This article is part of our Design special section about new design solutions for healthy living.
A black T-shirt bearing the words “Piss on Pity” written in pink in an Akzidenz Grotesk bold condensed font sets the tone for the Victoria and Albert Museum’s “Design and Disability” exhibition. It is one of thousands of identical garments from the early 1990s worn by demonstrators attempting to shut down a British fund-raising telethon they saw as a crass and insulting portrayal of disabled people.
The telethon had previously raised 20 million pounds (about $35.6 million in that era) from viewers, much of it donated to causes focused on the disabled. But Alan Holdsworth, a folk musician who led the protests, said at the time, “It portrays us as tragic, pathetic victims who long to be non-disabled, or plucky heroes who deserve a pat on the head for triumphing over adversity. Well, we’ve had enough of it.”
The Piss on Pity movement was a turning point in how disabled people saw themselves. The campaign, which erupted in 1990 and again in 1992, was regarded as significant enough for the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History to acquire an example of the T-shirt for its collection.
Both in its content and the way in which it is presented, “Design and Disability,” on view through Feb. 15, 2026, takes the viewpoint of the disabled rather than the designer. It opens with a message warning that some of the themes may be distressing and encouraging the non-disabled to “witness and engage as an act of solidarity.”
Visitors who have had to work hard to get to the museum — as those with wheelchairs, anxiety disorders or autism certainly will have — are invited to rest a moment on entering. They may sit on a bench by Finnegan Shannon. Shannon, an artist who uses they/them pronouns, created the piece as part of their “Do You Want Us Here Or Not” series that began in 2018. The bench reads, “I NEED MORE TIME. REST HERE IF YOU AGREE.”
The bench is followed by a tactile map with Braille text that categorizes the exhibits based on their screen content, audio material and vibration effects.
Given how many museums are driven by the remorseless imperative to stage revenue-raising blockbusters, it is something of a miracle that “Design and Disability” got put on at all. The show is not expected to bring in visitor numbers that will match those of “David Bowie Is,” which opened at the V&A in 2013 (312,000), or the current hit show on Cartier jewelry (sold out for the next six weeks at the time of writing). But the museum saw it as an important subject to address, and the show has attracted an enthusiastic response from many who have seen it.
Reviewing it for The Guardian, Lucy Webster was clearly moved: “Running through each section of this tremendous show is something mainstream society doesn’t get to see very often: disabled joy. It’s there in the harness that allows deaf and hearing-impaired gig-goers to feel music as vibrations on their chest. It’s there in the vibrant clothes. It’s there — certainly — in the all-purpose hands-free vibrator (yes, really). But it’s not just the individual items that exude this joy. It’s the themes of community action and care that show up again and again, and the reframing of the very concept of disability — from the ‘medical problem’ society sees to the proud identity we know it to be.”
Ms. Webster, whose 2023 autobiography, “The View From Down Here,” begins with a disarming account of being refused entry to a London nightclub because she was in a wheelchair, said in her review that she found delight in the nightlife images of Sandra Oviedo, a Chicago photographer also known as ColectivoMultipolar. The scenes feature the colorful, gender-fluid creations of Rebirth Garments, a company that, according to its website, designs for the “very particular clothing needs” of trans and disabled communities “instead of being centered on cisgender, heterosexual, white, thin people.”
Such projects represent a more culturally oriented and perhaps more glamorous take on disability than the one proposed by what is known as universal design.
Also known as inclusive design, this strategy erases the idea of difference by finding commonality in people’s needs. If a vegetable peeler can be comfortably used by an arthritis sufferer, proponents of universal design say, it will be equally useful for the more agile. If a curb cut is incorporated into pavement for the benefit of a wheelchair user crossing the road, it will help somebody pushing a baby stroller to do the same. A fire escape that is safe for blind people will be safe for the sighted trying to find a way out of a smoke-filled room.
Universal design as an approach was shaped by two architects belonging to a generation that was vulnerable to polio. Ronald Mace, an American who contracted polio at age 9 and used a wheelchair from that time, was determined to break through the physical barriers to an architectural education that he encountered in the 1960s. Selwyn Goldsmith, from England, was partially paralyzed by polio at 24.
These men shaped legislation in both the United States and Britain that has gone some way to changing the attitudes that had made life difficult for them. They argued for levers not knobs, for bathroom doors wide enough for a wheelchair.
Universal design was also influenced by Patricia Moore, an able-bodied designer who began her career in the New York City studio of the famed industrial designer Raymond Loewy.
Triggered by the dismissive response to her suggestion that it would be useful to design a refrigerator that could be opened by arthritic hands, she embarked on a research study that involved disguising herself as an 85-year-old. She eventually became part of the team that worked on the OXO Good Grips product line created by Smart Design, a pivotal example of universal design.
Hers was a controversial approach: It gave her empathy, but she could always discard the prosthetics that she adopted; those for whom she spoke up could not.
One of the universal design movement’s most effective supporters has been the Helen Hamlyn Foundation (later the Helen Hamlyn Trust), which came to the public’s attention in 1986 with an exhibition at the V&A called “New Design for Old.” The Helen Hamlyn Center for Design at the Royal College of Art in London, whose eponymous founder is a trained designer, focused on the development of products that supported independent living for elderly people. A luminous light switch and a shower with a built-in seat were two examples featured, which, like all the show’s exhibits, were careful not to look medicalized.
When the foundation repeated the exercise at the Design Museum in London in 2017, technology had evolved. The San Francisco designer Yves Béhar contributed a high-tech smart suit that could support failing muscles to keep wearers active.
Jeremy Myerson, the first director of the foundation’s research program at the RCA, took Helen Hamlyn, now 91 and using a wheelchair herself, on a tour of “Design and Disability.”
The two admired the show, with reservations, Mr. Myerson said. “We saw things that we had not seen before. But this is somebody’s point of view, and it is a partial view. There is no hierarchy in the display. How do you compare the impact of a T-shirt and that of somebody like David Constantine, who made it possible for low-cost wheelchairs to be made in the Third World?”
Asked to respond, Catrìona Macdonald, the V&A’s exhibitions manager, said, “We wanted to focus on disability as a cultural identity. If we focused too much on the broader context, we would risk not addressing the built environment for disabled people or exploring what disabled culture and identity is now.”
And yet the broader context is what makes the exhibition speak to the widest audience. As Mr. Myerson put it, “Old age will make us all disabled sooner or later.”
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