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On July 5, 1978, a handful of activists rolled their wheelchairs in front of two buses at the Colfax and Broadway transit stop in downtown Denver. They held cardboard signs with “Freedom rider” and “Buses are for everyone” written on them and repeated the incisive chant, “We will ride!” The Denver Regional Transportation District (RTD) had just released a fleet of new buses intended to improve transportation. But only ten buses in the entire city had wheelchair lifts. The activists, known as the Gang of 19, stayed on the street overnight. Eventually, the city agreed to add lifts to at least a third of the fleet.
Public transit systems are ostensibly meant for general use, yet many Canadian and American cities are still undergoing costly renovations to adapt infrastructure not built with a broad view of the human experience. At least 3.6 million Americans don’t leave their homes because of a disability, testifying to modes of transportation that have forgotten or ignored them.
We are all surrounded by designs that work for some people while alienating others. Everyday items like paring knives, scissors, and other tools with hand grips are primarily designed for right-handed people; food packaging and medication bottles are often hard to open for those with limited mobility or hand strength. Most people, as a result, navigate their environments with varying degrees of frustration and difficulty, while those with the greatest disabilities are routinely excluded.
Light switches were once placed high on walls—beyond easy reaching distance of children or people who use wheelchairs. (Today, the standard height for light switches is around forty-eight inches, a carefully chosen number based on a range of height distributions.) This example shows how designs intended for the “average human” cannot rely on an abstract, anonymous idea of a person. Real people, not simplified templates, are essential to determining the right height for a switch so that most people can turn on a light.
An alternative approach to cookie-cutter defaults is universal or human-centred design. Human-centred designs consider a range of user scenarios and develop tools that can be used in a variety of ways. For instance, iPhones have a screen-reader function that allows blind people to explore the screen with a finger, activating buttons by using a different action, such as a double tap. People with visual impairments can adjust text size. Functions like texting and video calling provide a way for deaf people to communicate by writing or signing over distances, while people with limited mobility can navigate their phones using spoken commands.
Denver’s bus protest, organized by American Disabled for Attendant Programs Today (ADAPT), played a key role in the disability rights movement that led to the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act over a decade later. Thanks to the advocacy of countless disability rights groups in both Canada and the United States, public wheelchair lifts, elevators, tactile strips, and audio signals are more common today than in the 1970s. Yet these changes were introduced slowly and with reluctance. Attorney John Holland filed a lawsuit against the RTD in 1977 over their inaccessible buses. It took months of litigation and the Gang of 19’s highly publicized protest for the RTD to agree to make adjustments. This is an all-too-familiar story when it comes to accessibility. Change at the civic level comes down to costs and logistics and is by its nature slow.
How do we argue for human-centred design in our communities while doing the uphill work of reforming government policies? Three principles can help us. First, the adaptations most of us will participate in shaping are small-scale, community-level ones. When we work together to solve practical inclusion problems affecting us or our neighbours, the resulting changes are more effective and achievable. Second, we all benefit from living in communities that recognize the diversity of human needs and limitations—whether we use those adaptations our whole lives or just for seasons. And finally, human-centred designs are a way to resist views that reduce human persons to their productivity output or level of independence.
Human-centred designs are a way to resist views that reduce human persons to their productivity output or level of independence.
Mutual accommodation and respect offer a starting point, especially with competing priorities and needs. For instance, Brigitte McCauley-Philion works with others to adapt her environments so they are deaf-friendly. Brigitte, who is an American Sign Language teacher and an education assistant for children with disabilities, enjoys meeting with a group of friends from Ottawa’s deaf community at the Second Cup on Bank Street. Over time, the baristas have gotten to know the group and have learned finger spelling and a few words in sign language. They’re used to the friends ordering by typing their drink choices on their phones. The café’s tables and chairs are arranged in long straight rows, not conducive for sign language. So, every time they come, the group rearranges the cushy chairs at the back of the café into a semicircle so they can sign to each other. Before leaving, they put the chairs back in rows.
The arrangement is simple, but it works. “Be willing to see the practical, small examples right in front of you—what works and makes sense,” Brigitte says. At Second Cup, she doesn’t have to navigate common communication barriers, such as cashiers using exaggerated hand gestures or reacting nervously when she asks to record on her phone so she can translate their speech to text. Because such adaptability is not the norm, Brigitte mostly opts to return to places where she is known. Yet the solutions aren’t overly complex or expensive. A small amount of awareness and adaptability on the part of others goes a long way to aid communication. Additional considerations would improve her ability to interact in other environments, such as text appearing on a screen when an order is ready versus only being called aloud. Changes like this are low cost but would expand her options.
“It’s a form of loving your neighbour—to partner with them,” says Stephanie Massicotte, who works as a crisis counsellor trainer. “You can’t collaborate if you don’t respect the other person and actually want to know what they have to say and what they bring to the table.” Stephanie, who has used a wheelchair since childhood, appreciates when one of her friends shares the responsibility of calling ahead to ensure a restaurant is wheelchair accessible before making a reservation. She coordinates with family members to move about Ottawa. (The cost to retrofit a vehicle so she could drive without use of her legs is $100,000, so she opted for a passenger-side lift instead.) “I have to be able to communicate what I need, but we also need to collaborate to figure out solutions that could work for everybody,” Stephanie says. “Can we come up with a Plan A, Plan B, or even a Plan C that works reasonably well, where everybody is respected and everybody is trying their best?”
