be confusing—people may think they are intended to
convey two different messages” (Pierson, 1995: B1). And still others worried

that the proposed symbol appears an attempt to separate the user from
the wheelchair, perhaps suggesting the user has a choice of whether or
not to use the chair. It does not … suggest movement of chair and user
but whether mobility of user apart from the chair, as if the chair were
something to be ashamed of and escape from. (Pierson, 1995: B1; italics
in original)

In the end, as concerns around Murphy’s symbol mounted, his sponsors

at the SEGD decided that the group could not endorse its acceptance. The
part played by Murphy in this unfolding narrative is relatively minor. And,
where Rehabilitation International actively pushed for the acceptance of
the ISA, the SEGD was reluctant to promote Murphy’s revision. Murphy
gave the group the legal rights to his image, but the SEGD was squeamish;3
worried that they would be held responsible for circulating an unapproved
variant of the ISA, the organization’s legal counsel advised the SEGD to
issue a disclaimer each time it was contacted by persons interested in the
newer symbol (Society for Environmental Graphic Design, 1994). The
statement acknowledged that Murphy’s symbol deviated enough from the
official version that, if users adopted it, they might be charged with failure
to comply with the ADA. Effectively, the law was written referencing use of
the ISA, and only the ISA (Murphy, 2016).
Paul Arthur also repudiated Murphy’s design, though in a less public
manner. Focusing on the guidelines issued by the government in the wake
of the ADA, Arthur sought more “human factors research.” Essentially,
he wanted more research on specific problems related to disability and
communication. What typeface, for example, is legible to vision impaired
and fully sighted people alike? How practical is Braille lettering when only
5 percent of blind people read it with ease? Murphy didn’t investigate
these types of questions. Instead, he offered a symbolic representation of
disablement itself. In a letter to Murphy, he wrote that the new symbols “are
backsliding into pure decorativeness. You seem with these symbols at least,
to be becoming less interested in effective communication and more in being
pretty” (Arthur, 1994b). To some extent, Arthur was correct. Murphy made
the symbol less rigid, more rounded and organic; generally speaking, he
harmonized the inelegant ISA, making it work more congenially with other
symbols in use at the time. The newer symbol was made more appealing for
 A CRITICAL DESIGN? (1990–TODAY) 175

the broader design community who, broadly speaking, found it ugly. But
the effort to “prettify” the access symbol must also be seen in relation to the
larger political climate of the period. Murphy’s symbols, and especially his
reworked wheelchair figure, were more than mere aestheticization. States
of disablement had long been stereotyped publicly as ugly, and even unfit
to be seen.4 For this misfit symbol, a gesture toward beauty was, in itself, a
meaningful act. Disability, the revised symbol seemed to insist, could be a
dynamic, purposeful, and even graceful state.
Though some organizations, including Williams College and Wal-Mart
stores, have adopted Murphy’s symbol, its greatest legacy is, perhaps, its
influence. For instance, a well-received version was adapted for the Museum
of Modern Art’s 2003 revised signage system. It would also have a profound
influence on a second redesign, introduced in 2010 less as a design than as a
form of guerrilla art. But the latter pushed further, challenging not only the
ISA’s appearance, but also the symbol’s fit in public space.

A twenty-first-century makeover
While this discussion slowly unfolded in the design community, casual
observers began to take note only when, in late 2010, a Harvard design
student and a philosophy professor from nearby Gordon College began
defacing the International Symbol of Access throughout the Boston area.
Placing a transparent but bright orange sticker over the familiar wheelchair
figure, the pair said this defacement could capture “the social power of the
urban street.” They printed a thousand transparent window decals and quickly
began distributing the sticker to anyone who asked (Vanhemert, 2013). In that
respect, it could be interpreted as an example of what its instigators alternately
called “guerrilla activism” and a “graffiti art project.” As such, this sticker
brought a new level of scrutiny to the ISA (Baker, 2013: A1). But the narrative
is not that simple. For a start, when it was featured in a 2011 Boston Globe
article (Baker, 2011), disabled people, including Victor Calise, began agitating
for the sticker symbol to replace the older, officially recognized wheelchair
symbol. By 2013, the Globe breathlessly announced that the project “has gone
from an artistic statement to a global movement” (Baker, 2013: A1). But this
new image was not designed by Brendan Murphy, the SEGD, or any member
of the professional design community. In fact, the image that finally seemed
poised to replace the ISA was not, at first, even presented as a work of design.
The so-called Accessible Icon Project (AIP) had higher aims (Figure 7.8).
Sara Hendren, one of the AIP’s creators, acknowledges that the redesign
does edit the older symbol. But it also presents “a much bigger question
to ask about who is abled and who is disabled and what we think about
dependence and need” (Baker, 2011). In effect, it forced the ISA to undergo
“a 21st Century makeover” (Deque Systems, 2013). But has the redo finally
redressed the symbol’s fundamental misfit?
176 DESIGNING DISABILITY

FIGURE 7.8  The Accessible Icon Project, developed by Sara Hendren and Brian
Glenney, 2010. Courtesy Sara Hendren.

Like Murphy’s 1993 remake of wheelchair symbol, the AIP gives a nod
to the older International Access Symbol, but only as a point of departure.
Thus, while it still uses a wheelchair to symbolize access, the seated figure
is in dynamic motion. It also highlights the maladroit misfit of the original
design—to this day, the ISA remains a schematized depiction of a modern
 A CRITICAL DESIGN? (1990–TODAY) 177

wheelchair, with a circle placed on its back. But in this case, the question
of context is key. Understood as an activist or street art campaign, the
transparent orange sticker overlay was used as an act of defacement; it
challenged the ubiquitous presence of the symbol—its very “fit” in the built
environment—as well as the message that it carries. It also transcends its
material setting. Instead of relying on official channels of distribution, the
Accessible Icon merges social networking, the web, and the evolving rhetoric
of disability rights. The new figure attracted global attention. As Hendren
relates, “It outpaced our expectations … We heard from a doctor at a big
rehab hospital at Delhi and he’d changed the official signage there. People in
Italy, people in Sweden, people in Canada. I could go on and on” (Vanhemert,
2013). But it is also meant to challenge ideas of disability and fitness itself.
With this in mind, the AIP carries a casual, unembarrassed assertiveness
that transcends earlier images and debates around the access figure. Fifty
years earlier, designers, disabled people and their advocates grappled
with the symbol, even debating how “secret” any form of access signage
should be. This new revision makes no apologies for its public presence.
Instead, it presents a powerful and dynamic wheelchair user on the move.
In stylistic terms, it builds off Murphy’s 1993 figure. The chair and the
user are distinguishable. But the AIP’s aggressive dynamism exaggerates the
sense of movement introduced by Murphy; were the two in a race, there’s
no doubt who would win. In a restless age, where everything is moving
faster and faster, the AIP remake is dynamically slanted, inexorably moving
forward as if racing through traffic or over a finish line. For its makers, the
significance is clear. For one thing, the symbol focuses on the abilities of the
wheelchair user; by emphasizing the motion of the individual, the disabled
person is the driver. As explained on the AIP’s website, the wheelchair user
asserts his or her “active status of navigating the world” (Accessible Icon
Project, 2013).
Even more specifically, to Hendren’s collaborator, philosophy professor
Brian Glenney, the new icon was different from the unworldly, inexpressive
wheelchair user conceived back in 1969; this newer sticker figure most
closely approaches the street-savvy grace of the skateboarder. In fact,
skateboarders have long shared spaces with wheelchairs, both using curb
cuts and ramps if to different ends. Looking for equivalents, Glenney recalls
a favorite wheelchair athlete, Aaron Fotheringham (“Wheelz”), a 21-year-
old from Las Vegas who uses his wheelchair at skate events. When Hendren
developed the final design, Glenney recalls how “I felt good about the
symbol … I knew it could represent Wheelz” (Phelps, 2012).
Glenney and Hendren are not the only ones to rethink and question the
role and appearance of the wheelchair figure. But, while no one claims that
more access is a bad thing, some observers believe that signage is not the
best means to this end. To some critics, the wheelchair symbol translates as
a form of paternalism. As early as 1977, architects Charles Moore and Kent
Bloomer complained that access signage forces a kind of “childhood status”
178 DESIGNING DISABILITY

