Doing disability differently

This article looks at how design for disability might be more creatively reconceptualised. When grounded in accessibility and compliance, design tends to perpetuate historically stereotyped divisions between disabled and able individuals; it is unable to get far beyond architectural Modernism's simplistic and functionalist concepts of the generic user. Even OMA's rightly celebrated 1998 Villa in Bordeaux, for a wheelchair user and his family, is troubling in this respect. The same architects' more recent Maggie's Centre in Gartnavel, Glasgow, represents a far more radical programme of design for disability. It shows that, like every other aspect of design, disability can be negotiated within a range of messy parameters. To call for architects to rethink disability as generative and creative is not to criticise them for not being inclusive enough but is intended to open the way for new forms of questioning to become embedded in education and practice. (Quotes from original text)