Jacob’s Well, a community for marginalized people in Vancouver’s lowest-income neighbourhood, is built on the premise of mutuality and committed friendships. One part of the weekday rhythms of worship, recreation, and food is the Thursday night Bible study. Almost everyone who attends has some form of physical or mental disability or low social flexibility.
Around seven in the evening, people start to trickle into the small street-level room, helping themselves to hot drinks, cookies, and fruit. The chairs are brightly painted: one is blue with white clouds and a yellow sun; another is festooned with colourful scribbles like a wild ball of yarn. Photographs and artwork by community members hang on strings, held up by clothespins. Bibles and hymn binders, their covers soft and worn, are scattered across the tables.
The evening begins with singing hymns—loudly, joyfully, and off tempo. Someone taps a djembe while another strums a guitar. People wander in and out. They intersperse prayer requests with tangents about childhood memories or drama witnessed on the street last week. One man serves everyone watery hot chocolate—appearing with another mugful as soon as anyone manages to finish the first. These interjections are part of the flow, incorporated into the shape of the Bible study instead of being treated as disruptions.
Heath Meikle, the pastor who leads the study, has ADHD, which is part of what sparked him to also plant a church in the neighbourhood for people who are neurodivergent. Along with others in the community, he developed the study’s structure by focusing on who it was for and experimenting with them to find something that works. They concentrate on group participation and combine different learning styles—with auditory, visual, and hands-on elements. Heath kicks off the discussion by giving a recap of last week’s Bible passage, drawing illustrations on a whiteboard. He then asks a question, such as “Have you ever been a guest somewhere and had to eat something you didn’t like just to be polite?” The questions are loosely related to the text being studied, but their primary function is to give people an opportunity to tell their stories and let out verbal energy.
One regular attendee, an aging man with a sloping posture and a shy smile, struggles to express his ideas in words. Everyone else remains quiet while he makes several tries to respond to the question of the night: Have you ever changed your mind about something? Finally, the words emerge: you can change your mind through perspective and perseverance. He cracks a grin when Heath incorporates this nugget into his summary of what the group shared that night. “I’m burdened by the fact that we need each other—we just don’t always know we need each other,” says Heath. “I need everybody at the Bible study because I grow and I understand God better through the variety of [his people].”
This is another mindset shift that can help us grasp the importance of human-centred design: We all need each other in a variety of ways. When designs exclude certain people, those environments lack the perspectives and personalities of individuals who cannot readily participate. This kind of exclusion risks making interdependence less visible, prompting us to forget that it is commonplace. As children, we depend on our parents to feed, dress, and carry us. As we age, we rely once again on others to help us navigate icy sidewalks, use confounding new apps, or lift grocery bags laden with tomato soup cans and a ham roast.
One in four Americans and 27 percent of Canadians have some type of disability. Those numbers are growing, especially as our senior populations increase. And these statistics do not include those with temporary illnesses or injuries, or those with other physical vulnerabilities, such as pregnant women. Our lives go from dependence to dependence, with a greater span of independence (for many of us) in between. We cannot ignore our own dependence or the dependence of others. Each of us will benefit from designs that can adapt to different limitations—if not now, then in the future. If not us, then as we care for someone we love.
Accepting the dignity of human bodies—their diversities, frailties, and finitudes—transforms our framework of care. It means care is not earned by productivity or how little trouble we manage to produce for others.
Those of us whose bodies currently have significant needs have the most to gain from a robust view of the body’s dignity and the most to lose if we don’t get it right. “The narrower our ideas about whose bodies matter—who is our neighbor—the less likely we will be to help, love, or even see others,” writes journalist and writer Leah Libresco Sargeant. “And with the body unacknowledged, it is easier to overlook the more permanent but more elusive soul.” Accepting the dignity of human bodies—their diversities, frailties, and finitudes—transforms our framework of care. It means care is not earned by productivity or how little trouble we manage to produce for others. It means we design structures and shape communities with and for the most vulnerable.
We are fearfully and wonderfully made; our bodies are also humblingly temporary. As our society ages, this finitude will become an increasing public concern. If we accept our own dependencies, this will soften our hearts to love others who require more care. It should also spur us toward designs that prioritize a range of experiences. Those at the Jacob’s Well Bible study, for instance, are often excluded and forgotten in inflexible environments that don’t adapt to include their behaviours, movements, and appearances. Not only does that exclusion isolate them, but the wider community is poorer because of their absence. Social and physical structures shaped to welcome a diversity of people are a way of visibly affirming that human value is not based on units of productivity. By adopting designs that aid real people in our lives, we keep our efforts targeted and personal, finely tuned to the intricacies of individual needs. In this way, our built world’s defaults can become more hospitable—one lift, ramp, and semicircle at a time.