on disabled people. In this way, they observe, “over emphatic graphics” can
be too much. Alarmingly, plastered around an urban environment, they
“scream that this is a safe place for the handicapped” (Moore and Bloomer,
1977: 7). Other critics have focused on the question of segregation. In
seeking a benevolent approach toward disability, Selwyn Goldsmith argued
for a form of “positive discrimination” that might grow out of Britain’s
postwar welfare state. But Goldsmith never fully convinced the British
design establishment and—by the late 1970s—he found himself increasingly
under attack.5 Instead, a number of critics gave new urgency to the South
African activist Vic Finkelstein’s argument. Architectural critic Rob Imrie
spoke for many when he worried that “current urban planning is inscribed
by a ‘design apartheid’ where urban planners, architects, and related officials
are guilty of constructing spaces that exclude disabled people” (Imrie, 1996:
24). For the same reason, scholars Liat Ben Moshe and Justin Powell note,
some activists and critics feel ambivalence toward any symbol that “directs
persons needing accommodations to ‘special,’ often segregated, locations.
If universal design principles had been carried out fully we would have
no need for such a symbol, because places and objects would have been
designed from the start for a diverse population” (Ben-Moshe and Powell,
2007: 494).
If these critics argue that access signage is counterproductive, others
have leveled visual critiques at actual access signage itself. In the UK, artist
Caroline Cardus, for instance, created a collection of self-authored road
signs she called “The Way Ahead.” Conceived as a traveling exhibition
that opened on October 1, 2004, the day that the UK ushered into law its
new Disability Discrimination Act,6 Cardus designed a series of symbols
that quietly send up existing signs. One reads “Warning! People Using
Sign Language Ahead.” Another announces, “disability is not a choice—
your attitude is.” More recently, in the US artist Park McArthur devised a
series of blank blue signs that imitate the traditional rectangular format of
disabled parking signage (Figure 7.9). These signs eliminate the troublesome
wheelchair figure entirely. On the other hand, the point of Hendren and

FIGURE 7.9  Artist Park McArthur’s Blanks suggests an alternate reconsideration

of the International Access Symbol, 2014. Copyright Park McArthur.
 A CRITICAL DESIGN? (1990–TODAY) 179

Glenney’s sticker was to embed critique into the world around us. Presented
as street art, affixed to signage already in place, and introduced into the built
environment, it was integrated into daily life.
But the active wheelchair figure also sits at a curious intersection between
graffiti art and design, digital networking, and political identity. In late 2009,
when Hendren and Glenney first conceived the revised symbol, they were
already at work on a device that might help blind users perceive colors by
listening to sounds. The spirit of cross-disability practice and theory, however,
led the pair to push off into a different direction when Hendren saw a variant
of the Murphy design and wrote about it on her blog. Observed on the door
of a local department store, she snapped—and posted—a photo, comparing
it to the ISA. Her first thought was of design and disparity. To begin, she
noticed, “The difference between two icons like these was so striking to me
that I couldn’t believe the second one (and others that are closely similar)
wasn’t used more commonly” (Accessible Icon Project, 2013). The same was
true for Glenney, who quickly offered a proposition: replace the old signs.
Glenney’s part in this unfolding story is significant. He had a background as
a graffiti artist and suggested something that would evoke the subversiveness
of graffiti tagging. By designing an “overlay” sign, placed on top the original
ISA, they could emulate graffiti artists’ sticker campaigns (Accessible Icon
Project, 2013). He found the possibilities exciting. The same was true of the
press, who would refer to the campaign as “a guerrilla street art project”
(Baker, 2013: A1)
But it is misleading to present the finished sticker as a completed thought,
much less a rash act. The process for creating their icon more closely
resembled designers’ working methods. For one thing, Hendren began by
developing a sticker in the shape of a stand-alone orange figure, and applied
it to outdoor ISA signage around Boston (Figure 7.10). But, after consulting
a group of friends and colleagues, Hendren and Glenney discovered that it
lacked clarity. So, too, viewers’ feedback indicated that the new figure looked
more like a person getting up and out of a wheelchair than someone at ease
in one. Instead, they tried a different approach. Since the early 1970s, US
access signs have been blue and white, following the international norm for
roadside signage. Glenney and Hendren made their own version of the blue
and white symbol, the better to blend in. But this was misleading. For one
thing, the new signs went unnoticed. They hoped that their revision would
spark vigorous discussion and debate, but it went entirely unrecognized.
People pay little attention to the access figure; they simply didn’t notice
when the new stickers were applied.
For the final iteration, they made a transparent sticker with their new
symbol printed on it in orange (Figure 7.11). All the better to make the
revision clear. The color made it difficult for observers to miss the image
overlaid on the older symbol. And because the original sign was still
visible under the newer sticker, the gesture invited what Hendren wanted
all along—a visual comparison. Hendren would later point out that “this
180 DESIGNING DISABILITY

FIGURE 7.10  An early version of Brian Glenney and Sara Hendren’s Accessible
Icon Project (AIP) uses red sticky vinyl figures which could be placed on top of the
official International Symbol of Access, c. 2010. Courtesy Sara Hendren.

image feels like the heart of the project: a clear-backed sticker that shows
the newer figure—here in red and orange, leaning forward ‘italicized,’ while
the original image shows underneath” (Accessible Icon Project, 2013). There
was no mistaking the static older figure for the dynamic newer one. This is
the figure that finally got public attention.
 A CRITICAL DESIGN? (1990–TODAY) 181

FIGURE 7.11  A later version of Brian Glenney and Sara Hendren’s Accessible
Icon Project uses a transparent red sticker. This allows the official symbol of access
to continue being visible under it, c. 2010. Courtesy Sara Hendren.

Of course this imagery was a more critical edit or “correction,” of

the ISA’s original—and maladroit—misfit. Whatever would come next,
it is important to note that the original sticker campaign functioned as a
form of critique. That is, it comments on the original design’s fitness. This
criticality has often been overlooked. The sticker symbol was introduced
not as a replacement for the ISA, but rather as an attempt to spark a kind
of visual debate. Glenney and Hendren did not design the project as part of
a protest movement like those held in the 1970s by Disabled in Action or
by the Atlantis community in Denver. According to its makers, the newer
wheelchair figure was designed to raise questions, not push for answers.
If, as its makers claim, the newer symbol reflects current discussions
around the nature of disability, its appearance was particularly timely.
Beginning in the 1990s, activist and academic circles began to rethink
disability as a constructed cultural category. Seen this way, theorists note,
disablement might be deemed not only worthy of reflection and study but
also, much like gender and race, as a broader concept open to discussion
and critique (Garland-Thomson, 2013: 916). Of course, this discussion was
just beginning to take shape when Brendan Murphy launched his 1993
remake of the ISA. But, unlike Murphy, Glenney and Hendren did not claim
to present a design solution to these questions. Instead, they pitched their
sticker as a loose reflection of these broader intellectual currents. Placed
182 DESIGNING DISABILITY

