Branding and Designing Disability

Reconceptualising Disability Studies

Elizabeth DePoy, Stephen Gilson

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780415635387
• eBook ISBN: 9781136203077
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Health Care Delivery
• Index: Social Sciences

Over the past fifty years, design and branding have become omnipotent in the market and have made their way to other domains as well. Given their potential to divide humans into categories and label their worth and value, design and branding can wield immense but currently unharnessed powers of social change. Groups designed as devalued can be undesigned, redesigned and rebranded to seamlessly and equivalently participate in community, work and civic life. This innovative book argues that disability as a concept and category is created, reified, and segregated through current design and branding that begs for creative change.

Transcending models of disability that locate it either as an embodied medical condition or as a socially constructed entity, this book challenges the very existence and usefulness of the category itself. Proposing and illustrating creative and responsible design, DePoy and Gilson include thinking and action strategies that are useful and potent for "undesigning", redesigning, and rebranding to meet the full range of human needs and to enhance full participation in local through global communities. Divided into two parts, the first section presents a critical examination of disability as a designed and branded phenomenon, exploring what exactly is being designed and branded and how. The second part investigates the redesign of disability and provides principles for redesign and rebranding illustrated with examples from high-tech to place-based sustainable strategies.

The book provides a unique and contemporary framework for thinking about disability as well as providing relevant design and branding guidance to designers and engineers interested in embodiment issues.

Part 1 Scope and craft

1 Branding, designing and marketing humanity

DOI: 10.4324/9780203093542-1

An ideology that cannot withstand intense challenge is invariably anti-progressive. Through questioning, ideas grow to be more robust and compelling.

(Randy Schutt, 2010)

Over the past thirty years, disability scholarship has joined hands with multiple dialogic fora, giving dynamic substance, multi-dimensionality, and complexity to its shape and scope. Disability has been invited into the humanities and the sciences for analysis and response, ascribing increasingly colorful hues to its scrutiny. Yet, the tug of war between disability as an “undesirable that individuals have” versus disability portrayed as impedance of human flourishing resulting from complex hostile or neglecting contexts continues to occupy much of the disability studies scholarship and discourse of the twenty-first century. We would suggest that this theoretical tension, while useful in the conceptual adolescence of disability studies, must grow into adulthood if profound, sustained, and broadened social change is to be realized within an increasingly advancing globalized, corporatized, market context.

Because of the contemporary hegemonic place and role of design in a market-driven environment situated within the visual and material cultures of the twenty-first century, we devote our work in this book to a careful examination of designing humans as category members within mythic divisions that are blockaded with vague and movable boundaries and contain unquestioned institutionalized beliefs. We argue that despite the existence of the word and the perception of disability as a real and stable entity, disability is an artifact of design and branding, with the current relativistic motifs and labels no longer useful in the twenty-first-century global market economic context. Hovering under the cultural radar of well-intentioned citizens and genuine helpers, be they laypersons or professionals, contemporary disability design is manipulative, employing diverse and surreptitious crafts and containment mechanisms that impose negative valuation, truncated rights, limited opportunity, and even poverty, on those branded with this title. But contrary to negative critique with no point beyond conceptual sparring, we follow the sage words of Randy Schutt which opened this chapter. Within questioning, we find opportunity guiding contemporary redesign and rebranding necessary to hasten and direct vital and timely social change.

In the introductory chapter, the context, analytic framework, and scope of the book are laid out. We begin with a short essay on how we arrived at this conceptual point and then commence the work of specifying definitions of design and branding and other constructs seminal to our thinking in this work. Equipped with clarity of lexical tools we then enter the world of design, in which concretes and ideas coalesce to create identity and signify value. We finish the chapter with examples and the “so what” of the book.

How we arrived at this point

Our formal but initially narrow entry into the designer house of human categories and thus disability began with personal queries about why equipment such as crutches and walkers were not widely diverse in design and material. Given the permanence of these accouterments and to some extent their adoption as body parts (Shannon, 2011), our initial curiosity focused on why has there been a failure to recognize these devices as part of one's outfitted, visible identity (Wolfendale and Kennett, 2011), particularly now that walking supports, canes, reading glasses, and now even bifocals, are available in commercial venues and allow choice of styles and prices.

However, once design thinking (Fast Company, 2006) entered our consciousness, we began to notice it more expansively in public, private, and subtle forms, inciting broader and more complex questions about proportions, spaces, places, objects, and subjects. Sleuthing through design scholarship and praxis specifically to answer questions about the origin of and evidence supporting contemporary design standards for accessible architectures, we came face to face with Vitruvian Man, DaVinci's masterpiece, depicting ideal man as eight heads tall with his genitalia located at “body central” (Gilson and DePoy, 2007; Lester, 2012). In essence, positioning Vitruvian Man as the human symbol of ideal proportions and thus the fundamental foundation for built environment dimensions, designs even the typical body as underwhelming, incorrect, and ill-fitting (Gilson and DePoy, 2007; 2011). Moreover, mass-produced items for negotiating and functioning within built environments, for example chairs (de Dampierre, 2006), operationalized the Vitruvian body as desirable, keeping the male imagery and mythic proportions omnipotent in design of public spaces, building standards and product design, even in a world which ostensibly celebrates diversity. Moreover, norming proportionality on a design which today would be diagnosed as acromegaly or gigantism seemed so very ironic to us, given the disdain for and ill fit of the atypical body within contemporary environments.

