As part of the Walker's presentation of Designs for Different Futures (on view now), we will be publishing a number of texts from the exhibition catalogue (Yale University Press, December 2019), exploring the ways in which designers create, critique, and question possible futures, big and small. The exhibition was organized by the Walker Art Center, Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Art Institute of Chicago.
This conversation took place by phone on December 12, 2018, with Aimi Hamraie at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Jillian Mercado at home in Los Angeles, and exhibition co-curator Michelle Millar Fisher in her office at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Michelle Millar Fisher (MMF)
For readers who aren’t familiar with you, could you both state briefly what you do, and what matters to you about doing it?
Aimi Hamraie (AH)
I’m a professor at Vanderbilt University. I study disability and the design of the built environment, and I wrote a book called Building Access: Universal Design and the Politics of Disability [2017]. This work is important to me because I think we have to understand how the world is made so we can change it.
Jillian Mercado (JM)
I’m a model and activist, and my job is really important because, growing up, I didn’t see representation of people who looked like me, or of any disability whatsoever. So I try really hard to make sure that we are seen and we are heard, especially regarding disability rights.
MMF
Designs for Different Futures looks at the way design intersects with different possible futures, but before we look forward, can you talk a bit about how you see design today intersecting, or not, with bodies that fall outside of normative or idealized categories?
AH
Some of the things that I study as a historian of the built environment, including architecture and urban design, include simple architectural features like the prevalence of stairs, which create barriers for wheelchair users. There are a lot of ways that ideologies are being encoded in built environments that tell us what kinds of bodies are valued or devalued. Right now I’m doing a project about how cities are trying to promote health through the built environment—by building more bicycle lanes, for example. But they’re assuming that everyone can easily get around on a bicycle and has the energy to expend on that. There are a lot of examples of ways that the built environment assumes that able-bodied people are the norm.
MMF
Jillian, how about you?
JM
I think that there is a lot of assuming going on. I always say that you can’t make a new law or regulation without having us [disabled people] in the conversation. There are
a lot of people who are talking for us and not with us. We need to hire people who have disabilities to be part of the team when changes or regulations are being made. In my world, social media has been such a big help in allowing me to give a voice to a situation; I have a privilege and am grateful for that. I do think that slowly but surely our voices are being heard, but there are so many things that frustrate me, like transportation. I’m in California, and Uber just started putting accessible cars on the road. I guess people are now noticing that we also go out, and we also have lives, and it’s not necessarily going to a hospital all the time.
MMF
When designers speculate on different futures, they often forget to think inclusively and holistically. You’ve just spoken about that in terms of decision-making processes related to design. Is there anything you want to add as to why this would be so?
AH
My colleague Alison Kafer wrote a book called Feminist, Queer, Crip [2013], and it’s about the question of why, when we think about the future, we don’t think about disability. In the book she analyzes some works of speculative fiction in which there is no disability or there are eugenicist principles like elimination of disability. Something she says that I think is really interesting is that when we only think about disability medically, then we always think that medicine is going to eliminate disabled people from the future because we have faith in cure and rehabilitation. If, instead, we listen to disabled people and think about the way we are surviving apocalypses that are happening in the present—and being very skillful and resourceful in inventing ways to overcome very difficult circumstances, like inaccessible built environments—then we have a different view of the future.
People are writing disability speculative fiction now in which they try to imagine future worlds that are accessible. I’m writing a paper right now about a novel that imagines a postapocalyptic city in which the first thing people do is retrofit all the houses to be accessible. It’s individual imagination—but also the ideology that we take from medicine rather than from disability culture—that shapes the ways we think about the future as having disability or not having disability.
JM
I’m nodding at everything you’re saying. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been in speaking-engagement situations where they’ve hired me a while before, and then when I get to the place, they’re like, “Oh, sorry, there’s no ramp.” How does this slip their minds? So now when I’m hired to go somewhere and they ask, “Is there anything else you need?” I’ll say, “Well, just make sure I can get in.” Architecturally, this world was not made with us in mind, yet this is where we live. I’m always associated with a medical term rather than seen as just living my life, the same way somebody born with brunette hair or reading glasses is living theirs. And even though my chair is full-on future technology—it goes into a standing position, which is crazy—I’m a very simple person, and I just want to take a shower every single day, you know? There are a lot of places, even apartment buildings, that don’t consider that at all. So it’s really important to have conversations like this, and to have essays and books being written about these topics.
MMF
Designers are often very focused on prosthetic products that can be applied to the external body. Instead of redesigning the future body, how would you redesign future societies with disabled persons in mind?
AH
I have disabilities related to sensory processing, and I also get chronic migraines. Right now, when you go into a public space there’s LED lighting everywhere, and it’s presented as a way of conserving energy for the future. But that makes it impossible for me to go there, and it forces me to wear prosthetics. I have specific glasses that I have to wear when I’m around LED lighting, and I also have to wear special earplugs. This used to be an issue only in certain buildings, but now it’s everywhere. So if I were designing a different future, I would think about ways of conserving energy that don’t create that kind of sensory situation for myself and others like me. And lighting is only one source of energy consumption in the world. Industries also use tons of fossil fuels, but instead of forcing industries to change on a deep structural level, we’re putting the onus on individual consumers of light bulbs and other products. So, for me, an accessible world is one that shifts the burden off of disabled people and also asks what the user experience of all these new technologies is, and who are they potentially harming—and then finds different solutions, and on an appropriate scale. That’s a very different way of thinking about accessibility that’s not just about certain checklists that we can apply to the built environment.
