The ideas behind the work.

Universal Design is the field I have spent my professional life in. The term was coined in 1985 by Ron Mace, an American architect and wheelchair user, and his argument was practical rather than moral: design done well from the start serves a far wider range of people than design patched afterwards with special solutions. The curb cut is the classic example. Wheelchair users fought for it, and it now serves parents with strollers, cyclists, delivery workers, travellers with luggage. In 1997 the Center for Universal Design condensed the field into seven principles that designers and policy makers still use as a working vocabulary, though other complementary frameworks have been developed in subsequent years.

Universal Design is often treated as another word for legal accessibility. The two are related, but they are not the same, and the difference matters greatly in practice. In a 2025 paper with Agneta Ståhl and Susanne Iwarsson, I argue that three concepts need to be kept distinct and in relation to each other:

• Accessibility asks: can the person get to it and use it? This is the objective, measurable layer, the one building codes, WCAG and the European Accessibility Act operate on.
• Usability asks: does using it actually work, in this situation, for this person? This layer is subjective and situated. A building can meet every code and still be miserable to use.
• Universal Design asks: was this designed from the start for human diversity, or is variation being managed as an exception? This is the value-based, visionary approach to design, and it is where my work lives.

Accessibility is necessary but not sufficient. Usability builds on it. Universal Design is what the two look like when human variation is the premise of the design rather than a complication for it.

Three generations

The field has moved in generations. The first, from Mace onwards, gave us the term, the principles and the compliance instruments. The second brought usability and process into the frame: how things are experienced, and who participates in designing them. My own challenge to the field started in my 2009 thesis, whose chapter on the seven principles examined the body they presuppose. In 2022, my colleagues and I proposed a third generation: nonclusion, design that refuses to begin by sorting people into those who fit and those who must be accommodated, because that sorting is itself what produces the gap the field has been trying to close.

Nonclusion is not a rejection of Universal Design. It is a contribution within and to Universal Design and where I think it is heading, and most of this site explores what that looks like in practice. If Universal Design is new to you, the three guidelines under How-to are a concrete place to start. If you want the research, Writing collects the publications behind everything summarised here.

Nonclusion is the word my colleagues and I started using for design that does not begin by drawing a line between people who fit (the norm) and people who must be accommodated (the deviation). It starts somewhere else, with human variation as the premise of design rather than as an exception to manage.

Both inclusion and exclusion share a Latin root, claudere, meaning to close, to shut, to block. Inclusion still requires an outside. Someone is being brought in, someone holds the keys. Nonclusion is the move that does not put the boundary there in the first place, neither to shut people out nor to shut them in.

This is not inclusion done better. It refuses the premise that inclusion is the question to ask and answer. The clearest one-line consequence, what I call the nonclusive flip, is this: design does not need to grant belonging, it needs to stop denying it. Belonging is not a future state for the system to provide. It is already true of the person standing there. Design’s task is recognition.

The human-rights texts already use that grammar, and dignity is where it shows most plainly. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights says people are born free and equal in dignity. The Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities pairs dignity with respect, promote, protect and violate. Neither text ever says create, grant or give. Dignity is treated as something already there, to be recognised or denied but never handed out, which is exactly what nonclusion claims about belonging. Design can protect and support a person’s dignity. It cannot create it.

A hotel entrance with a red carpet leading straight up a flight of stairs is conditional access dressed as welcome. The carpet performs belonging while the stairs does the sorting. A nonclusive entrance does the opposite: a single arrival, no marked alternate route, no symbol that says “this way for you.” The work is not to add a ramp beside the stairs. It is to design so that the question of a separate route never arises.

The shifts

In the 2022 paper we named seven shifts that together describe the movement towards nonclusive design. An eighth has grown out of our language research since then: from person to situation. Together they are the direction of travel, readable in any single design or sentence.

• From included to undefined users. When the design stops naming who it is for. Whoever arrives is who it is for.
• From person to function. When signs and controls show what a thing does or contains, and stop depicting who is expected to use it.
• From person to situation. When texts and designs address what is going on, so they cover everyone who is in the situation.
• From adaptism to variation. When tne “normal” solution with a special adaptation on the side gives way to one solution that carries the variation itself.
• From separation to convergence. When separate routes and separate cases give way to shared ones.
• From reactive to proactive. When access is part of the design from the first drawing, so nothing has to be added when a particular person arrives.
• From unaware to aware. When the categorisations a design makes are made consciously, so they can be questioned and changed.
• From explicit to tacit. When the support is embedded in the design and works without announcing itself.

The three guidelines under How-to show these shifts in real things: every move there closes with the shift it contributes to.

The first of what I call my three breakthroughs was seeing the key role categorisation plays in design. By breakthrough I mean something I notice in hindsight: a point where major learning happened, the kind that changes what you do because of what it lets you see. Categorisation was the tool that unlocked it, bottom-up: a key, a screwdriver, working from the environments, the signs and the sentences up to the pattern.

Most accessibility work, including most Universal Design work, assumes that categorisation is a neutral instrument. A wheelchair symbol categorises a space as accessible. A “persons with disabilities” clause in legislation categorises a population the law will protect. A toilet sign categorises bodies. The acts are done in good faith, presented as descriptive, as protective, as inclusive.

