669668

Getting a Grip: Disability in American Industrial Design of the Late Twentieth Century
Author(s): Bess Williamson

Source: Winterthur Portfolio, Vol. 46, No. 4 (Winter 2012), pp. 213-236
Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur
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Getting a Grip
Disability in American Industrial Design of the Late
Twentieth Century
Bess Williamson
From the 1970s to the end of the twentieth century, a number of American designers pursued the approach known as
universal design, or design that can be used by both disabled and nondisabled people. Universal design informed a
number of mainstream products as designers integrated disability-related features into functionally and aesthetically
distinct offerings for the mass market. These successful, fashionable consumer goods reflected the ideal that design for
people with disabilities could bring about better design for all. In the public image of these products, however, disability
was rarely a central focus, but instead remained secondary or hidden.
MERICAN INDUSTRIAL designers faced

a new challenge beginning in the 1970s:
designing appliances, kitchen tools, office
equipment, and other devices of work and leisure
so that they could be used by people with disabilities.
The problem of everyday products and spaces designed without attention to physical, cognitive, and
sensory impairments was a significant issue for a
new and vocal activist group of the period, the
American disability rights movement. The movement agitated for change on a variety of stages,
including nationwide protests in the 1970s to call
attention to the design of sidewalks, government
buildings, subways, and other public places.1 Unlike
Bess Williamson is assistant professor in the Department of Art

History, Theory, and Criticism at the School of the Art Institute of
Chicago.
I gratefully acknowledge the guidance of editor Kasey Grier
and two anonymous reviewers. This article is based on research at
the Hagley Museum and Library, with essential input from archivist
Lynn Catanese and financial support of the Henry Belin Du Pont
Dissertation Award, and at the Smithsonian National Museum of
American History, where Katherine Ott provided insight and research help. Further thanks are due to my advisor, Arwen Mohun,
and colleague Janneken Smucker at the University of Delaware,
who read several versions of the work.
1
Joseph P. Shapiro, No Pity: People with Disabilities Forging a New
Civil Rights Movement (New York: Times Books, 1993); Richard K.
Scotch, From Good Will to Civil Rights: Transforming Federal Disability
Policy, 2nd ed. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001).
B 2012 by The Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum,
Inc. All rights reserved. 0084-0416/2012/4604-0001$10.00
their counterparts in the architectural world, however, the designers of consumer products were not
subject to legal requirements to improve usability.
Instead, a select group of designers took up this new
functional concern as a creative challenge and a
source of innovation. Departing from conventional
approaches to designing for the most common physical types, they considered the extremes of the human bodythe impaired bodies of older people
and people with disabilitiesas a starting point for
new designs. In the last several decades of the twentieth century, several new, commercially successful
products grew out of the push to design for common, or universal, values of greater usability.
The approach that came to be known as universal
design provides a distinct example among a range
of late twentieth-century design efforts to address
social issues. Responding to social and cultural
changes in the 1960s and 1970s, many designers
saw such issues as environmental waste, resource
scarcity in the developing world, urban American
poverty, and the struggles of the disabled as potential
avenues for an enlightened, progressive design practice.2 These proposals, however, often proved difficult to implement, given the commercial emphasis
2
Dean Nieusma, Alternative Design Scholarship: Working
toward Appropriate Design, Design Issues 20, no. 3 (Summer
2004): 1324; Nigel Whiteley, Design for Society (London: Reaktion,
1993); Victor J. Papanek, Design for the Real World: Human Ecology
and Social Change (New York: Pantheon, 1972).

