The anchor papers

This paper with Agneta Ståhl and Susanne Iwarsson proposes a harmonisation the field has needed for a long time. Accessibility, usability, and Universal Design have been used interchangeably, overlappingly, and sometimes in direct contradiction, through decades of scholarship.

The harmonised model reads the three as different evaluation registers rather than competing labels. Accessibility is objective, measurable, environment-anchored: what you can document with a tape measure, a doorway width, a contrast ratio. Usability is subjective, perceived, person-anchored: what a person experiences when using the environment in the activity they came to do. Universal Design is value-based, visionary, future-anchored: the question of what kind of world the design is reaching for.

None of these collapses into the other two. A design can be highly accessible and poorly usable. It can be usable for many and still not universal in the visionary sense. The paper gives the field operational language for working with all three layers without confusion, and it is the conceptual ground for my ongoing research projects.

This paper with Stina Ericsson does for the word inclusion what the 2022 paper did for the universal in Universal Design: it walks the term carefully, looks at what it presupposes, and names the structural asymmetry it hides.

The argument, compressed: inclusion is not a state. It is an act. Someone includes someone else. Read that way, the geometry of the inclusion paradigm becomes visible: there is an inside and an outside. The act of inclusion is performed by the inside. The act is done to the outside. The kindness of the act does not change its direction.

The paper produced a line I keep returning to: it is done to someone by someone. Seven words that carry the structural argument.

Empirically, the paper rests on a hermeneutic analysis of more than 300 photographs collected during five research projects, reading the denotations, connotations, and categorisations of the signs and environments we move through every day.

With Daniel Wojahn and Stina Ericsson, we analysed nearly 57,000 articles from four decades of Swedish print media, tracking how the Swedish names for dis/ability changed over time: handikapp, then funktionshinder, then funktionsnedsättning, then funktionsvariation.

Each new term was introduced with the hope of changing how society understood disability. None worked as intended. The terms changed. The with/without thinking stayed. Every term ended up meaning the same thing: something attributed to an individual, understood to deviate from the norm. Vocabulary churn without paradigm change.

The study is the empirical anchor for disablised in my work. The word is not mine: Daniel Wojahn and Stina Ericsson brought it into our shared research, and they were not the first to use it either. It names what is done to a person: not by a body or an impairment, but by categorisation, as signs, language, and routing sort someone as disabled. What the wheelchair signs do visually, the language does linguistically: both mark a body, not a situation.

The article is published fully open access, so the journal link below takes you straight to the complete text.

This is the publication where the word nonclusion enters print for the first time. It was also the first time I worked with Margaret Price and Johnna Keller. The four-author collaboration, together with Stina Ericsson, produced something none of us would have produced alone.

The argument, compressed: the universal in Universal Design has never been universal. Every UD framework presupposes a body, and that presupposition is itself a non-universal move. Beyond this diagnosis, the paper proposes a third-generation move: beyond first-generation UD (accessibility, compliance) and second-generation UD (usability, process) lies nonclusion, designing without the categorisation move that produces the very gap inclusion is trying to close.

The paper is also where several of the concepts my later work builds on first appeared in print: the key role categorisation plays in design, adaptism, and the move from adaptism to variation throughout the design. In retrospect, this is the paper that anchors everything that came after.

My PhD thesis at Certec, Lund University, built the conceptual instruments I have been using ever since. The Activity Diamond names accessibility as a relation within an activity, with four vertices: Subject, Object, Outcome, and Environment. Accessibility is not a property of the environment alone. It is something that happens (or fails to happen) in the meeting between a person, what they are trying to do, and the world around them. That shift prefigured what WCAG 3 reached for sixteen years later.

The thesis also introduced epiaccessibility: how accumulated activity experiences alter accessibility over time. Accessibility has a longitudinal dimension. What happened to you last time shapes what you attempt next time. It runs in both directions, and on two levels at once: experiences deposit in the person and in the surrounding culture. Both concepts are still doing work now, embedded in the 2025 harmonised model of accessibility, usability and Universal Design and in my current research projects.

The chapter examining the presupposed body of the seven UD principles is also where I first wrote we have never been universal.

My licentiate thesis, in Swedish, and the place where my situation argument began. The title translates as Situated Design for All – in praise of improvisation. The thesis grew out of two projects: Spelhålan, where children and young people with disabilities played ordinary commercial computer games through a breadth of control solutions, and iFields, interactive environments designed to meet whole families rather than a single marked user.

The argument makes two moves that I have been building on ever since. The first turns against dividing people into those with and without disabilities: what matters is what a person can and will do in the situation itself, and the method chapter states the premise in one sentence: every situation must hold possibilities for everyone. The second is about time: guidelines and forethought reach only so far, because accessibility also arises in the doing, in the moment. A description shift is a power shift, and this one moves power toward the person and her possibility to improvise and act now, rather than being assigned a ready-made, predetermined solution.

The thesis is not against planning. Its own name for the reconciliation is den planerade improvisationen, planned improvisation. It means planning in advance for action in the moment. Reading it now, I can see how much of the later work is already here: the distinction between planned and lived accessibility that my 2009 thesis developed, the situation argument that became the Design for situations guideline, and even the observation that a person who gets used to possibilities being within reach in the moment comes to expect that she will manage next time too — the seed of what I later called epiaccessibility.

This article with Stina Ericsson opens with a line that has followed me since: you cannot reach equality by focusing on inequality. Much research that wants to understand equality studies inequality. Accessibility research often studies inaccessibility. The article asks what happens when design research stays on the positive side of that division instead.

From there it walks the shift that gives the article its name. Universal Design has always had everyone as its target group, but in practice it is still largely understood to be about disabled people. Early UD looked for barriers and ways to remove them. A barrier-free environment is a means, not an end, and when the field confused the two it inherited a deficit view of dis/ability. Nonclusive design starts elsewhere: in situations, in variation, in what supports activity rather than what disrupts it.

It was written for a broad design audience as part of Difference, the special issue of Design for All, India, that we guest-edited about Universal Design in Sweden.

This article, with Stina Ericsson as first author, develops three guiding concepts for nonclusive communication: situation, non-categorisation, and variation. The question is practical. How does a text or an image place its focus on what is going on, rather than on kinds of people and their properties?

The empirical case is a public information video about Universal Design from the Swedish Agency for Participation that is not only about UD but is itself an example of UD in communication. We read the video’s voice-over, subtitles and animation through the nonclusion components from the 2022 paper, and kept the ones that do their work in text and image.

The situation concept stands on models of how people’s actions arise between person and environment, among them the Activity Diamond from my thesis. The guidelines on this site’s How-to pages build directly on this article, which is why it appears among their sources.

Should signs portray people with impairments at all? The debate is older than Universal Design, and the international access symbol, the person in the wheelchair, has survived decades of criticism largely unchanged. This chapter with Stefan Johansson and Stina Ericsson starts in that paradox: UD says everyone, yet the features associated with it still carry a symbol understood to mean disabled.

The empirical base is the photograph collection from our five years of studies on categorisation and UD: signs gathered from streets, buildings and services. In the material we identify three strategies for inclusive signage. Additive strategies put more pictograms in a row. Combinatory strategies merge categories into composite symbols. Nonclusive strategies stop depicting people altogether and show the room, the function, the mechanism.

The additive road carries a built-in paradox: no matter how many pictograms sit in a row on a toilet door, someone still falls outside. The chapter reads the growth of the other strategies as a sign of unease with categorising people, bodies and roles. The wheelchair-sign photographs on this site document the same shift in the wild.