At least for us, a short dip into design was not possible, once its power had revealed itself in crafting valuation, meaning, opportunity, and more profoundly, the boundaries beyond which humanness is extracted from a living corpus. As process, product, and attribute, design, and its conceptual and crafted associates not only have a profound historical presence, but are omnipresent in contemporary times and thus beg for interrogation and analysis in constructing current conceptualizations and retooling the future of disability. Design is conceptually, functionally, and visibly activated as an intellectual and action agenda for understanding and praxis in the global context in which it is entrenched and used to benefit multiple agendas. We see design throughout the palpable and abstract awaiting full engagement.

Before moving to substance, we take on anticipated skepticism about the central tenets of this work. In this book, we situate social change within context, not in opposition to it. In a screen-mediated world, we would suggest that strategies such as sit-ins, protests, and occupations are useful in raising awareness but not sufficient, by themselves, to produce fundamental change. While we agree with indictments of the market economy as in part causal of disparity and inequity, those issues are not the substance of this book as they are much broader and longitudinally enduring than the change that we are advocating and believe can start to occur now. Because our universe is an expanding playground for marketing, branding, and design with capitalism seen as the “bad boy” of many narratives, we would suggest the stories need to change. Marrying market strategies to art, science, and philosophy provides the intellectual material for innovation that does not throw the proverbial bad boy baby out with the bathwater. Nor do we believe that the market will move over and contract so that others can move in. So, given the permanency of market thinking, along with its successful actors and strategies, this book argues for the use of what will remain constant, but reframed within fairness, thoughtfulness, choice, and respect for humanness.

A second point that we emphasize and introduced at the beginning of this chapter, building on disability as constructed, is the challenge to understanding disability as a stable or useful category. Undesigning the fiction of disability and the beliefs that surround its fabled constancy is the essential prerequisite to diverting energy away from inaction and channeling it into eliminating designed inequality.

So let us begin with the precision of lexical clarification.

Defining design

Looking back to the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the term design was used to describe a scheme, mark, or designation. Perhaps because of its origin as scheme, Terzidis (2007) distinguishes the process of planning, which he refers to as scheming, from designing, a creative, imaginative act.

According to Terzidis (2007), the word design emerged in part from classical Greek, in which it designated incompleteness, “the strive to capture the elusive” (p. 1). Over the years, design has taken on expansive and vague proportions, denoting a range of properties of an entity, of thinking and creative process, of deliberate intentionality, and beyond. The quotation below illustrates this scope.

Design: Design is the planning that lays the basis for the making of every object or system. It can be used both as a noun and as a verb and, in a broader way, it means applied arts and engineering. As a verb, “to design” refers to the process of originating and developing a plan for a product, structure, system, or component with intention. As a noun, “a design” is used for either the final (solution) plan (e.g. proposal, drawing, model, description) or the result of implementing that plan in the form of the final product of a design process. This classification aside, in its broadest sense no other limitations exist and the final product can be anything from socks and jewelry to graphical user interfaces and charts. Even virtual concepts such as corporate identity and cultural traditions such as celebration of certain holidays are sometimes designed. More recently, processes (in general) have also been treated as products of design, giving new meaning to the term “process design.”

(http://en.wikademia.org/About_design)

The definition above begins to reveal the immense reach of design, not only as multiple entities, but in diverse contexts, some crisply delimited and visible and others ethereal.

Ascription of the term “hybrid thinking” to design adds yet another dimension to the construct, characteristic of post-postmodern disciplinary marriages. In this vernacular, design thinking refers to a well-informed problem solving process with intentionality of outcome always held in the spotlight (Lockwood, 2009). Yet, the elements of visual décor, recognition of planfulness, usability (Fukasawa and Morrison, 2007), and/or style inhere in the process, distinguishing it from other methods of problem solving and its reliance on multiple fields of knowledge differentiating design from hybrid thinking. In hybrid approaches, problems are both defined and resolved by an orchestra rather than a soloist or even a quartet. As such, design became one of the most significant and powerful influences both in reflecting and shaping social and political phenomena, and as asserted by Fry, is now compulsory as the agent for political change.

A future worth having requires political transformation of social and economic life, underpinned by a praxis more capable of enabling directing and maintaining affirmative change than existing institutions of democracy (for they lack the appropriate nous and techne) … The kinds of changes that are so vital require another kind of politics united with dynamic transformative agency… A task of such magnitude requires ma...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Foreword
• PART 1 Scope and craft
• PART 2 Undesigning and redesigning
• Index