214
Winterthur Portfolio 46:4
of the industrial design profession and relative conservatism among manufacturers. By contrast, universal design deliberately focused on mass-market
appeal as a means of bringing about social change.
The underlying claim of universal design was that
addressing the concerns of people with disabilities
in everyday products would bring design solutions
for alland thus, design solutions that could compete successfully in a mass marketplace. This claim
paralleled the arguments of the disability rights
movement, which posited that the concerns of people with disabilities were not marginal, but rather
central to a diverse human population with a host
of potential vulnerabilities.
The design historian Judy Attfield describes design objects as wild things, referring to the difficulty
of finding a tame or well-ordered interpretation of
modern material things as they move through the
wilds of creative planning, manufacturing, marketing, consumption, and use. To locate design within
a social context, Attfield writes, means integrating
objects and processes within a culture of everyday
life where things dont always do as they are told
nor go according to plan.3 In the case of the modern lives of people with disabilities, there are many
ways in which designed things do not do as they are
told. Most notably, the vast majority of consumer
products are not designed with disability in mind,
meaning that handles are too delicate, buttons too
stiff, and graphics too small for certain users. Even
in architecture, where laws have improved the landscape somewhat, blocked doors, out-of-order elevators, and poorly designed ramps show how even
legal mandates do not guarantee that material
things will work according to plan. Universal design represents a deliberate effort on the part of designers to address the ways things can go wrong for
hand, eye, and body. These plans, in turn, created
new questions and avenues of interpretation as they
reached material form.
The history and development of universal design show the variety of ways that material objects
respond to, and in turn shape, social contexts. At
first look, universal design represents a victory of
disability rights principles, as designers moved beyond assumptions of disability as a special and separate experience toward accepting the relevance of
disability to usability in general. Before this moment, ergonomic or body-focused design sought
an ideal, typical body size and shape as a guide
for designing spaces and products, leaving out the
3
Judy Attfield, Wild Things: The Material Culture of Everyday Life

(Oxford: Berg, 2000), 6.
farthest ends of the physical spectrum and focusing

on an able-bodied norm. When, starting in the
1970s, designers noted the potential promise of designing for atypical or, in Disability Studies terms,
extraordinary bodies, they acted on new cultural
understandings of disability.4 At first, these new approaches remained on the margins of design discourse. A range of designers made first ventures
into this arena in independent experiments in their
own offices and in educational projects. In the
1980s and 1990s, however, the strategy of incorporating features of greater manual and visual usability informed several mass-market, high-profile
products, including the best-selling Cuisinart food
processor and the OXO GoodGrips line of kitchen
tools. This chronology, in which disability moved
from a nonissue, to an experimental challenge, to
a commercially viable consideration in industrial
design, reflects an overall change in American attitudes toward disability. Still, looking deeper, there
are aspects of wildness, in which these artifacts also point to other, unintentional narratives.
As this article describes, products of universal
design are artifacts not only of the emergence of
disability rights in America, but also of a lasting
cultural ambivalence toward physical difference
and difficulty. While these products distinctive
buttons, handles, and graphics derived from disability research, their marketing made little to
no reference to inability or impairment. Universal
designs emphasis on the benefits of products for
all users often led to images and coverage that
elided or even eliminated any actual persons with
disabilities. As a result, a consumer might easily appreciate the functional and stylistic qualities of
these products without being aware of their design
derivationnever questioning the premise that
disability is a special or extraordinary experience.
Recent observers have offered other possible approaches, seeking once again to revise material approaches to disability. Ongoing debates about the
possibilities of designing for a variety of bodies
show the elusiveness of a tame, ordered response
to new ideals and ideas in design.
The Human Factor
Universal design initiated a new phase in a longer
history of designers, planners, and engineers working
4
Rosemarie Garland Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1997).