around the city of Boston, they claimed, the image was meant to extend
an ongoing conversation about society’s stereotypes around disability,
agency, and change. Academic writing and intellectual discourse have an
appropriate place, Hendren argues, but that’s not enough—“people need
to see it” (Hendren, 2015). In the end, “framing this work as a street art
campaign allowed it to live as a question, rather than a resolved proposition”
(Accessible Icon Project, 2013).
Whatever its theoretical resonance, the red decal overlay was itself a kind
of misfit. Hendren explained its sheer oddity as part of the strategy; it was
“like drawing a circle around the change in the design that we were trying
to do, and pointing to that change” (Baker, 2011). Reflecting on Murphy’s
symbol and other variants, the pair observed, “we knew that better icons
already existed.” As they reconsidered Murphy’s symbol, however, they
presented their stickers a kind of commentary, all the while capitalizing on
the ISA’s pervasive presence. It is so common today, the ISA has become,
in Hendren’s words, “invisible” (Hendren, 2015). In some ways, that very
ubiquity made the ISA a perfect platform for raising “questions about
disability and the built environment, in the largest sense. Who has access—
physically, yes, but moreover, to education, to meaningful citizenship, to
political rights?” To ask this question, the pair began distributing stickers to
friends and to Glenney’s contacts among graffiti and sticker art networks;
they began plastering the image around Boston (Baskin, 2013).
Whatever the symbol’s resonance today, this kind of critical design has
a healthy history. Take, for example, the Italian Radical Design movement
of the 1960s. Though this period is perhaps best known for launching
postmodernism, the Italians also saw design as a form of intellectual
discourse rather than a consumer-driven practice. (This discourse was
rooted in the culture around the Italian magazine Domus, which launched
a series of provocative design statements.) More recently, “critical design,”
a term first used by British designer Anthony Dunne (Dunne, 1999), has
extended this tradition. The attraction of this approach led Dunne and, later,
Fiona Raby to reject design that affirms the mainstream corporate culture
of consumerism—what they call “affirmative design.” But Glenney and
Hendren deployed their critical design differently from Dunne and Raby.
Where the earlier pair placed their work in gallery and museum settings,
the Boston duo relied on networking savvy and social media to push critical
design into the twenty-first century. This approach is especially meaningful
given the context and history of disability signage, where large institutions
and governmental authorities have largely controlled access symbols and
signs, dictating how, when, where, and why it is put into use.
Yet, the notion of design as critical provocation was entirely absent
from the processes surrounding earlier iterations of the access symbol.
Most official access symbols designed in the 1960s stressed one form of
assimilation or another. That was more or less the approach of Selwyn
Goldsmith, whose symbols were meant to address what he called “the
 A CRITICAL DESIGN? (1990–TODAY) 183

FIGURE 7.12  Artist Shepard Fairey affixing a sticker on a parking sign in Los
Angeles, 2005. Getty Images.
184 DESIGNING DISABILITY

psychology of disablement” (see Chapter 5). What mattered primarily to Paul

Arthur was that his Expo 67 pictogram fit within a larger symbol system.
In many ways, the 2010 sticker makes a statement similar to that of the
1993 symbol designed by Brendan Murphy. Both aim to present disability as
an active and dynamic state. But Hendren and Glenney’s sticker campaign
took a different shape and employed an unusual means of distribution. It
was, they admitted, “mildly transgressive” in “altering public property.”
But what mattered primarily was that its means of distribution caught
attention, especially because of what Hendren has referred to as “media
interest in graffiti’s legality.” More to the point, the pair capitalized on a
recent exhibition in Boston, featuring the career of sticker and graffiti artist
Shepard Fairey. That artist was already well known for posting enigmatic
stickers and posters throughout Boston and beyond (Figure 7.12). Not only
did the art exhibition bring attention to his work, but he was also arrested at
its official opening: he had outstanding warrants for damage to property at
two Boston locations. Fairey’s transgression made headlines when the artist
arrived at the opening, only to be arrested by the Boston police as his cab
neared the museum. For publicity purposes, the timing was perfect.
With such headline-grabbing precedents, the pair gained more and more
space in the press. They also found they could “shape our interviews to our
own agenda: the politics of disability, access, and inclusion” (Hendren, 2015).
For models, Hendren points to the Austrian collective WochenKlausur, an
activist group of artists that has been successfully carrying out social projects
since 1993, and writing about them. She relates, “When I read this it was like
the oracle speaking” (Hendren, 2015). WochenKlausur are typically invited
by art institutions to develop and realize proposals which are small scale but
concrete for identifying and improving local sociopolitical problems. Their
first attempt was at the Vienna Secession, where they took over an exhibition
space and used it as an office (one will search in vain for a work of art). The
group designed and launched a mobile medical unit that aimed at serving
the local homeless population. Their name WochenKlausur or “weeks of
closure” describes the time they set aside to work on a problem, usually in
closed session working spaces and often limited to eight weeks. And their
work is in fact not about conceptual or expressive autonomy, but rather
issues often related to social design and public policy.
Like WochenKlausur, Glenney and Hendren’s work slides between
easy definitions of “art” and “design.” The slippage is most prominent in
Hendren’s understanding of WochenKlausur’s tactical use of the media.
Hendren observes that the Austrian collaborative works in areas normally
understood as the realm of urban planning and design. Contemporary art
provides a useful umbrella for social practice, at once attracting publicity,
but also opening the public sphere to issues ripe for confrontation and
speculation. “Call something art or culture,” Hendren notes, and “you
will get more attention” (Hendren, 2015). By naming their practice as
art, WochenKlausur was able to engage in a level of cultural critique and
 A CRITICAL DESIGN? (1990–TODAY) 185

critical discourse normally alien to design. This is also important for posing
questions about disability. Much like the ubiquitous International Access
Symbol, disability is common enough in most people’s lives, but it and the
stereotypes around it are rarely probed and discussed at any length. The
new symbol was presented not as a definitive design, but rather as a piece
of guerrilla art and thus an object of discourse. But it also brought the
Boston project considerable press coverage. In the end, the design received
glowing reviews in the American press, including extensive coverage in the
Boston Globe, Washington Post, New York Times, and National Public
Radio. For inspiration, Hendren again points to an early WochenKlausur
project. When, for example, that group’s 1993 grant ended, they used the
threat of press coverage of the closure to scare politicians and cashier the
project permanently. As Glenney observed, “If she were to make this thing
domesticated, it wouldn’t have that social power” (Baker, 2011).
In fact, as it gained more and more attention, there began a separate
campaign for it to substitute for the ISA. In Boston, where the sticker
campaign began, Triangle, a nonprofit disability services organization, began
to advocate for widespread adoption. From its inception, the access symbol
has cast and recast different strategies for dealing with a continuing problem—
the very public misfit between disabled bodies and the built environment. In
the mid-twentieth century, accommodations were often hidden, and forms of
secret knowledge were favored. When professional designers finally began
to consider the problem of how to disseminate information about access,
they focused primarily on how to fit it within larger systems of public
communication. Hendren and Glenney’s guerrilla action and tactical use
of the media suggest an alternate, and arguably more effective strategy for
design distribution. That said, it was ultimately fitted to existing standards.
Hendren and Glenney worked with a professional designer, Tim Ferguson
Sauder, to bring the icon in line with international signage standards.
Complying with the Department of Transportation’s ISO DOT 50 standards
meant bringing this renegade symbol in line with a series of pictograms
originated in 1974 and spearheaded by Roger Cook and Don Shanosky.
The symbol was transformed from a transparent orange figure meant to
clash with the blue ground and white image under it, into a single, cohesive
image that erased the older, static figure. Sauder immediately understood
this difference; the revision was “an approach that, in many ways, opposes
Sara’s original goal.” Revising the figure’s dimensions, line width, and other
details helped Sauder regularize the new symbol. The aim was “to make it
feel like it’s part of that family, so an airport in France, Russia, or Greece will
consider using it, to extend the conversation to those countries, so people
will notice the difference and think about it. It’s a tension that we’ve talked
about quite a bit” (Kirkwood, n.d.). By 2014, the symbol was in use in
parking lots and buildings across the state of New York, and had entered the
collections of the Museum of Modern Art as a critical design. As Glenney
186 DESIGNING DISABILITY

