BELOW Visitors to a school for the blind in Tustin, California, are blindfolded to allow them to experience sightlessness as they are served lunch

DESIGN / FEATURE

“They may end up with a sense that disability is tragic and isolating, rather than a common experience”

Men’ era of sleek modernist furniture and suburban conformity feels far removed from our present interest in diversity and inclusion. Still, Moore’s methods are alive and well. In a design world seeking diverse perspectives, simulating disability with the goal of garnering empathy is a common and well-endorsed practice. But all along, disabled people themselves have objected to these experiments, saying they dramatise disability and exclude disabled audiences.

Today, empathy exercises and disability simulations are highly controversial practices. By understanding why they remain beloved in centres of contemporary design and how they fail, we can discover much that is often hidden about the realities of the current state of design for disability and why disabled people often continue to feel excluded from the design industry at large.

The experiment Moore took up in the 1970s has become a familiar part of many design practices and classrooms. In 2000 the famed Silicon Valley industrial design firm IDEO, the foremost practice for ‘design thinking’, published its Method Cards, a set of 50 prompts for creative thinking around design problems. Among the cards are so-called Empathy Tools: suggestions that designers ‘use tools like clouded glasses and weighted gloves to experience processes as if you yourself have the abilities of different users’. On the back of the card is a pair of hands wearing thick ski gloves, holding a push-button mobile flip phone. The exercise, the image implies, might reveal the difficulty of operating such a phone with limited manual mobility.

Empathy tools, like many of the IDEO methods, are intended to bring groundbreaking new approaches to design. Indeed, major companies took up these kinds of exercises throughout the 1990s and 2000s. Design teams wore blindfolds or scratched goggles, donned heavy gloves, or performed housework wearing weighted backpacks to simulate the declining mobility of ageing and disabled consumers. These practices were also common outside of design firms, in museum staff MAR M A D U K E S T

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