Universal Inclusive Accessible

Access: The power, opportunity, permission or right to come near or into contact with someone or something. How do you seize an opportunity? How do you enact a right? Who grants access? These questions are inseparable from the material effects that designers impress upon the world. Precisely because we give form to the forces that structure our daily lives, designers always inform, enact, and enforce access. Sparked by an initial interest in design for disability, this project evolved to explore the ways in which the built environment inherently defines and limits access and to test the conventions of design. The works presented here bring words and images together to evoke the cluster of material and immaterial channels of access that spread throughout our world and to highlight the complexity of an issue that on the surface seems so simple to resolve. Universal, inclusive, accessible: combined with design, each adjective defines a different mode of imagining and materializing the relationships between us humans and the world. Do we design for our differences? Our similarities? What answers can designers give to these questions? Are there answers? Maybe not, but there can always be improvement.