Accessing Design / Designing Access

Written By Architecture Writing Workshop .

A conversation with Hannah Wong
February 2024

The vast array of initiatives in the architectural field reveals ongoing efforts to include diverse voices in classrooms, practices, and beyond. Yet rarely do we examine the infrastructure of long-established rules and conventions based on which architects operate and design the built environment. How do these ingrained frameworks affect designers and users of diverse backgrounds? Are there alternative approaches to design that are yet to be explored?

Hannah Wong speaks with AWW guest editor Paul DeFazio about her experience as the first legally blind student at Harvard Graduate School of Design, her approach to disability as a designer, and the promise of access intimacy for pedagogy and practice.

Paul DeFazio (PD): When you’re applying to jobs, or when you applied to school, how and when do you choose to disclose your disability?

Hannah Wong (HW): Because architecture is such a visual field, being blind has some implications—and people are either going to accept that or not. If a school or an employer is going to reject me for my disability, I’d prefer to get that out of the way sooner than later so that I can be in a place that is welcoming and supportive.

PD: Your graduate application essay took a strong position on disability. Disability is generally an understudied topic in architecture schools; there are few (if any) instances where we get to learn about it.

HW: Disability in architecture is often reduced to a set of specific requirements and narrow ideas about access. The reality is that these things are not geared towards a more creative, generative understanding of architecture. As a student, one can make a project about accessibility without taking a stance on how it fits into a model based on standards and regulations.

PD: Does disability ever generate other ways of designing? For me, work often takes longer—and architecture schools are notorious for workloads far beyond any student’s capacity.

HW: It does take longer to do certain aspects of the work. And my instructors often encourage me to explore non-traditional forms of representation as a way to circumvent that, but when you’re saddled with so much work, coming up with new ways of representing architecture can feel like a luxury. So far, with the exception of model making (I don’t use the woodshop or power tools), I’ve tended to follow more traditional ways of working.

PD: There are conventions (or expectations) in architecture, whether at work or in school, that don’t work for people with disabilities. Model making is a great example of that. Another example that I often encounter is the use of lineweights in drawings. If an instructor prefers lighter lineweights over bolder ones, it can result in legibility issues.

HW: Sometimes I can't read my own drawings.

PD: I think there needs to be more flexibility built into those conventions.

HW: People with disabilities are perceived as a small minority in the field so it’s presumed that the conventions in place work for most people. What if there were alternative means of representation, or, more radically, what if there were no drawings at all? How many people might that benefit? When I make drawings using the usual conventions, I don’t make those drawings for myself. I make them for other people. By ignoring my own needs, I wonder how many other people's needs I'm also ignoring.

I’ve had professors in the past who understood that something not working for me could become a moment of learning for them; but getting from there to broader, systemic change is a whole different process.

PD: You co-founded Design.Able, a student-run group at the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) that works towards supporting inclusive design practice and dismantling ableism. How would you describe the organization and what do you find is the importance of its mission and work within architecture schools?

HW: Design.Able has a double meaning: It’s about the idea that design and ability are able to come together, and it’s about understanding that disability is designable in the built environment.

One of the reasons I started the organization was because I was really lonely. People tend to congratulate those who are the first to do or achieve something, but no one wants to tell you that you might be the only one. I wanted to create a safe space where people who support disability justice could come together and create a network of support—not just for me but for other students who were feeling marginalized—and address the ways in which institutions often make students feel like they have to compromise certain parts of themselves.

 
 

PD: What does Design.Able do to achieve that?

HW: At the GSD, there are not enough people with disabilities, so Design.Able is composed mostly of allies. At the moment, the group is very small; I don’t think we’re doing as much as we could if we had more people. Among other things, the group has hosted a symposium on disability and dance, held workshops on the accessibility of graphics standards and presentations, and invited a number of speakers, including Sara Hendren, Bojana Coklyat, Finnegan Shannon, and Mel Y. Chen.