JM
Many people have said to me, “Oh, but we have a ramp.” Does that mean you’re now accessible? No. The fact that you said LED lights hurt your eyes, Aimi—that indicates that obviously designers aren’t considering making things accessible for everyone. A store, a building, whatever the built space, you want it to be accessible for literally every single person. So, as I said earlier, when building a public place, even a residential place, you can’t do the project without having us in the group, in the whole planning process.
MMF
Are there any examples of designing for the futures of disability that are happening right now, from print and magazine culture to architecture and product and industrial design, that you think really hit the mark—that you’re excited about?
JM
There’s a prosthetic company, ALLELES Design Studio, that does amazing designs on prosthetic leg covers. They’re just so beautiful. This is something that people don’t think about. Equipment like canes or anything that’s considered medical is always lacking in design.
MMF
How about you, Aimi?
AH
My colleague Sara Hendren is a designer and a design researcher. She does really amazing work that calls into question who we think of as a designer, and how we think about accessibility. She’s worked directly with disabled people who engage in design practices in their own homes but are not usually recognized as doing design or engineering, and she catalogues their practices and their hacks to show that disabled people are often real experts on design. She has a project called Engineering at Home, among many others. There’s also some really interesting disability-adjacent fashion design happening right now that I think is really cool. Sky Cubacub of Rebirth Garments creates conceptual fashion pieces that are handmade and bespoke for disabled and gender-nonconforming people. Alice Wong is an activist I really admire …
JM
Oh, I love her.
AH
She runs the Disability Visibility Project. She’s created so many different ways for disabled people to communicate and talk about disability culture using fairly simple technologies like a Twitter hashtag.
JM
I also want to acknowledge Microsoft because they’re doing so many great things, as far as gaming, for almost every single disability. There are so many designers who are doing specific lines for people who have disabilities. Two Blind Brothers did a whole T-shirt line focused on people who have visual impairments.
MMF
Jillian, could you say a few words about your cover for Teen Vogue? In the interview in that issue [September 5, 2018], you said, “I always knew that there was a hole in the fashion industry.” How do you see disability represented in the field of fashion today, and what are the ways you hope it might evolve in the future?
JM
I just didn’t see myself being represented at all, in any aspect of the industry, in a mass-media kind of way—not in magazines or on television, or honestly anywhere that the masses would be able to see. So I took it upon myself to really dig deep into the backstage of the fashion world—which for me was business because I studied marketing—and our mindset when it comes to disability. I wanted to represent what wasn’t there.
MMF
This discussion we’re having is predicated on our own social positions and experiences. I wondered if, through your work and research, you’ve observed different approaches to designing for disabled bodies in other places. For example, walking through the city of Tokyo recently, I didn’t understand at first what the tactile paving was—that it was to help visually impaired people navigate the city. Are there other cities that have forward-thinking design plans?
AH
I think San Francisco and Denver—places where the disability rights movement has a really strong history—are important. And I would also say that the internet is an important place. Since the invention of the internet there has been an explosion of the disability community in ways that wouldn’t have happened otherwise because people couldn’t get in contact with each other.
JM
I’ve had so many people come up to me and say that they don’t see a lot of people with disabilities “out” like I am. So with the internet, the community of people with disabilities has exploded because we’ve gotten tired of not enjoying what this earth and this world have to give us. With us talking online and with social media, I think that people are now really hearing us and seeing that we exist. We do. We should have the same basic rights, and we’re not asking for too much. We just want to live as comfortably as everybody else.
There’s a wheelchair company called Scewo making chairs that will potentially help to go up steps. Stairs are kryptonite for me. And so the future is slowly but surely coming up with different things to make our lives a little bit better. We need to be the ones who are on top of it to make sure that it’s not a trend, but a way of life. ▪︎
JILLIAN MERCADO is an American fashion model and disabilities activist. She studied merchandising management at New York’s Fashion Institute of Technology and worked for the photographer Patrick McMullan and Tumblr before becoming creative director of We the Urban magazine. She has appeared in print and television campaigns for Diesel denim, Olay, Bumble 100, Calvin Klein fragrance, Nordstrom, Target, and Tommy Hilfiger. In September 2018 she was featured on Teen Vogue’s first digital cover.
AIMI HAMRAIE is assistant professor of medicine, health, and society and American studies and director of the Mapping Access Project at Vanderbilt University, Nashville. Hamraie’s interdisciplinary scholarship bridges critical disability, race, and feminist studies; architectural history; and science and technology studies. Their publications include Building Access: Universal Design and the Politics of Disability (2017).
MICHELLE MILLAR FISHER is the Ronald C. and Anita L. Wornick Curator of Contemporary Decorative Arts at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Her work investigates intersections of power, people, and design. She is currently collaborating on the book and exhibition Designing Motherhood. Previously she worked at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art, New York, where she co-organized Items: Is Fashion Modern? (2017) and Design and Violence (2015).
The catalogue was produced by the Philadelphia Museum of Art, with design by the Walker Art Center. It was edited and conceived by the exhibition’s curators: Emmet Byrne, Design Director and Associate Curator of Design, Walker Art Center; Kathryn B. Hiesinger, The J. Mahlon Buck, Jr. Family Senior Curator and Michelle Millar Fisher, formerly The Louis C. Madeira IV Assistant Curator in the department of European Decorative Arts after 1700, Philadelphia Museum of Art; Maite Borjabad López-Pastor, Neville Bryan Assistant Curator of Architecture and Design, and Zoë Ryan, formerly the John H. Bryan Chair and Curator of Architecture and Design, the Art Institute of Chicago.
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Text and compilation © 2019 Philadelphia Museum of Art, Walker Art Center, and The Art Institute of Chicago
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