Historian, Elizabeth Guffey: One of the fundamental experiences of disability is feeling that the world was designed for somebody other than you.
I’m Elizabeth Guffey, a professor of art and design history, but I also identify as a disabled person.
We’re in front of the Accessible Icon Project from the mid-2010s.
The original symbol was conceived in the late 1960s. It’s a blue-and-white drawing of a wheelchair, seen from the side, with a circle placed on top of the chair’s back, which becomes the head of the disabled person. There have been people who’ve tried to remake that symbol over the years, because it’s so static and it just looks inhuman.
So, Sarah Hendren—she had a disabled child—she and Brian Glenney decided, let’s do an interventionist art campaign, in which we make stickers that we place around Boston over this static, lifeless figure. What they’ve tried to do is depict a wheelchair user leaning purposefully forward in motion, and it really is signaling that the disabled community is filled with people who are dynamic and active.
We need to be more cognizant of the ways we think about disability more broadly. Disability is not a tragedy, it’s not a liability. It’s just part of being human. One of the things that design does is that it can normalize things or it can make people seem less normal. This symbol forms an acknowledgment of that problem, and it’s a realization that how we design the world makes a difference in how all of us are living in it.