Accessibility without Accountability at Cooper Hewitt
At the opening reception for the 2018 exhibition Access+Ability at the Smithsonian’s Cooper Hewitt Museum in New York, former director Caroline Baumann spent 10 minutes publicly thanking various individuals and entities that made the exhibition possible. I felt like I was the only person in the room who noticed that she failed to thank a single disabled person. But then again, I can’t imagine anyone else in the room responded to the invite by asking if the event would be “featuring or giving voice to — or, as I have since learned to phrase, “amplifying the perspective” of any disabled people?
It has taken me half a decade to develop the language and literacy to explain how Cooper Hewitt relegated disabled people to the margins in order to shape an idealistic narrative of 21st-century “innovations” in the field of disability design. It was the spring of 2017 when I first sat across from curator Cara McCarty in the museum’s garden. We were introduced not long before, because she was in a rush to work on what would become Access+Ability. It felt like the opportunity of a lifetime, as consulting gigs for disabled people that do disability work are scarce. Especially then.
McCarty jotted down notes as I insisted this cannot simply be an exhibition about disability, and that it has to be done with disabled people. For me, “with” was a resistance word, rooted in the foundational “nothing about us without us” disability invocation. And I meant for it to reflect the agency and ownership disabled people had with regard to that exhibition. I was dismayed when Cooper Hewitt superfluously incorporated “with” into the Access+Ability blurb, advertising “over 70 innovative designs developed in the last decade for and with people with disabilities.”I was even more horrified to discover the central display of the exhibit featured a Disability Dongle, which is the outcome of a process led by a designer-savior who lacks the proficiency to adequately address the surface level problem they have scoped. Their often abandoned prototypes have given rise to such phenomena as what I call the wheelchair-to-warfare pipeline, in which disabled subjects are used to develop technologies that will ultimately be taken up in military operations. The Superflex Aura Power bodysuit prototype was described by McCarty as a “21st-century girdle or a corset,” and contained “electric muscles” developed by DARPA to provide “core wellness support” to an elderly person’s torso. Other objects were born of questionable methods, such as IDEO’s Los Angeles County Voting Booth prototype, which used disability simulation, a practice that “promotes distress and fails to improve attitudes toward disabled people,” to inform its designers.
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