The breakthrough was seeing that they are none of those things. Categorisation is an act, not a description: it is always done to someone by someone. Every act of sorting bodies into types reproduces a norm. We cannot use categorisation to understand accessibility because categorisation is what produces the gap between “taken-for-granted user” and “the accommodated other user” in the first place. The wheelchair sign does not solve a problem. It names a body. The naming is the problem.

This is the breakthrough that nonclusion is the response to. In the hundreds of wheelchair signs, toilet signs, and accessible-entrance arrangements I have photographed in many countries, the same norm-and-deviation structure recurs. Categorisation and the normate template frequently co-occur. The recurrence in such materially different contexts (six modes of wheelchair signs, the EAA’s “persons with disabilities” formula, the CRPD’s “on an equal basis with others” clause, EN 17161’s user categories) is what makes the mechanism visible. If categorisation were merely a descriptive tool, we would not see the same structure recurring in such different materials.

The constructive direction follows from the problem. If categorising persons is the act that produces the gap, the practical move is to shift what gets described: from person to function, from person to situation. A sign that shows the toilet instead of a body. “Step-free access” instead of a person in a wheelchair. In our work with municipalities, this has been the easiest nonclusive move for people to pick up and apply in their own contexts.

The “us” and “them” lens is the analytical instrument I use to read designs (photographs, texts, signs, architectural decisions) through the structure I think is doing most of the work in the inclusion paradigm. It asks one question, in different forms: does this design or design act produce, sustain, or resist a division between “us” and “them”?

The lens grew out of noticing the key role categorisation plays in design. Once I could read a wheelchair sign as performing categorisation (naming a deviation from an assumed norm, not just indicating accessibility), the same reading became possible for toilet signs, policy texts, accessible-entrance routing, and standards documents. The categorisation operation was the same, only the substrate changed.

The lens has eight mechanisms, where master mechanism is norm and deviation. The lens shows what “us” and “them” looks like. Nonclusion shows what no “us” and “them” looks like.

A wheelchair symbol on a side entrance does seven of the eight mechanisms at once. It marks a body type. It routes a conditional access path. It locates a physical separation. It applies a label. It makes the unmarked main entrance the default for “everyone.” It relies on the language of “persons with disabilities.” And the absence of any symbol on the main entrance is in itself a categorisation. Read with the lens, the sign is the conditional access paradigm made metal.

What would it mean to benchmark Universal Design at the societal level? The question is different from the more familiar accessibility-benchmarking question.

Accessibility benchmarking measures whether the floor is high enough: whether a website meets WCAG, whether a service meets the EAA, whether a city meets ADA. Most existing UD evaluation frameworks operate at the project or organisational scale, not at the societal one. Society-scale UD measurement is largely missing, and where it is being attempted, it tends to be accessibility compliance benchmarking in disguise, measuring outputs rather than conditions.

The proposal I worked through in newsletter 15 was an analogy: measure UD the way we measure peace. The Positive Peace Index measures conditions for flourishing (well-functioning government, low corruption, equitable distribution of resources, free flow of information) rather than counting weapons or absence of war. The eight pillars are not peace themselves, they are conditions in which peace is possible. UD at the societal scale could be measured the same way, by tracking the conditions for human variation to flourish rather than the presence or absence of specific barriers.

One more distinction has become central to this work: compliance and exemplarity are different columns of the matrix, not different amounts on a single scale. A design can meet every requirement and never become exemplary, and much of what is exemplary is unregulated. Moving from one to the other is a traversal, not a degree. I have drawn this distinction as the exemplary curve, one of the open resources.

The 3×3 BM Matrix (Accessibility, Usability, UD on one axis, and Output, Process, Societal Impact on the other) is what I have been using to organise the discussion of UD-benchmarking. After initial pilot testing with participants from municipalities and other researchers, the richest cell turned out to be UD × Societal Impact. Process × Usability is where people’s lived, subjective experience enters the process and changes it.

The matrix also turns out to have a longer history than I knew. My 2009 thesis wrote that the experience of each activity “leaves its imprint, both on the individual and on the surrounding culture”, and the Societal Impact row evaluates exactly that culture-side deposit: the growth of accessibility as a societal phenomenon, and the values Universal Design contributes to. As someone who is using a wheelchair, a sole focus on accessibility compliance has always felt incomplete. I didn’t know it back then, but now I can see some of where the benchmarking matrix came from.

The newsletter edition has since grown into a full paper, Benchmarking Accessibility, Usability, and Universal Design – What Kind of Society are We Building?, written with Lilian Müller, Larry McNutt and Gerald Craddock and accepted for UD26, the 8th International Universal Design Conference, in Galway in November 2026. It travels with a workshop at the same conference, What Makes Universal Design Visible? Direct and Proxy Indicators, where Lilian Müller and I ask the participants to generate indicators for the cells of the matrix. The paper is published after the conference, and I will add it to my papers then. The indicators the workshop produces go on into Provtryck Konsekvenserna!, where the matrix is tested in Gothenburg’s digital twin.