Empathy and Mismatch: The Problem of Disability Simulation

• In Event: Making Disability: Disability Culture, Design, and STS

Abstract

This paper discusses practices of “disability simulation,” or the enactment of physical or sensory impairment through blindfolds, heavy gloves, dark glasses, wheelchairs, etc, in order to give nondisabled people – especially designers – insight into the daily experiences of disabled people. Whether suggested as a means to build “empathy” or improve design overall, the practice has been widely critiqued by disabled people both within and outside of tech fields. This paper seeks a history of this practice, and to suggest ways in which it can be theorized as a product of recent institutional cultures of diversity and “inclusive” technology culture. I pursue two major threads of inquiry. First, I frame simulation as an extension of what Aimi Hamraie calls the “normate template” in 20th century design, as simulation reproduces the assumption that disability is fundamentally at odds with standard design (or, to use the term recently in vogue in the tech world, that disability represents an instance of “mismatch” with technology). Second, I explore how simulation reinforces the notion of design as a constant push for innovation and change, rather than maintenance and care. In both threads, STS perspectives inform a reading of simulation as a technological practice that often reifies, rather than challenges, the marginalization of disabled people.

Cited:

Aimi Hamraie, Building Access: Universal Design and the Politics of Disability (Minneapolis: Univ Of Minnesota Press, 2017).

Kat Holmes, Mismatch: How Inclusion Shapes Design (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2018).

Shannon Mattern, “Maintenance and Care,” Places Journal, November 20, 2018, https://placesjournal.org/article/maintenance-and-care/.

Pat Moore and Charles Paul Conn, Disguised: A True Story (Waco, Texas: Word Books, 1985)

Michelle R. Nario-Redmond et al., “Crip for a Day: The Unintended Negative Consequences of Disability Simulations,” Rehabilitation Psychology 62, no. 3 (August 2017): 324–33.

Author

• Bess Williamson, School of the Art Institute of Chicago