215
Getting a Grip
to improve the fit between manufactured things and
the human body. Over the course of the twentieth
century, experts in these various fields recognized a
fundamental challenge of mass production: that
while standardized manufacturing could churn out
identical machines and tools, human bodies proved
more difficult to predict. Before the 1970s and the
advent of universal design, disabilities rarely featured in the calculations of designers. When these
professionals did turn to people with limited reach,
dexterity, mobility, or sight, they tended to respond
to the thinking of their time, treating the disabled
as marginal figures, exceptions to the norm. These
assumptions shaped the technical processes by which
spaces and products were designed and ultimately
created the inaccessible society that disability rights
advocates would critique in the later part of the
century.
A starting point for the history of body-focused
design can be found in the early twentieth century.
Progressive Era experts in scientific management
created a new form of industrial consulting focused
on the interactions between industrial equipment
and human operators. For leading figures including
Frederick W. Taylor and Frank and Lillian Gilbreth,
proper selection and training of workers were key
tools for eliminating wastes of time and energy on
the factory floor and, eventually, in homes as well.5
Taylor suggested screening workers according to
body type, essentially designing a workforce to fit
the physical requirements of certain machines and
tools.6 The Gilbreths, for their part, advised that
there was a one best way to do any task and focused
on both training and equipment design as a means
of achieving it.7
In rare moments when these early twentiethcentury consultants considered disability as a factor
in industrial work, they imagined customized solutions to adapt mass-produced work equipment. The
Gilbreths were some of the first to address the concerns of disabled workers through design. They
studied veterans of World War I who had lost arms
and recommended adapting office and factory equipment to accommodate their disabilities.8 Medical
5
David Meister, The History of Human Factors and Ergonomics
(London: Erlbaum, 1999), 15152.
6
Frederick Winslow Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management (New York: Harper, 1919).
7
Jane Lancaster, Making Time: Lillian Moller Gilbreth; A Life beyond
Cheaper by the Dozen (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2004).
8
Elspeth Brown, The Prosthetics of Management: Time Motion Study, Photography, and the Industrialized Body in World
War I America, in Artificial Parts, Practical Lives: Modern Histories
of Prosthetics, ed. Katherine Ott, David Serlin, and Stephen Mihm
(New York: New York University Press, 2002), 24981.
specialists and social workers recommended similar

arrangements, suggesting that disabled individuals
be trained for specific kinds of jobswatch repair,
for examplein which they could easily adapt a
small workshop to their individual concerns.9 After
Frank Gilbreths death in 1924, Lillian worked with
rehabilitation hospitals to develop specialized training kitchens to extend the same lessons to the labors
of housework.10 For women who used wheelchairs
or prosthetic limbs or who had heart or orthopedic
conditions, easy-to-reach shelving and other tools
could help them use [their] time and energy to advantage in their home duties.11 While these design
scenarios remained limited to customized projects
and adaptations, they nonetheless acknowledged
the presence of people with disabilities in workplaces and homes and their material needs in these
spaces.
During World War II, a new field of human
factors or ergonomic design honed in on the
problem of designing military equipment for a
range of bodies. Looking at military equipment
such as planes and submarines, they saw buttons
that were hard to reach and distinguish, cramped
seating, controls out of reach or at awkward angles,
and loose clothing at risk of catching on levers and
doors. In military research laboratories, interdisciplinary teams of doctors, biologists, psychologists,
anthropologists, and engineers mined medical data
for use in design, using these anthropometrics
(human body measurements) to determine designs
of equipment ranging from cockpits to control panels
to uniforms.12
Anthropometric methods developed in World
War II remained standard in design for decades after
the war. Statistical research showed that the greatest
variation in physical dimensions occurred at the very
ends of the anthropometric scaleamong the highest
9
Edna Yost, Normal Lives for the Disabled (New York: Macmillan,
1944), 78; S. Harry Berns, Edward W. Lowman, Howard A. Rusk,
and Donald A. Covalt, Spinal Cord Injury: Rehabilitation Costs and
Results in 31 Successive Cases including a Follow-up Study (New York:
Institute of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, New York University
Bellevue Medical Center, 1957), 12.
10
Lancaster, Making Time, 334; Yost, Normal Lives for the Disabled.
11
Lillian Gilbreth, Building for Living, in A Nationwide Report
on Building Happy, Useful Lives for the Handicapped: A Record of the
1950 Convention (Chicago: National Society for Crippled Children
and Adults, 1951), 4850.
12
Meister, History of Human Factors and Ergonomics, 14752;
Ross Armstrong McFarland, Human Factors in Air Transport Design
(New York: McGraw-Hill, 1946); Charles Mauro, Human Factor:
How Human Variability Affects Design, Industrial Design 25 ( January
1978); Leonard C. Mead and Joseph W. Wulfeck, Human Engineering: The Study of the Human Factor in Machine Design, Scientific
Monthly 75, no. 6 (December 1952): 37279.