observed at the time, “What was ‘against’ the law is ‘becoming’ a law in just
three years” (Gordon College, 2014).
But what did disabled people themselves think of the new symbol? Some
of the earliest advocates for the AIP are themselves disabled, and many see
the new symbol as an opportunity to revise stereotypes and misconceptions.
Brendan Hildreth, a wheelchair user and a former volunteer at Triangle’s
headquarters outside Boston, praises not only the symbol, but also the
advocacy around it as a mark of empowerment. Says Hildreth, “I hope
people understand that this project is about more than just a picture. People
look at me differently just because my muscles don’t work the same as theirs,
but my disability does not change the fact that I am a leader … Anyone can
be a leader, and bring positive change” (Hicks, 2013).
Hildreth’s remarks gesture at the ways in which the new symbol has
drawn attention to our shifting attitudes toward disability, and encourage
discourse. However, the symbol has also struck up debate around issues of
disability and identity. According to some activists, its dynamic portrayal
of impairment still follows a kind of “ableist” logic. Activist Stephen
Mendelsohn has noted, “The new symbol conveys a profound prejudice
against those of us with severe disabilities who need things like power
wheelchairs, attendant care, breathing support, and feeding tubes. The
message being sent is that while it is cool to be ‘able disabled,’ having a
severe disability causes one to be a ‘burden’ ” (Haigh, 2015). Others
identify with the older symbol. Protestor Cathy Ludlum prefers the original
ISA which has been described by detractors as “blocky and rigid.” “I AM
blocky and rigid!” Ludlum has said (Haigh, 2015). Others see it as beside
the point. Scholar Kelly Fritsch, for instance, wonders why we continue to
define disability in terms of wheelchairs at all (Frisch, 2013). Perhaps more
comprehensively, others have complained that the new symbol is not part
of a larger signage system, and fails to integrate with those already in place
(Whitehouse, 2016).
Nevertheless, the fate of the AIP symbol looks more promising than that
of Brendan Murphy’s 1993 design edit. In 2015 the US Justice Department
informally declared that it could be used in place of the ISA.7 But the series
of critical questions posited by the AIP’s creators remain unanswered. Why
is a symbol still needed? What meanings does the symbol have for those who
are disabled and for those who are not? Does the current symbol facilitate
or hinder inclusion?

Notes
1 Murphy was initially drawn to the topic after his instructors at Cincinnati
directed him to Arthur’s article (Arthur, 1993a).
2 For more on this see Finkelstein (1975), Groce (1985), Eisland (1994), and
Oliver (1990).
 A CRITICAL DESIGN? (1990–TODAY) 187

3 In the end, Murphy gave the rights to his symbol to the SEGD, with the caveat
that it never be used in conjunction with the word “handicapped.” But the Boston-
based group only released it along with a legal disclaimer noting that they couldn’t
“endorse” the symbol (Pierson, 1995: B1). Instead, their statement noted, “We
advise environmental graphic designers, fabricators and their clients to proceed
with caution and seek the advice of an attorney regarding ADA compliance and
symbols liability” (Society for Environmental Graphic Design, 1994).
4 A fuller consideration of these issues, and the laws surrounding them, is
available in Schweik’s (2009).
5 Goldsmith’s approach was increasingly attacked in the 1970s. His third edition
of Designing for the Disabled (1977), for instance, continued to focus almost
exclusively on mobility-impaired persons; it provided little consideration of
architecture for hearing and vision impaired persons, and even less for those with
developmental disabilities. But more specifically, Goldsmith’s ranging meditations
on the benefits of dependency were also found wanting. As one critic put it, his
philosophical stance was out of date, introduced poorly explained concepts like
“interdependence,” and most generally “plagued with contradictions that will
confuse rather than enlighten the reader” (Ripley, 1977: 26).
6 The 1995 Disability Discrimination Act made it illegal to discriminate against
disabled persons in most capacities of day-to-day life. It also made provisions
for the employment of disabled persons, and established the National Disability
Council.
7 The Accessible Icon Project, that is, the group formed after Hendren and Glenney
gifted the rights to this image to the nonprofit organization Triangle Inc. That
group has encountered its own problems. When supporters of the new symbol
requested that the Massachusetts Architectural Access Board support its use in
that state, it was rejected because of concerns about a financial conflict of interest.
In fact, Triangle Inc. sold stickers and parking stencils of the symbol from their
website. To date, most legislation has focused on continuing acceptance of the
older ISA—in tandem with recognition of the newer symbol.
 Epilogue

The Beginning of the End?

In September 2013, Ontario’s Lieutenant-Governor David Onley

announced that it was time to replace the familiar wheelchair symbol.
In tandem with Ontario College of Art and Design University’s Inclusive
Design program, he agreed to co-sponsor an international Reimagining
Accessibility competition. Although Onley himself uses a power chair, the
competition guidelines explained that “less than three per cent of persons
with disabilities in Ontario use a wheelchair or electric scooter for mobility
purposes” (Inclusive Design Research Centre, 2013). The contest’s goal
was to revise and extend ideas of disability, finding a symbol effective
across multiple, global cultures. Recalling the year when the ISA was first
developed, Onley tweeted, “So much has changed since 1968: TVs, phones,
computers. But the wheelchair symbol has stayed the same despite our
evolving attitudes and understanding of accessibility” (Inclusive Design
Research Centre, 2013).
When the competition closed in October 2013, over 100 designs had
been submitted, including entries from Brazil, Columbia, France, Germany,
Mexico, the United States, the UK, and Iraq. A panel consisting largely of
North American designers gathered to winnow the field.1 They narrowed
the competition to forty, and then six, before settling on a final two. And
then the competition stalled. The panel’s eleven members were unable to
reach a consensus and select a winner. In the end, the two finalists were each
awarded honorable mentions. One, conceptualized by students Taghreed
Al-Zubaidi, Julie Buelow, Yijin Jiang, and Arief Yulianto, introduced a series
of stylized “affinity” symbols, each in a different color or value (red, blue,
yellow, and gray-scale) and indicating a different need (Figure E.1). The
other, student Dalton Hadwen’s blue and white representation of an opening
door, was set inside a circle. Onley called both new symbols “brilliant.”
190 DESIGNING DISABILITY

FIGURE E.1  A range of symbols were created by a student design team for the
Reimagining Accessibility contest. One of two designs that earned an honorable
mention, this project features an infinity symbol in red, blue, and yellow. Stylized
symbols, representing a variety of individual disabilities, can be placed within the
larger design, 2013. Courtesy Julie Buelow.

But he also remarked that they still did not represent the complex needs
of people with disabilities. That, Onley admitted, was “far more complex
than we thought” (Reiti, 2013). More ambiguously, when his competition
 EPILOGUE: THE BEGINNING OF THE END? 191

co-chair, Sophie, the Countess of Wessex, addressed the award winners she
noted, “Even though you have not come up with the exact replacement,
what you do see here is the beginning of the end of the traditional symbol”
(jgeboers, 2013). But is this really the end of the older symbol? If so, what
is going to replace it? At the same time, who will decide what message the
replacement will send?
As this book has shown, it is simply not possible to reduce the development
of the access symbol to the work of an individual, a movement or industry.
From the outset, the symbol was debated and, one might even say, designed
by many different powers. It is the same today. Some critics like Frank
Bowe argue that “our objective now should be to abolish the symbol of
accessibility. America should have no need for it: a barrier free America
would require only a symbol of non-access to designate special-purpose
areas that are not accessible” (Bowe, 1978: 106). Others, meanwhile, see
the access symbol as an important opportunity to shape public perceptions
of disability. They argue “that representation matters; that public portrayals
of disabled people have effects and consequences which—though slippery,
diffuse and difficult to trace—are nevertheless ubiquitous and capable of
powerfully shaping disabled people’s lives in innumerable and very tangible
ways” (Sandell and Dodd, 2010: 3). This debate is not new. It turns on the
same issues that years ago drove early advocates for barrier-free access like
Timothy Nugent and Selwyn Goldsmith.
Of course any access symbol designed today must bear a heavy weight.
Designing a perfect symbol—a symbol that can be all things to all people—
is close to impossible. Officials at the ISO claim that any new symbol
must meet rigorous design standards. As one authority insists, “changes
must undergo extensive human factors testing to ensure adequate levels of
comprehension, recognition, and legibility for optimization in a roadway
environment” (Lindley, 2015). Because of this, international authorities are
reluctant to make even slight changes to the ISA—even though its original
design was haphazard at best. The symbol may be imperfect, it may be a
misfit, but the authorities seem to suggest, it is what it is.
In 2013, the same year as the Reimagining Accessibility competition,
the Boston Globe approached Joseph Kwan, the current chairman of
Rehabilitation International’s Commission on Technology and Accessibility
(ICTA) (that is, the group headed by Karl Montan and responsible for the
original design). What, the Globe asked, did he make of recent attempts
to redesign the access symbol? Kwan was quick to dismiss these efforts,
claiming “there will always be people who wish to redesign [images] to
satisfy their creative urges” (Baker, 2011). Barry Gray, chair of the ISO’s
committee on graphical symbols, was similarly dismissive. He homed in
on the Accessible Icon Project’s wheelchair figure, critiquing it for the very
reason that others embraced it. Noting that the new figure was too dynamic,
he insisted that it “has to work in static situations. Part of its job is to mark
wheelchair spaces in public transportation or indicate refuge in emergency
192 DESIGNING DISABILITY

