A ramp gets a wheelchair through the door. It says nothing about the seating inside, whether a label can be read aloud, or whether disabled people helped design what’s on show rather than only receiving it. The Guardian’s review of the Victoria and Albert Museum’s exhibition, Design and Disability, argues that the show goes far beyond the assumption that access means a ramp. It shows disability-led design is “so much more than ramps.”
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What fills the gap a ramp leaves
Design and Disability splits into three parts: Visibility, Tools and Living. Among the objects on show, a wearable harness lets deaf and hard-of-hearing gig-goers feel music as vibration across the chest. Nearby sit a self-tightening shoe and the first fidget spinner, which was made with autistic and other neurodivergent people in mind. A bicycle carries a built-in leg brace, and a video explains “deaf space”: the architectural idea that a room’s layout can support lip-reading and British Sign Language.
Why some exhibits read as protest, not accommodation
The V&A’s own guide treats several exhibits as arguments rather than accommodations. The artist Finnegan Shannon’s ongoing work, Do you want us here or not, confronts a habit the guide names outright: museums are notorious for inadequate seating. Ann Magill designed the first Disability Pride flag in 2019. Its zig-zag pattern caused problems on screen for people with visually triggered disabilities, so she redesigned it with online Disabled communities on Tumblr and Reddit. The new version came out in 2021.
The typeface designer Emily Sara built the 504 font in 2023, taking individual letters from placards carried during the 504 Sit-ins, the 1977 US protests named for Section 504 of the 1973 Rehabilitation Act. One of the sit-in’s activists, Judy Heumann, has her photograph standing in for the letter Z. The guide also states that Black disabled men in the US are nearly 55% more likely to be arrested before they turn 30. That statistic sits beside a graphic the neurodivergent artist Jennifer White-Johnson made in solidarity with her Black autistic son.
Tristram Hunt, the former Labour MP who now directs the V&A, invoked the disability rights slogan “Nothing about us without us” at the show’s launch. A T-shirt on display carries the “Piss on Pity” slogan from the 1990 Block Telethon campaign. Photographs from the Campaign for Accessible Transport show disabled protesters stopping buses in the street. The show also links that history to the Black Panthers and to queer culture, part of what the reviewer called its focus on how disability intersects with other marginalised identities.
The same idea, outside the museum
A protest poster answers a question a ramp cannot. So does a city block, according to Victor Pineda, a wheelchair user since the age of 7 who has needed a ventilator around the clock since his doctoral studies. Writing in Fast Company, Pineda cites the advocacy group World Enabled’s estimate that by 2050, 6.25 billion people will live in cities, and nearly a billion of them will be disabled.
Pineda’s case for inclusive urban design rests on treating disabled people as the authority on their own needs, not an afterthought. Consulting the people who will use a space should happen early in the process, he argues: nobody would design braille signage by consulting someone who can see. His other rules ask planners to build accessibility in from the outset rather than retrofit it later, and to have planners, architects and developers work with accessibility experts. He also urges going beyond legal minimums, and champions accessibility as a moral imperative, not only a legal requirement.
Two routes, one finding
A protest poster and a city block do not look like the same problem. Yet both sources put disabled people at the centre of the design. One example meant redesigning a flag with online Disabled communities. The other means consulting disabled people early in urban planning.
A ramp answers one question: can you get in? Design and Disability, and the strategies Pineda sets out for the cities around it, answer a harder one: once you’re in, does any of this actually work for you?