216
and lowest two to five percentiles.13 Researchers calculated that, by eliminating these statistical outliers,
they could develop designs that could accommodate
the remaining 95 percent of potential operators
tall, short, slender, broad, and with a range of reach
abilitywithout sacrificing weight or size. While
their numbers were limited to the young, able-bodied
population of active-duty military, these engineers
did pursue some measures of diversity in their samples, including servicemen of a variety of specialties
as well as women enrolled in the Women Army Service Pilot (WASP) and Flight Nurse programs.14 Given
the military context, however, these early ergonomists
had the option to eliminate certain body types from
certain positions if fit was too difficult to achieve.
It is better to require that the 98th percentile
man hunch down to the 90 per cent cockpit or even
to bar him from the fighter type aircraft, wrote one
researcher, than to include head and foot space for
his edge-of-the-spectrum body size.15
As the war came to an end, human factors specialists applied their 95 percent principle to the
design of civilian products and environments.
Where once they discussed the extremes of flight
conditions, now these engineers and industrial consultants emphasized the importance of fit and comfort to the efficient operation of any kind of
equipmentin industry, in offices, or at home.16
The leading disseminator of human factors methods
to the industrial design field was Henry Dreyfuss, a
prolific American designer of products and interiors
(e.g., the John Deere tractor and black Bell Telephone).17 After a stint designing naval equipment
during the war, Dreyfuss developed a series of anthropometric charts for his offices use in civilian
13
H. T. E. Hertzberg, Some Contributions of Applied Physical Anthropology to Human Engineering, Annals of the New York
Academy of Sciences 63 (1955): 62022; Albert Damon, Howard W.
Stoudt, and Ross A. McFarland, The Human Body in Equipment Design (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966), 3.
14
Francis E. Randall, Albert Damon, Robert S. Benton, and
Donald I. Patt, Human Body Size in Military Aircraft and Personal
Equipment, Army Air Forces Technical Report no. 5501, Army
Air Forces Air Material Command, Dayton, OH, 1946.
15
Hertzberg, Some Contributions of Applied Physical Anthropology, 620.
16
For example, McFarland, Human Factors in Air Transport Design;
Ross Armstrong McFarland, Human Body Size and Capabilities in the Design
and Operation of Vehicular Equipment (Boston: Harvard School of Public
Health, 1953); Ross Armstrong McFarland and Alfred L. Moseley, Human Factors in Highway Transport Safety (Boston: Harvard School of Public Health, 1954); Damon, Stoudt, and McFarland, The Human Body in
Equipment Design; Earnest Albert Hooton, A Survey in Seating (Cambridge,
MA: Department of Anthropology, Harvard University, 1945).
17
Russell Flinchum, Henry Dreyfuss, Industrial Designer: The Man in
the Brown Suit (New York: Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum,
Smithsonian Institution, Rizzoli, 1997), 8788, 17579.
design, consulting with former Navy statistician