situations, as well as lifts and toilets” (Choksi, 2014). Gray’s position (that
the image should literally reflect the kind of function it describes) reflects the
long-standing policy of the ISO. Seen from this perspective, the two great
advantages of the ISA are its static neutrality and its sheer ubiquity.
But this hasn’t stopped designers, organizations, and corporations from
proposing alternatives. Some have proposed a linguistic symbol. For instance,
several submissions to the Reimagining Accessibility competition proposed
a giant A, though these were quickly eliminated because the letterform was
judged too limited; the press was told that only five languages convey the
idea of “access” using words that begin with the letter “A” (jgeboers, 2013).
In recent years, other alternatives have been recommended. Microsoft marks

FIGURE E.2  In recent years, designers have struggled to develop an access symbol
that transcends the wheelchair image and remains applicable to newer technologies.
From DigitalVision Vectors, Getty Images.
 EPILOGUE: THE BEGINNING OF THE END? 193

accessible computer programs, usable for those with hearing and vision
impairments, with an “Ease of Access” symbol; similarly, Apple has launched
a blue and white symbol that resembles a squat, friendly Vitruvian man. The
latter has been imitated widely and billed as a “Universal Access” image.
Nevertheless, in the material world the wheelchair motif remains unrivaled.
At the same time, although the ISA is now posted all around the world
and indicates a shared commitment to access, as a symbol it remains
flawed. Taken literally, the figure suggests access for wheelchair users alone
(Figure E.3). Indeed, nearly every disabled person who is not a wheelchair
user can recall at least one occasion of being denied access simply because
they don’t look like the figure depicted on the symbol. Scholar Kelly
Fritsch, for example, tells how her disability meant she could not climb
the steep steps of an accessible bus. But the bus driver would let her use
the lift only if she were seated in a wheelchair. “I found myself in the
position of being both disabled and not disabled enough, or not disabled
in the right way,” she says. “When I pointed out this contradiction to the
bus driver, he shrugged his shoulders and commented: ‘Why don’t you just
get a wheelchair’ ” (Fritsch, 2013: 136). On the other hand, she notes that
when she uses a tandem bicycle (riding with a partner “who does most
the pedaling”), she has been told not to bring it on a rail car specially
adapted for disabled users to walk or roll through the door (and avoid the
steep steps at the entrances of many North American trains). When asked,
a train worker insists “No bikes allowed,” while “pointing to the blue
and white icon of the wheelchair mounted on the train walls” (Fritsch,
2013: 136). After she told these stories at a scholarly conference several
years ago she began to hear from other disabled people who revealed
similar tales. Each had been berated by security personnel or casual
onlookers, expelled from bathrooms, parking, and other accommodations
because, as she put it, “they did not ‘fit’ the register of being disabled”
(Fritsch, 2013: 136). At the small college where I teach, I’ve heard stories
of colleagues with cerebral palsy, post-polio syndrome, and “invisible”
neurological afflictions who have been hounded by passersby who insist
they “don’t look” disabled enough to use ADA-designated parking; I have
also engaged in long, circular arguments with college facilities managers
and ADA compliance officers, who remain convinced that the existing law
extends only to individuals who use wheelchairs. Thus they plan campus
accommodations around an idealized vision of wheelchair mobility.2
If the existing access symbol is ubiquitous, it is also deeply misleading.
The result of a compromise, it remains imperfect at best. In the past 100
years, most disabled people realize that the conditions of their day-to-day
lives have vastly improved. But the idea of access, and the laws meant to
enforce it, have not solved the problem of lack of access. And, in some ways,
the pervasive presence of the wheelchair symbol is misleading. It can suggest
that access for disabled people is no longer a pressing issue. Ultimately, any
solution to the lingering and very real problems of access that continue to
194 DESIGNING DISABILITY

exist must take the symbol—and all that it signifies—into account. Only
then will the ISA live up to its original promise.

Notes
1 The committee members were: Glenn Barnes, David M. Capozzi, Arlene
Dickinson, Frank Gehry Partners, Lizbeth Goodman, Paddy Harrington, Rabia
Khedr, Robert Probst, Bill Shannon, Gary Taxali, and Mark Wafer.
2 The result of this misunderstanding is that issues like distance and terrain can
be forgotten; after all, this erroneous logic follows, wheelchairs can travel easily
over longer stretches of paths and sidewalks. And so accommodations like
disabled parking lots can be moved away from the center of campus. If, as I’ve
seen, all accommodations for the mobility impaired are measured according to
an idealized understanding of wheeled access, parking for disabled people must
always make way for bike racks and pedestrian malls or can be transformed
overnight into loading docks.
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 BIBLIOGRAPHY 211

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 INDEX

able-bodied persons, life spans of 18 at Illinois 75

access 3 in Oklahoma 60
architecture of 98 signs 70
embodiment of right to 146 unpublicized 71
environmental 2 in Washington 61
history of 5 for wheelchair users 86
ideas and technologies of 2 Ackerman, Rudolf 27
insignia 113 “A Cry for Help” 163–175
problems of 28 active disability 143
signs for disabled students 73 stand-in for 34
structural changes for 132 active disablement
symbol (see access symbol) ideas of 173
universal symbol of 10 modern symbol of 36
accessibility 5, 63, 76, 83, 114, 133, activism 144, 146, 155
160, 189–192 Acton, Norman 132, 153
demonstration of 55 ADA. See Americans with Disabilities
Accessible Icon Project (AIP) 2, 10, Act (ADA)
175, 176, 180, 181, 185 adjustable spring mechanism 32
aggressive dynamism 177 affinity symbols 189
symbol 186 affirmative design 181
access symbol 8–9, 11, 16, 103, 104, AFPHP. See American Federation for
110, 144, 148, 162, 192. See also Physically Handicapped Persons
access (AFPHP)
basis for 122 aging 7, 42n.1, 114
in China 8 aids, mobility 18, 22
development of 191 AIP. See Accessible Icon Project (AIP)
by Don Meeker and Associates 164 ambulance 32
origins of 9 American car culture 49
proliferation of 121 American Civil War 7
rapid and global adoption of 153 American Federation for Physically
sheer multiplicity of 118 Handicapped Persons (AFPHP)
and signage 10 70–71
accommodations 10–11, 28, 34, 51, American Standards Association 10
73–74, 100, 121, 125, 136, Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA)
142, 144, 152, 154–156, 158, 3, 7, 155–158, 162
165 compliance 159
barrier-free access 85 animal symbol 116
for disabled persons 79 anthropometrics 64
environment of 55 Architect’s Journal (Goldsmith) 103
214 INDEX

