The curb cut effect and universal product design
When my daughter was little, we lived in traffic-clogged Midtown Manhattan. On our usual walks to the Katherine Hepburn Garden at Dag Hammarskjold Plaza, the children’s room of the New York Public Library or the playroom at Scandinavia house, I had to wheel the stroller across a lot of busy city streets. Whenever I did, I always looked for the curb cuts: those scooped-out mini-ramps cut into the sidewalk at street crossings. I was grateful they were there, just as millions of other parents with small children and unwieldy strollers are grateful they are there.
Disability activists and advocates of Universal Design call this “The Curb Cut Effect.” It’s what happens when a design change that was intended to serve people with disabilities is so broadly beneficial and widely-accepted by the larger community that we forget its original purpose. For example, few people who keep food processors on their kitchen counters realize that the Cuisinart DLC-X, which set the design pattern for every food processor on the market today, was designed by a disabled designer and RISD professor named Marc Harrison, who researched and re-worked Cuisinart’s original model to make it more accessible to people with impaired movement and vision.
Those of us who know how the curb cut story turned out might be tempted to look back and assume that everyone back in the day would have immediately recognized their benefits. Of course, that’s not how it happened.
A Short History of Curb Cuts
The first curb cuts in the United States were installed in Kalamazoo, Michigan in 1945 immediately after the end of World War II . A lawyer named Jack Fisher, who had lost full use of his legs in an Army base jeep accident, petitioned the city to replace the perpendicular sidewalk on several downtown streets curbs with sloped concrete ramps.
Fortunately for Jack and other disabled people in Kalamazoo, his request came during a brief moment of disability awareness in America. With the end of World War II came the return of thousands of combat veterans who had lost sight, mobility, or limbs in recent battles. America’s recently deceased president, Franklin Roosevelt, had been wheelchair-bound from a 1922 attack of polio. The war did nothing to slow the toll of new polio outbreaks. The virus would partially or totally paralyze as many as 35,000 civilians per year during this period. With so many recently able-bodied people suddenly sitting in wheelchairs, moving with leg braces and prosthetic limbs, or locked into iron lungs, America had a hard time ignoring disabled people, at least for the moment.
Disabled veteran Jack Fisher was fortunate. He got a sympathetic hearing from a Kalamazoo city commissioner whose own son was in a wheelchair and the result came in 1945 when one single American city made its downtown sidewalks a bit more accessible. However, no other American cities followed Kalamazoo’s lead and for nearly two decades, the idea of expanding public disability accommodations went nowhere. And without it, too many disabled Americans did the same.
America’s collective interest in disability issues seemed to peak after a 1946 movie, The Best Years of Our Lives, which dealt frankly with the problems of disabled veterans, won eight Academy Awards. But this happy state of awareness didn’t last. By the 1950s America wanted nothing more than a “return to normalcy,” which meant a society where disabled people, racial minorities and other marginalized groups were airbrushed out of the picture of happy postwar prosperity.
Systemic change would have to wait for disability activists like Eric Dibner and Hale Zucas in the early 1970s. When the city of Berkeley, California ignored their pleas for accessible sidewalks, they set high explosive charges and unleashed jackhammers at street crossings in the dead of night to create their own curb cuts. After countless curb repairs and police summons, the city gave in and installed accessible curbs, but that wasn’t the end of it. It took nearly twenty more years of lobbying, demonstrations, and citizen activism to pressure Congress to pass the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and make sidewalk curb cuts universal.
How the Curb Cut Effect brought changes for everyone
Even after the ADA and mandatory curb cuts became law, some people continued to grumble about spending money on ‘special privileges for a few.’ But soon, something amazing and unexpected happened: Able-bodied people discovered curb cuts and decided they loved them. Tourists with heavy rolling suitcases, parents like me with children in strollers, and delivery people with loaded hand trucks used them constantly and were grateful. And of course, people with mobility impairments live more complete lives because of it.
“Disabled people were the original life hackers, right? We spend our lives cultivating intuitive creativity because we’re forced to navigate a world that’s not built for our bodies.”
— Liz Jackson, Designer and Chief Advocacy Officer of The Disabled List
Once you start to look for the Curb Cut Effect, you find it everywhere. It’s no exaggeration to say that the IoT ( Internet of Things ) couldn’t exist without it. It’s in the voice control on your smartphone, streaming TV remote, and smart speaker. It’s in the closed captions that college students whose hearing is perfect but whose audio processing isn’t, prefer to keep on their video screens, the wearable blankets that warm us indoors during Minnesota winters, and in the downloadable audiobooks that entertain me during my daily jog.
There are other, less obvious benefits. The simple, idiom-free English that accessibility-aware content strategists urge us to use on our websites and application instructions not only make those products more friendly for people on the autism spectrum, but they also drive more traffic from countries where English is a second or third language. In addition, neurotypical speakers of American, British, or Commonwealth English appreciate clear, simplified prose just as much.
Universal design tells us that if we create products that are a pleasure to use for people with all kinds of disabilities, we will improve the experience of those who don’t. Not every assistive technology or design accommodation we add will “breakthrough” to the larger, non-disabled community like curb cuts or Cuisinarts did, but that’s not the point. We design for accessibility so that all people can use our products to do the things they want to do in life. That’s not just a good business decision, it’s also the right thing to do.