Alvin Tilley.18 In 1959, Dreyfuss published a collection of the charts called The Measure of Man, a package that included two wall-sized posters of male and
female figures along with thirty-two smaller charts
showing them in a variety of design contexts, including standing at a control board, sitting at a
desk, driving a car, and in the passenger seat of an
airplane (figs. 12).19 The charts in The Measure of
Man guided designers through the practice of designing for the middle 95 percent range of documented body types, providing three measurements
(2.5, 50, and 97.5 percentiles) for each anthropometry point. Acknowledging that no single design
could be perfect for all users, the book offered
these small, average, and large measurements with
the ideal that designers could strike a balance that
provides all three with reasonable fit.20 The charts
became standard reference works for American design offices, seeming to provide exact measurements
for every design situation.21
For the Dreyfuss office and other industrial designers who used The Measure of Man, people with
disabilities were literally off the charts, not represented in the 95 percentile median or even in the
full 100 percent of data sets.22 When Dreyfuss and
his contemporaries did encounter people with
disabilities, they had to conduct new research to fill
in data not provided in standard guides. In 1954,
the Dreyfuss Office contributed to a Veterans
Administrationfunded project to improve prosthetic
arms for veterans who had lost limbs in World War II
and the Korean War.23 Dreyfusss staff initially approached the project by strapping prosthetic limbs
18
Henry Dreyfuss, Designing for People (New York: Simon &
Schuster, 1955).
19
Henry Dreyfuss, The Measure of Man: Human Factors in Design
(New York: Whitney Library of Design, 1960).
20
Ibid., 45.
21
In surveys, designers cite Dreyfuss as one of the most often
consulted ergonomic sources. John V. H. Bonner, Exploring the
Interface Culture between Ergonomics and Product Interface
Design, in Design Cultures, Proceedings of the Third European
Academy of Design Conference (Sheffield: European Academy
of Design, 1999). A small selection of works that cite the Dreyfuss
offices technical guides include: Harry A. King, Body pillow, US
Patent 4,754,510, filed March 6, 1986, issued July 5, 1988;
Michael E. Wiklund and Stephen B. Wilcox, Designing Usability
into Medical Products (Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press, 2005), 77; Teresa
Bellingar, Pete Beyer, and Larry Wilkerson, The Research behind
Zody, white paper (Haworth Ergonomics, Holland, MI, May
2009), 5.
22
The National Health Examination of 196062 made available
a more racially, geographically, and socioeconomically diverse population, with subjects between the ages of 18 and 89. Damon, Stoudt,
and McFarland, The Human Body in Equipment Design, 1011, 53.
23
David Harley Serlin, Replaceable You: Engineering the Body
in Postwar America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004),

217
Getting a Grip
Fig. 1. Henry Dreyfuss, Standing Adult Male chart, 1960. From Henry
Dreyfuss, The Measure of Man (New York: Whitney Library of Design,
1960). (Henry Dreyfuss Associates, LLC.)
on their own bodies, but this proved unsatisfactory

such is the taken-for-granted magic of sound arms
and legs that they were unable to use these mechanical devices, wrote Dreyfuss. For a better test group,
he brought in several amputee veterans to demonstrate how they used their arms, stripping off their
shirts so that the designers could observe how they
co-ordinated their muscles to operate the steel substitutes.24 The designers responded with a prototype
that complemented the amputees demonstrated
skills, improving the weight distribution in standard
3450; Katherine Ott, The Sum of Its Parts: An Introduction to
Modern Histories of Prosthetics, in Ott, Serlin, and Mihm, Artificial
Parts, Practical Lives, 1617; Bess Furman, Progress in Prosthetics:
A Summary under Sponsorship of the Prosthetics Research Board of the
National Academy of Sciences (Washington, DC: Department of Health,
Education and Welfare, Office of Vocational Rehabilitation, 1962).
24
Dreyfuss, Designing for People, 27.
Army-issue dual-hook prostheses. For Dreyfuss and

his staff, design for people with disabilities was a special side project involving issues that were unique to
that group.
Occasionally, a designers foray into developing
products for injured or disabled bodies led to success in the world of mass-market design. Like many
of his contemporaries, the commercial illustrator
Thomas Lamb felt a desire to participate in the war
effort in the 1940s. Lamb never worked for the War
Department or any branch of the armed forces but
instead worked independently to develop a new
crutch for injured veterans who would be returning
from the front.25 Through research into modern
25
Rachel Elizabeth Delphia, Design to Enable the Body: Thomas
Lambs Wedge-Lock Handle, 19411962 (MA thesis, University of
Delaware, 2005).

218
Fig. 2. Henry Dreyfuss, Adult Male Driver in Vehicle

chart, 1960. From Henry Dreyfuss, The Measure of Man
(New York: Whitney Library of Design, 1960). (Henry
Dreyfuss Associates, LLC.)
rehabilitation medicine, he learned that standard

crutches could cause arm pain when users put their
full body weight on their armpits; in response, he
proposed a crutch with an improved, comfortable
grip that would encourage users to lean more weight
on their hands (fig. 3).26 Although he did not explicitly calculate a 95 percentile range of hands, Lamb
studied anatomy books and measured hundreds of
hands to devise a handle that would fit a range of
sizes, as well as left- and right-handed users.27 Rather
than a one to one grip formsuch as one made
from squeezing a coil of clay in the handLambs
George Deaver and Mary Eleanor Brown, The Challenge of