Architectural and Transportation Bolin, Paul L. 50

Barriers Compliance Board 143, Brady, Matthew 30–31
157 Brando, Marlon 45–46
architectural barriers 77, 144 publicity photo shoot with 47
abolition of 102 with wheelchair 48
removal of 148 Breslin, Mary Lou 58, 71
Architectural Barriers Act 134, 144 Brewster, David 27
Architectural Guidelines of the Bright Victory (1952) 47
Americans with Disabilities Act Brodsly, David 48
155 Brown, Christy 165
architecture of access 98 Browne, H. K. 35
The Army (Kidd) 20–21 Buchanan, Beatrix 34
Arntz, Gerd 92 Bull, Nancy 83
art 184 Bush, George 155
Arthur, Paul 98, 110–114, 129
design for Expo 67 131 Califano, Joseph 150
Expo 67 pictograms 115–117 Calise, Victor 161, 163
frustration and weariness 160 Called Functional Training Week 75
success at Expo 67 125 camouflaging signs 103
wheelchair symbol 114–115, 122, Canadian insignia 100–101
129, 159 Canadian Red Ensign 99
Ashby-Sterry, Joseph 33 Canadian Rehabilitation Journal 132
automobiles 49 Canadian Research Council 98
autonomy 148 Canadian symbol 98–100, 103
novel sense of 49 Caniff, Charles 97
Cardus, Caroline 178
Bander, Charles 32 case-by-case basis 42
Bander’s chair, profile of 32 cerebral palsy 52
barrier-free access 144, 157 chair. See also wheelchair
American guidelines for 67 construction 32
civil rights to 144 folding 37
movement 47, 121 steel-bar 38
barrier-free architecture 10, 68, 81, users 51
88–90, 97, 101, 132, 152, 158 wheels, development of 32
barrier-free environment 154, 173 charity 6
“barrier-free” public space 59 Charing Cross Hospital 22
barriers 59, 87–93 cheerleaders, male and female 57
attack on 60–64 Chewing, Alan 165
inaccessible 97 Chicago convention (1965) 88
basis Chin, Gloria 75
case-by-case 42 chronic fatigue syndrome 7
state-by-state 62 citizenship, protections and duties of
Bath chair 27–8, 33, 34, 41, 77, 80 144
disdain for 34 civil rights 141, 143–145, 155, 157
how to behave in 33–37 campaign for 96
Belchick, Gerald 146 movement 10, 96, 142, 145
disabled students 146 Civil Rights Acts 155
The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) 47 Civil War 32
blue crutch days 36 collapsible wheelchair 48
 INDEX 215

Columbian Exhibition (1893) 30 cultures, mixture of 99

Columbian Roller-Chair Company 30 curricula in schools 126
combat fatigue 7 forms 5
common stock of signs 113 forms, “unity” of 111–112
communication 113 history of 10
systems 12 misfit 3–5
compliance 155–160 for real world 121–123; man and
conceptualization 58 environment 125–129; misfit
Cone, Kitty 58, 76 head 129–132; positive step
confusion 116 forward 132–136; technical aid
consumerism 181 123–125
Convention on the Unification of Road revolutionary introduction of 18
Signals 90 role in creating disablement 10
corporate identity 108–109 systematic program of 10
critical design 161–163 Designing for the Disabled
“A Cry for Help” 163–175 (Goldsmith) 84, 86, 87, 89, 101,
twenty-first-century makeover 103, 106
175–186 access symbol from 104
cross-disability protest 150 design missionary 111
Crow, Jim 96 DIA. See Disabled in Action (DIA)
culture Dickens, Charles 33
accessing 47–53 directional symbols, suite of 111
context of 16 disability 5, 6, 10, 77, 152
public’s attitudes toward mobility acknowledging and accommodating
49 121–122
of social welfare 79 aggressive attitude toward 107
custom-made wheelchair 37 approaches toward 81
attitudes about 18
Dalland, Olav 128 concept 4
Dawson, John 27 context of 16
day-to-day visibility 34 culture 79
DDA. See Disability Discrimination definition of 2–3, 5–8
Act (DDA) design for 125, 157
Deaf Power movement 151–152 different notions of 5
debabelization 92 discussion on media 167
Deffner, Hugo 60–62, 78 vs. environment 22
personal empowerment 78 forms of 7
troubled appearance in Washington global perceptions of 3
62 Goldsmith’s conception of 83
wheelchair 60 ideas of 10
defiance 155–160 laissez-faire approach toward 78
deinstitutionalization 7 nation’s sense of 63
de Majo, Willy 92 nature of 18, 58
demonstration project 105 non-ambulatory 108
dependency 62, 148, 187n.5 Nugent’s conception of 67
design 5, 184 positive discrimination and
barriers, attack on 9 psychology of 101–110
best-known landmarks in 5 problem of 3–4
for community 132 psychology of 110
216 INDEX

recognition of 4 discrimination
reconceptualization of 68 positive 101–110; form of 178
rights movement 5, 10 signs of (see signs of
semi-ambulatory 108 discrimination)
symbol 114 distinctive signs 75
symptoms and states of 7 Dombey and Son (Dickens) 35
thinking about 16–17 drawing sketches 128
types of 3 Dreyfuss, Henry 92
understanding of 7 1969 Dublin conference 123
workshop 127 Dunne, Anthony 181
Disability Discrimination Act (DDA) dynamism 152
155
disability-friendly atmosphere 28 “Ease of Access” symbol 193
disability groups 62 Ebert, Roger 76
protesting for inadequate housing Ebert, Walter Harry 77
149 Eisenhower, Dwight D. 52, 60, 61
disability rights activism 144 Ellseby, Richard 155
disability rights movement 5, 11, 132, environmental access 2, 71
143–146, 148, 150, 152 environmental misfit 9, 18–30
goals of 148 environment, hardscrabble 19
disabled access Epstein, Sigmund 20
experimental test site for 47 ergonomics 64
movement 47 European influence 111
public signage for 101 Everest, Herbert 37, 38, 40, 50, 71
symbol 98 Everest & Jennings’ (E&J) chair 38,
disabled bodies 9 41, 42, 46, 49, 80,
disabled community 118n.4 81, 85
disabled drivers 64n.1 advertisement for 82
disabled German veterans 77 ever-extending lifespan 7
Disabled in Action (DIA) 145 Expo 67 114
logo 147–148 Design division 118
disabled interlocutors 109 Expo graphics 113
disabled Italians 77–78 Expo wheelchair symbol 118
disabled mobility 9
disabled people 20, 83 Fairey, Shepard 184
accommodations for 10, 73 Fay, Fred 97, 151
broad-based coalition of 149–150 FDR’s rehabilitation center 43n.4
civil rights of 157 Federal Architectural Barriers Act 157
collective imagination of 97 feminist theory 4
‘differentness’ of 108 Feodorovna, Alexandra 43n.3
life spans of 18 figureless symbol 107
national coalition of 149 Finkelstein, Victor 5–6, 153
“rehabilitation” of 58 foldable wheelchair 41
secret signs of 98–101 folding wheelchair 37, 49, 71
Disabled Persons Act 152 Fotheringham, Aaron 177
disabled students 55, 59 fragility 27
access signs for 73 fresh symbols 105
parking facilities for 55 Friswell, James Hain 34
Disabled Students Organization 73 Fritsch, Kelly 193
 INDEX 217

