This article explores "Universal Design" and "neurodiversity" as two late-twentieth-century keywords that emerged from distinct but contemporary discourses. Both formulated in the 1990s, Universal Design and neurodiversity presented flexible and changeable frameworks for understanding disability, and both emerged in a time when rapidly changing technologies were significantly altering conversations about disability, access, and inclusion in the digital era. Two of the authors of the Principles of Universal Design (1997) contributed prior experiences designing for and with people with intellectual and cognitive disabilities, and the influence of their work than be seen, however subtly, in aspects of those Principles. As for neurodiversity, the term emerged from communities of autistic adults who used newly available internet forums to discuss and define their experiences away from parental or medical authority; this included guidelines for public spaces and gatherings to accommodate a range of access needs and social preferences. The two concepts were not conceived together, but they suggest new design futures that incorporate flexibility among both designers and users to accommodate a wider range of differences than had been conceived in the twentieth-century history of accessible design. Their alignments forecast a future of design that addresses access as an adaptable and shifting set of goals, rather than a fixed quality of design.

The cover of Mid-Century Modernism and the American Body: Race, Gender, and the Politics of Power in Design elegantly encapsulates the themes of the book. The image, taken from a 1953 fashion spread in Ebony magazine, shows a young Black model in a fringed dress and silver shoes within the frame of a Butterfly chair, a recognizable mid-century design by Jorge Ferrari Hardoy that was featured in the Museum of Modern Art, New York ‘Good Design’ exhibitions. The abstract metal form of the chair, pictured without the leather sling seat, provides an abstract frame for the model as she holds a delicate mobile sculpture to dangle above her arm. Like this cover image, Wilson’s book depicts Modernism—especially furniture, interiors, and products—as a glamorous and aspirational style that had different meanings depending on the context. While the book incorporates a gender analysis in images such as this, the emphasis is on the racial divide, specifically of Black and white Americans, in the mid-twentieth century.1 In exploring both Black and white media, Black and white designers, and the objects and spaces that might appear in both Black and white homes, Wilson accounts for Modernism as the product of a racially exclusive design industry that was nonetheless a popular style among Black designers and tastemakers.

Reviewed by: Measuring Difference, Numbering Normal: Setting the Standards for Disability in the Interwar Period by Coreen McGuire Bess Williamson (bio) Measuring Difference, Numbering Normal: Setting the Standards for Disability in the Interwar Period By Coreen McGuire. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020. Pp. 248. Historians of technology are likely to come across certain disability technologies in their general reading: prosthetic limbs feature in many histories of war and medicine, not to mention cyborgian fantasies of the posthuman. Less familiar are technologies of invisible or otherwise non-apparent disability, such as the devices that measure and, as Coreen McGuire argues, ultimately define human experiences such as deafness and "breathlessness," or shortness of breath due to a variety of conditions. The technologies in Measuring Difference, Numbering Normal are not as well-known as prosthetics, but they provide powerful examples of the interrelatedness between technology and disability. McGuire's book focuses on measurement techniques developed in Britain in the interwar period, a time of increased interest in disability due to war injuries, and in the quantification of disability as a condition of state social support. Specialized devices as well as familiar technologies such as the telephone were used to establish ranges of function considered "normal" in breath and hearing. McGuire also takes on more theoretical considerations of "Defining Disability." The first, philosophically-oriented chapter, argues that the very definitions of disease and disability are contingent on what can be measured. Three middle chapters present case studies of measurement mechanisms: the telephone as an "artificial ear" that measured deafness; the audiometer, which used similar technology to set scales of deafness and determine qualification for state benefits; and the spirometer, which measured lung capacity, a measurement that was greatly contingent on gender and class perceptions. The final chapter reveals how measurement of breath informed the design of the respirator, which became newly relevant when the mid-1900s polio epidemic prompted attempts to recreate "normal" breathing. These case studies offer detailed, thoughtful research on measurement tools, measured symptoms, and social perceptions of disability mutually constructing each other. They show how disability was defined by what could be measured, with significant implications for access to benefits and treatment. McGuire describes the "epistemic injustice" at the heart of measurement, as the biases built into measured data were then reproduced in denials of the validity of hearing loss or breathlessness that did not fit [End Page 527] those measurements. When women were less likely to be believed as breathing abnormally because they did not meet standards based on male coal miners' lung capacity, this is mechanical epistemic injustice, McGuire asserts. Her reading of breathlessness as gendered due to reference data as well as social expectations of bodily movements is nuanced and suggests many possible comparisons with illnesses such as chronic fatigue, depression, or the emerging Long COVID-19. Measuring Difference's technological histories trouble the social and medical models of disability, core concepts that the field of Disability Studies refers to in understanding the role of social attitudes, not just medical pathology, in disabled people's lives. McGuire asserts the limitations of viewing the social and medical models in opposition, as scholars and activists have done, in order to challenge medical professions as the sole holders of knowledge about disability. Indeed, McGuire's cases effectively show how technologies of measurement cannot be seen as medically or socially constructing disability, as they did both. Unfortunately, this valid point does not engage with other scholars' critical revisions of models in the last two decades. A number of writers—linking to queer and feminist studies, including STS—have reconsidered the social-medical boundary and instead offered such interventions as Alison Kafer's "relational" model. In Feminist, Queer, Crip, Kafer recognizes disability as an experience of both social attitudes and bodily experience, often with similar insurance or technology denials as the ones Mc-Guire tracks. Others who have considered disabled people's own expertise in technology, such as Aimi Hamraie or Meryl Alper, likewise do not figure in McGuire's claim that disability studies have remained fixated on a social model to the detriment of critical analysis of technology. McGuire's critique of the social model is significant for historians of technology who...

Chicago enjoyed a flourishing of design-related events and exhibitions in 2018 and 2019, much of it produced with the funds and support of the Terra Foundation’s Art Design Chicago initiative. Amon...

Abstract Design is a little-examined but significant factor in the history of disability, particularly in the context of the modern West. Both designers and users contributed to a history of design that sometimes ignored and sometimes addressed disability. For many modernist designers, the ideal of a “standard” or predictable body was key to a vision of an efficient industrial society, creating a world of objects and spaces that excluded or ignored disabled people. Nonetheless, people with disabilities engaged with design culture in distinctive ways, using and adapting mainstream designs to their own use. In the late twentieth century, the design world took up new goals of improving access, raising new questions about the intentions of designers and the role of users.