Crutches: VI. Living with Crutches and Canes, Archives of Physical
Medicine, November 1946, 683706; Thomas Lamb to Mary Eleanor
Brown, February 20, 1950, and Mary Eleanor Brown to Thomas Lamb,
April 13, 1950, Thomas Lamb Papers, Hagley Museum and Library,
Wilmington, DE.
27
Wedge-Lock handle sketches folder, ca. 1940s, Thomas Lamb
Papers, Hagley Museum and Library, Wilmington, DE; Anthony Staros,
Evaluation Report C-4/1: Lamb Crutch Handle, Scientific Handle Company, June 4, 1952, Thomas Lamb Papers, Hagley Museum and Library;
Tom Lamb The Handle Man, Industrial Design 1 (February 1954).
26
Fig. 3. Thomas Lamb, Lim-Rest crutches. (Thomas Lamb

Papers, Hagley Museum and Library.)
patented Wedge-Lock design incorporated angled

incisions with convex curves.28 These V-shaped cuts,
Lamb posited, guided the hand to the correct position
to make use of the thumbthe strongest fingerand
reduce strain in the outer edge of the hand.29
Thomas Lambs interest in wounded soldiers informed his new patent but had little to do with the
final uses of the handles. Despite repeated attempts, at great personal cost, to court the medical
supply industry, Lamb only found success with his
crutch handles once they were attached to mainstream consumer products.30 Cutco Knives licensed
Lambs Wedge-Lock handle starting in 1952, and
his designs remain standard on the popular knives
(fig. 4).31 He also adapted the handle with slight
28
Rachel Delphia, Ergonomics and Negative Space: Thomas
Lambs Wedge-Lock Handle, in The Utility of Emptiness, ed. Uli
Marchsteiner (Barcelona: Museu de les Arts Decoratives, 2008), 45.
29
Thomas Lamb, sketches and notes, Thomas Lamb Papers,
Hagley Museum and Library.
30
Lamb to Brown, February 20, 1950; Brown to Lamb, April 13,
1950; Thomas Lamb to Frances L. Orbeck, July 1, 1957, Thomas
Lamb Papers, Hagley Museum and Library; Howard Rusk, Self-Help
Devices for Rehabilitation (New York: Institute of Physical Medicine
and Rehabilitation, 1945).
31
Delphia, Design to Enable the Body, 62.

219
Getting a Grip
variations to provide optimal grips for luggage, bicycle handlebars, brooms, saws, pens, and cookware.32
Although Lamb denied any aesthetic considerations
in his design of the handle forms, the Wedge-Lock
has a distinctive, recognizable shape. Companies
that licensed the Lamb handle promoted them and
Lambs design story as key characteristics of the
products. Cutco described its knives as the worlds
greatest cutlery that combined a patented Double
D grind blade and the exclusive Lamb handle.33
In promotional materials, the producers of WearEver Aluminum cookware described the full story
of how Lamb became handle conscious during the
war, while designing a pain-saving crutch [and]
invented the wedging principle which became the
basis for this revolutionary new utensil handle.34 In
the Wedge-Lock handle, Lamb had translated research on the injured body into benefits for a commercial marketa result that foreshadowed the
development of universal design strategies later in
the centurybut never produced a crutch or any
other medically related handle.
Lamb and Dreyfuss both represent designers
responses to disability in an era before a rights
movement, when the argument for universal design had not yet taken hold. These midcentury designers responded to what disability rights advocates
would later describe as the disabling effects of
design, or the ways in which design can obstruct
movement, cause pain, or confuse the user.35 In
both cases, people with disabilities ultimately remained outside of the imagined mainstream of
users. In Dreyfusss case, he touted his work with
amputees as a part of the practice of designing for
people, but he admitted that the prosthetic arm
project required him to go beyond his knowledge
of the typical user. Thomas Lamb developed his innovative handles based on research on the particular
issues of injured veterans, but the resulting form
targeted a part of the users body that was not injured.
The carefully sculpted grips, through which Lamb
aimed to optimize the strongest fingers, assumed a
32
Cutco: Worlds Finest Cutlery, advertisement, Cutco Cutlery,
Olean, NY, n.d., Thomas Lamb Papers, Hagley Museum and Library;
Presenting the New, Advanced Wear-Ever Aluminum New Method
Utensil Design, advertisement, Wear-Ever, New Kensington, PA, n.d.,
Thomas Lamb Papers, Hagley Museum and Library.
33
Cutco: Worlds Finest Cutlery.
34
Presenting the New, Advanced Wear-Ever Aluminum New
Method Utensil Design.
35
Edward N. Brandt and Andrew MacPherson Pope, eds., Enabling America: Assessing the Role of Rehabilitation Science and Engineering
(Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 1997), 3; Joseph La Rocca
and Jerry S. Turem, The Application of Technological Developments to Physically Disabled People (Washington, DC: Urban Institute, 1978), 1.
certain range of motion in the hand to begin with.