Fulford, Robert 114, 116 standards of 125

Fuller, Buckminster 126 status of 125
fussiness 108–109 Gray, Barry 191–192
Great Exhibition (1851) 28–30, 33
Gallagher, Hugh 15, 41, 142 Greeves, Oscar “Bert” 80
Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie 4 Groce, Nora 58
Gehshan, Virginia 158 guerrilla activism 175
Gendron, Peter 32
Gerber, David 52 Hadwen, Dalton 189
Géricault, Théodore 18–19 Hall, Boylan 3
Gerrard, Marika 141 Hall, Ingersoll 3
Glenney, Brian 176, 177, 179, 186 Hamraie, Amie 154
Accessible Icon Project 181 hand-crafted cane 38
Goldsmith, Selwyn 69, 72, 78–79, 81, “handicapped keep out” signs 97
83, 87–89, 99–101, 108–109, hardscrabble environment 19
129, 133, 136, 152, 167 Hardy, Thomas 34
access signs 98 Harrison, Marc 155
advocate for disabled people 95 healthcare institutions, annual reports
approach of 182 of 33
barrier-free access 191 hearing aids 132
on barrier-free architecture 81 Heath, John 27–8
case for access signs 97 Heidi (Spyri) 34
conception of disablement 83 Hendren, Sara 176, 177, 179
Designing for the Disabled 83, 84, Accessible Icon Project 181
86, 87, 89, 101, 103, 106 Heumann, Judy 146
Expo 67 symbol 116 Hildreth, Brendan 186
ideas 85 hospital advice books 32–33
methodology 108 hospital-issued wheelchairs 32
Norwich design 131 human factors research 174
opinions of disabled people 108 human forms 91
pictorial symbol 107 humanism, role of 3
pilot project 110 human mobility
on practical things 86 human rights 2, 152, 153, 155
reading and discussions 113 activism 153
seminal study of accessible Hunt, Paul 153
architecture 84 Hurricane Sandy 163
signs 110 Hutton, Kurt 39
on special features 86
symbols designed by 105–106 ICOGRADA. See International Council
writings and research 110 of Graphic Design Association
gout chair 22–3 (ICOGRADA)
inventive mobility 25 ICTA. See International Commission
version of 25 for Technical Aids (ICTA)
government-sponsored initiatives 79 identity 92, 109, 110, 132, 142, 144,
graffiti art project 175 148, 162, 163, 166, 167, 179, 186
Graphical Symbols in 1984 134 ideology of welfare state 69
graphic design impairment 4, 50, 52, 57, 58, 62, 67,
annals of 101 81, 103, 124, 142, 145, 150,
power of 125 151, 154, 193
218 INDEX

forms of 22, 62 ISOTYPE (International System of

iconic 7 Typographic Picture Education)
mental/physical 7 92
mobility 7, 18, 36, 67 ITA. See Invalid Tricycle Association
inaccessible classrooms 51 (ITA)
individual groups 151
Industrial Revolution 18 Jasmin, Yves 116
information kits 133 Jeffery, Lyn 173
insignia 99 Jennings, Harry 37
institutionalization of disabled people 7
international access symbol 125, Kidd, William 20–1
133–134, 185 casual glimpse of disabled life 22
International Commission for King Louis XIV 24–5
Technical Aids (ICTA) 123 King, Martin Luther 143
International Council of Graphic King Phillip II of Spain 23–4
Design Association Kneebone, Peter 132–133
(ICOGRADA) 92, 125 Koefoed, Susanne 123, 128
international modernism, language of 131 access symbol designed by 122
International Organization for chair symbol 129
Standardization (ISO) 134 design 129
international pictogram standards 134 empty wheelchair design 123
international signage standards 185 original design 132
International Society for Crippled poster created by 128
Children 122–123 symbol of accessibility 160
International Society for Rehabilitation wheelchair symbol created by
of the Disabled in Stockholm 68 129–130
International Symbol of Access (ISA) Konstfack seminar (1968) 126
1–2, 38, 64, 123, 126, 132, 141, Kowalski, Stanley 45
144, 152, 156, 161, 166, 167, Krampen, Martin 112–113
175, 179, 180 Kwan, Joseph 191
conception 2
development of 10 label facilities 136
global ubiquity of 167 laissez-faire approach toward disability
official status 148 78
revisions to 10 The Lancet (journal) 22
symbols 8 landscape
variations on 150 rural 25
and wheelchair 18 urban 25
international system of signage 119n.6 Langford, Ken 71–72
international trade 92 language of international modernism
invacar 80, 81 131
invalid car 79, 80 Lembke, Daryl 142
invalid chair 32 Lewis, Jerry 167
invalid furniture 49 L’hermite, Jehan 22–3
Invalid Tricycle Association (ITA) 81, 83 life spans of able-bodied persons 18
ISA. See International Symbol of Lockhardt, Freda Bruce 38
Access (ISA) Los Angeles, wheelchair in 48
ISO. See International Organization for low-lying chairs 32
Standardization (ISO) Ludlum, Cathy 186
 INDEX 219

Mace, Ronald 154–155 Montreal Expo 1967 129

Magnani, Raimondo 77–78 Montreal fair, symbols for 112–113
Mampre, Susan 173 Montreal’s Expo 67 98
Martin, Pierre-Denis 24, 25 Moshe, Liat Ben 178
martyrdom 34 multilingualism 111
Massachusetts Association of issue of 114
Paraplegics 100 Murphy, Brendan 163–166
McArthur, Park 178 active wheelchair figure 173–174
International Access Symbol 178 designs 173
“mechanical” chairs 22 1993 design edit 186
mechanisms of modernity 38 remake of wheelchair symbol 176
medical care of elderly 54 revision of the International Symbol
medical facilities 54 of Access 168
medicalization of wheelchairs 31–33 reworking of ISA wheelchair figure
Meeker, Don 164–165 173
The Men (William) 45–46, 50 suite of signs 170–172
mental impairment 7, 157 symbols 173, 175
Merlin chair 25–6, 32, 38–39, 55 thumbnail sketches 167
Merlin, John Joseph 25 muscular dystrophy 52
ingenious mechanism 26 Mussolini 77–78
Miedema, Gary 114 My Left Foot (Murphy) 165
misfit
design 3–5 National Building Council 98
environmental 18–30 National Health Service (NHS)
sign for 12 wheelchairs 85
mobility 7, 8, 113 National Society for Crippled Children
aids 18, 22 and Adults (NSCCA) 88
devices 2 National Wheelchair Basketball
disabilities 28 Association 64n.2
to disabled and non-disabled people Neurath, Otto 92
51 New York parks symbol 131
impaired demonstrators 151 New York State Access Symbol 100,
impaired persons 3, 20 101, 113
impairment 9, 67 Nightingale, Florence 42n.2
personal 41 Nixon, Richard 149
public’s attitudes toward 49 No Barriers logo 87, 89
modernity 111 noddy car 80
mechanisms of 38 non-ambulatory disabilities 108
sign of 22 non-binding industry standards 68
modern mobility 38 non-disabled persons 20
modern wheelchair 15, 47, 68, 79–81, non-discrimination regulations 149
84, 113 non-wheelchair users 6
invention of 42 non-wheeled invalid chair 31–32
Montan, Karl 123 Nordic design 126
design intervention 131 normal 19, 71, 102–103, 107, 108,
engagement with issues of disability 115
123–124 normality 103
interest in rehabilitation engineering normalization 7
124 Norwich project 110
220 INDEX