I am especially proud of the workshops that we’ve organized on how to make print graphics accessible. People generally want to learn and do the right thing, but they often don’t know how to do that or where to start. Disability justice is not a distant, mythical goal. In the context of academic institutions (where everything is siloed, strict, and rooted in tradition), small actions like increasing the font on a presentation or giving visual descriptions to images can make for meaningful steps forward. These kinds of actions can spread and become instances where you can recognize that someone thought about accessibility.

 
 

PD: Amanda Bagg’s work with voice-over or Christine Sun Kim’s work with captions show how shifting beyond conventions can become more than just a way to provide access to the content—it can give a project another dimension. You mentioned that you’ve been thinking about the concept of access intimacy lately. For readers unfamiliar with access intimacy, how would you define it? What does it mean to you?

HW: Access intimacy (coined by writer and educator Mia Mingus) refers to the forms of comfort experienced by an individual when their access needs are understood by another person. It’s the feeling you get when you have needs that don’t have to be verbalized for someone to understand them. Although it’s often described in relation to people with disabilities, it can be experienced by anyone. It can be found in relationships built over time, in people with differing political awareness, and so on.

PD: What’s an example that you experience in your daily life?

HW: When someone is describing a drawing or is drawing on a piece of paper to show me, they might instinctively scoot closer to get the drawing within my field of vision without me having to say anything. Even if I still can’t see the drawing, the act of scooting closer feels like a form of access intimacy because I sense that they want me to understand what they’re talking about and are thinking about my needs.

It’s important to communicate your needs—especially needs related to access—but there is a lot of emotional labor associated with doing that. Having somebody else thinking about your needs can be powerful; it creates a more supportive environment because you don’t have to always be doing that work yourself.

PD: Access intimacy as a term sounds like a big concept, and it can be, but it’s also present in the small moments and gestures, as you’ve alluded to. I would venture to say that part of the reason why we value these small victories so much is that we are often going without our access needs being met, so having them met at all makes those moments feel important.

HW: That’s certainly the case. People often don’t have their access needs met, which makes access intimacy more special. Another interesting question is about how we might go about forming access intimacy with those who don’t naturally come to it. It’s easy to have access intimacy with someone who intuitively understands your disability, but what about forming it with those who ignore your access needs or don’t have experience providing access for others?

PD: How do you think access intimacy might inform a design practice?

HW: I think asking questions is an important part of that process: As design professionals, how are we thinking about what we’re designing for other people? What kinds of questions are we asking the users, the inhabitants, whoever we might be designing for? What are we trying to interrogate and understand and what are we going to assume?

I think it’s also important to acknowledge that, even though the conversation about designing for access is expanding to include more than just regulations and standards—and incorporate concepts like access intimacy—the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was a huge win when it was instituted. The ADA generated a mobilization for disability that we had never seen in American culture, and it remains enormously impactful today. As a community, disabled people take a lot of pride in that work.

At the same time, the perception that there are minimum standards to meet—and then call it a day—can lead to a sense of complacency among designers. Standards and regulations also ignore the diversity of needs within the disability community; they imply that by instituting these very specific criteria we're going to make things more beneficial for everyone.

PD: Exactly. It’s not universal. Even in the visually-impaired (VI) community someone might need a lot of light to see, another person might be photosensitive, someone might be both, or see well at a very specific light level. It’s difficult to accommodate all of that without a lot of flexibility and ingenuity.

HW: There's also a lot to be said about those who are not represented in the standards, or, more gravely, what it means for people when those standards go directly against their needs.

PD: What disability topics are you thinking about in your work right now?

HW: One of my primary interests is circulation, thinking about how to get around spaces, how to direct people without telling them where to go. How can we build spaces that do that and that make sense conceptually?

I’m also thinking about representation—specifically the visual representation of the non-visual aspects in the built environment, and the non-visual representation of the visual aspects in the built environment. I hope to continue researching multi-sensory design techniques and explore them through my work in the future.

Hannah Wong is an M.Arch candidate and the first legally blind student at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, where she has founded the student collective Design.Able. She is also a project manager at Critical Design Lab.

Paul DeFazio is an M.Arch candidate at Rice School of Architecture.

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