The anchor papers

This paper with Agneta Ståhl and Susanne Iwarsson harmonises three concepts. Accessibility, usability and Universal Design have been used interchangeably, overlappingly and sometimes in direct contradiction through decades of research.

The harmonised model keeps the three apart as different things to evaluate. Accessibility is about the fit between a person and the environment. It asks to what extent a person can access, understand and use what is there. It is mainly objective and can be measured, since it compares the demands of the environment, a doorway width or a contrast ratio, with what the person can do. Usability is subjective. It is how a person perceives and experiences the environment when using it for the activity they came to do. What’s the quality of use seen from the person’s point of view, for instance in terms of efficiency, effectiveness, and satisfaction? Universal Design is a value-based vision and approach to design, grounded in human rights, that should permeate all aspects of society. It asks what kind of world we are building.

None of the three can replace the other two. A design can be highly accessible and poorly usable. It can be usable for many and still be based on ableist thinking. The paper offers a shared language for working with all three layers without confusion, and a couple of our ongoing research projects build on it.

In this paper with Stina Ericsson we ask what the word inclusion presupposes, and who does the including. The 2022 paper asked the same about the universal in Universal Design.

Inclusion is not a state. It is an act. Someone includes someone else, so there is an inside and an outside, and the act runs from the inside outward. That holds however kind the act is.

That is what the title says. Inclusion is done to someone by someone.

The analysis builds on more than 300 photographs collected during five research projects. We read the signs and environments we move through every day for what they denote, what they connote, and how they categorise.

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 of them worked as intended. The terms changed, but the thinking in with and without disability stayed. Each new term soon meant the same thing as the old one: something attributed to an individual who deviates from the norm.

This is the study behind the word 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. To be disablised is to be categorised as disabled, by signs, by language or by the way one is routed. It is something done to a person, and it says nothing about the person’s body.

The article is open access, so the journal link below goes straight to the full 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 universal in Universal Design has never been universal. Every UD framework presupposes a body, and a presupposed body is not universal. From there the paper proposes a third generation of UD. The first generation was about accessibility and compliance, the second about usability and process. The third is nonclusion, design without the categorisation that creates the gap inclusion then tries 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.

My PhD thesis at Certec, Lund University, is where the concepts I have used ever since were first developed. 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 happens, or does not happen, in the meeting between a person, what they are trying to do, and the world around them. WCAG 3 has since moved in a similar direction.

The thesis also introduced epiaccessibility: how accumulated activity experiences alter accessibility over time. What happened to you last time shapes what you attempt next time. This goes both ways, for good and for bad experiences, and on two levels. The experiences settle in the person and in the surrounding culture. I still use both the Activity Diamond and epiaccessibility. They are tacitly 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 for whole families rather than for one person singled out.

The thesis makes two moves I have built on ever since. The first is to stop dividing people into those with and without disabilities. What matters is what a person can and wants to do in the situation itself. 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 term for holding the two together is den planerade improvisationen, planned improvisation. It means planning in advance for action in the moment. Much of the later work is already here: the distinction between planned and lived accessibility from my 2009 thesis, the situation argument that became the Design for situations guideline, and the observation that a person who gets used to possibilities being within reach comes to expect to manage next time too. That is the seed of what I later called epiaccessibility.

This article with Stina Ericsson opens with the line 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 follows the shift in the title, from inclusive to nonclusive. 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 somewhere else, in situations, in variation, and 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 a practical one: how does a text or an image keep 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 components that work in text and image.

The situation concept builds 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 material is the photograph collection from our five years of studies on categorisation and UD, signs from streets, buildings and services. In it 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 strategy has a built-in limit. No matter how many pictograms sit in a row on a toilet door, someone still falls outside. We read the growth of the other two strategies as a sign of unease with categorising people, bodies and roles. The wheelchair-sign photographs on this site show the same shift.