Norwich symbol 110, 136 patent 32

no-stairs logo 88 Paxton, Joseph 29
Nugent, Timothy 56, 58–59, 63, 78, peace symbol 144
154 permanently disabled persons 20
approach toward disablement 67 personal mobility 9, 41
“Attack on Barriers” 77 personal politics of signs 67–69
attitudes of reformers 107 breaking barriers 87–93
barrier-free access 134, 191 good sign 69–77
on barrier-free architecture 68, 81 self-help 81–87
campaign against architectural social welfare cultures 81–87
barriers 88 welfare path 77–81
conception of disability 67 physical impairment 157
at conference in Oxford 87 physical mobility 9
efforts to promote access 77 physical normality 102
ethic 53–59 Polio Research Fund 83
ideas 83, 89 Polio Research Fund, Britain 83
kind of “orthodoxy” 69 Pomona’s Travels (Stockton) 33
line of reasoning 86 portable invalid chair 49
on needs of disabled students 73 positive discrimination 10,
personal empowerment 78 101–110
philosophy 89 form of 178
program 70, 76 notion of 95
recommendations 69 symbol worthy of 108
scheme 70 positive psychology 103
Stockholm speech 84 positive solutions 95
vision of a barrier-free world 63 Potter, Sarah 49
Powell, Justin 178
Office Systems (Ellseby) 155 prevarication 118n.1
Ogden, Charles 92 private individuals 32
old age 7, 42n.1, 114 Probst, Robert 159, 165, 173
Onley, David 189 professionalization of medicine 32
Open Door symbol 173 professional rehabilitation 133
Opie, Amelia 29 prosthetics 124, 131
optimism 17 protest, rights and 144–155
“orthodox” American approach 101 proto-wheelchair 25, 29
psychology of disablement 101–110
pan-Scandinavian Design Students public planning 28
(SDO) 126–129 public space 34
disability group 127 “barrier-free” 59
Konstfack summer seminar 131 pushcarts 27
seminar on “technical aids” 127 PVA. See Paralysed Veterans of
Papanek, Victor 122, 126 America (PVA)
Paralympics 8
Paralysed Veterans of America (PVA) race 29, 161, 177, 181
52, 62–63 racial segregation 10
Paralyzed Veterans Association 38 radical access symbol 10
Paraplegic Veterans 52–53 Rea, Peter 108
parking sign 183 recognizability 113
passing 7, 19, 77, 129, 141, 155–160 regional architecture 51
 INDEX 221

rehabilitation self-help
of disabled people 58 design culture 69
medicine 71 ideologies of 81–86
program 54, 58, 69, 76 self-identifying 33
Rehabilitation Act of 1973 134, 142, self-propelled chairs 80
149, 157 self-wheeled chair 25
rehabilitation department 57 semi-ambulatory disabilities 108
Rehabilitation Institution (RI) 143 semi-permanent wheelchair 53–54
Rehabilitation International (RI) 10, “sensitive” disabled people 106–107
122–123, 129–134, 152, 154, Shakespeare, Tom 4
191 Sigma Signs 73–74
conference in 1969 Dublin 173 signage, international system of 119n.6
control 153 signposting system 108
symbol 164–165 signs 158
wheelchair symbol 135 access to disabled people 97
Reimagining Accessibility contest 190 common stock of 113
Repository of Arts (Ackerman) 27 in public buildings 97
Retzinger, Jynny 141–145 universal of 111
confrontation in 1981 145 signs of discrimination 95–98
rheumatism 7 positive discrimination and
RI. See Rehabilitation International psychology of disablement
(RI) 101–110
Rider, J Haggard 31 secret signs of disabled people
rights. see also civil rights; human rights 98–101
and protest 144–155 universal sign 110–118
Rockefeller, Nelson 100 signs of protest 141–142
rolling chair 24, 77–78 compliance and defiance 155–160
Roosevelt, Franklin 15–18, 36–37, 52, rights and protest 144–155
61 selma of handicapped rights 142–144
death of 42 signs, personal politics of 67–69
use of wheelchair 42 breaking barriers 87–93
wealth and power 41 good sign 69–77
Rubin, Gayle 4 self-help 81–87
rural landscape 25 social welfare cultures 81–87
Rusk, Howard 97 welfare path 77–81
Silver, Long John 34
SAD. See Standards for Accessible skepticism 5
Design (SAD) Skewton, Cleopatra 33, 35
Scandinavian design 125 Smith, Mary-Ann 43n.3
school’s rehabilitation programs 56 social ills 78
scientific socialism 92 socialism 91–92
SDO. See pan-Scandinavian Design social welfare
Students (SDO) culture of 79; ideologies of 81–86
sedan chair 27 policies 102
segregation 96 system, Britain’s 81
debates on 2–3 social welfare system 81
signs 96 Society of Environmental Graphic
self-assertion 148 Designers (SEGD) 10, 159–160,
self-assurance 58 174
222 INDEX

space 22, 25, 29–31, 55, 56, 59, 76, 136 Tarschys, Rebecka 126
inaccessible 97 technical aid for disabled people
professional 125 123–125
public 7, 34, 59 technology 2, 7, 42, 49, 56, 84, 191
special parking 105 Temple, Shirley 17
urban 20 temporarily disabled persons 20
special aids 6 text- based access sign in China 8
specialized symbols 151 “therapeutic” chair 31–32
Spyri, Johanna 34 threshold 32
Standards for Accessible Design (SAD) Tim, Tiny 34
157 Titchkosky, Tanya 3
guidelines 159 Tomlinson, Nicholas 102
regulations 158 Toombs, Henry 63
state-by-state basis 62 training manuals 32–33
steel-bar chairs 38 transportation 28
Stein, Ken 150 traveling 32
Stevens, John 102, 103 Tremblay, Guy 52
Stevenson, Robert Louis 34, 36 Truman, Harry 52
stigma/stigmatization 15, 89, 101, 102, Tunstall, James 28
106–107, 114, 173
Stockholm design 126 Union of the Physically Impaired
Stockton, Frank R. 33 Against Segregation (UPIAS) 153
Streetcar Named Desire (William) 45 universal design 154–155
Stresa figure 91 Universal Design movement 154, 155
Stresa logo 148 universal recognizable symbol 154
Stresa symbol 89–90, 93 universal sign 110–118
stylized lily logo 88 urban landscape 25
Swedish Central Committee for urban spaces 20
Rehabilitation (SVCR) 123 US Architectural Barriers Act 69, 141
Swedish Fokus Society 124 US Barrier-Free Access Act 142
Swiss multilingualism 111 US disability rights movement 152
symbol 2, 114
access (see symbol) Victorian literature
“affinity” 189 margins of 33
creation 8–9 vision 7
of defeat 30–33 visually impaired button 169
definition 8–12
design and implementation 2 Wall, Marshall 76
designed by Goldsmith 106 welfare path 77–81
development of 16 welfare state approach 152
history of 2 Wendell, Susan 4
on Krampen 113 wheelbarrows 27
questions of 99 wheelchair 2, 9, 61, 68, 128
specialized 151 abstracted depiction of 112
universal of 111 and access 59
A Symbol for Disabled People accessible entry 70
(Goldsmith) 133 access sign 111
symbolism 99 access symbol 110, 146–147, 151
system of standard symbols 92 advertisement for 82
 INDEX 223

agitate for 22 semi-permanent 53–54

athletes competing 161 shape 131
bicycle-like wheels 101 significant rethinking of 37
conception and use of 30 silhouetted figure in 103
constructed for 20 symbol 3, 108, 130, 135, 151, 162,
constructed for human mobility 20 169; development of 10
custom-made 37 systematic knowledge about
design 38 accommodating 55
dissemination of 9 tandem with car 71
experiment in 9 transform 16
figure 163 use and disability 56
folding 36, 41, 46, 71 using students 51
hospital-issued 32 wheelchair user 5–6, 20, 51, 53–54, 56,
incompatibility of 102 58, 72, 115
International Access Symbol and 18 accessible accommodations for 152
invention of 9, 42 democracy for 121
King Louis XIV in 24 in Denver 151
logo 89–90, 155 furnishings and fixtures accessible
in Los Angeles 48 to 127
mechanics of 24 special needs of 67
medicalization of 31–33 wheeled culture of access 47
mobility 46, 47 Whitehouse, Roger 159
modern 18 Williams, Harrison 146
National Health Service (NHS) 85 William, Tennessee 45
obstacles to 50 wood chairs 38
in outdoors 17 work 4–7, 49, 67, 70, 71, 80, 84, 85,
picture of usage 84–85 88, 92, 102, 103, 111, 123, 124,
predecessors of 19–20 126–128, 133, 182, 184
proliferation of 9 World’s Fair in New York (1855) 30
protestors using 146
ramp, two-storied 72 Zames, Frieda 3, 4