As Lambs wife wrote of the crutch handle, the objects are making the hands perform, rather than
the hands making the objects perform.36
For people with disabilities living in the 1950s
and 1960s, the mainstream world of products
and architecture remained difficult to use. Some
specialists within the field of medical rehabilitation
observed this problem and sought to address it, but
they, too, failed to see a role for these issues in
mainstream design and marketing. In rehabilitation clinics and hospitals, occupational and physical therapists designed specialized tools dubbed
self-help aids for their patients to use in the typical inaccessible environments of the postwar home.
At Dr. Howard Rusks New York Institute for Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, a leading center
established in 1948, a patient might learn to attach
a leather strap to an electric razor or solder an extended loop onto cutlery as part of training for independent living outside of the hospital.37 Rusk
wrote of the dearth of available products for this
training and reported that many former patients
and their families, as well as independent inventors, sent him ideas and plans for products of this
kind. He cautioned, though, that their market viability might be limited: While there is a great need
for this type of equipment still, the problems are
so individual that too often a universal type of device is not suitable for everyone.38 Rusks medical
perspective, like the special research projects of
product designers, reflects a society-wide perception of people with disabilities as outsiders to mainstream commercial culture and design. In contrast
to this view, designers who embraced disability as
an area of research in succeeding decades found
that there was indeed a possibility for universal devices to be marketed to a broader population.
Discovering Disability
Consumer product designers began to reconsider
standard ergonomic approaches in the 1970s, responding to a growing, more active population of
people with disabilities in America. With advances
Carolyn Lamb, The Story of the Lamb Lim-Rest [after 1944],
Thomas Lamb Papers, Hagley Museum and Library.
37
Robert G. Wilson, Need for and Development of Aids for
Handicapped People (MS thesis, Illinois Institute of Technology,
1952), 16; Self-Help Devices, IPMR: A Chronicle of Independence,
1972, 1213; Howard A. Rusk and Eugene J. Taylor, Living with
a Disability (Garden City, NY: Blakiston, 1953).
38
Rusk and Taylor, Living with a Disability, 20.
36

220
Fig. 4. Cutco Knife Company, Cutco: Worlds Finest Cutlery. (Thomas

Lamb Papers, Hagley Museum and Library.)
in surgical techniques and technologies such as

the iron lung respirator, people with significant
physical disabilities were increasingly likely to live
long and active lives in the mid- to late twentieth
century.39 Drawing inspiration from the civil rights
and second-wave feminist movements of the time,
a new disability rights movement emerged in the
late 1960s and early 1970s, coalescing around
social service organizations and veterans groups.40
39
Brandt and Pope, Enabling America, 131; Edward D. Berkowitz,
The Federal Government and the Emergence of Rehabilitation
Medicine, Historian 43, no. 4 (Winter 1981): 53045; Ott, The Sum
of Its Parts, 1518.
40
Shapiro, No Pity; Paul K. Longmore, The Disability Rights
Movement: Activism in the 1970s and Beyond, in Why I Burned
My Book and Other Essays on Disability (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2003), 10218.
These groups lobbied for local accessibility regulations and in 1977 staged nationwide protests to
pressure the federal government to pass and enforce sweeping regulations for public buildings
and transportation design.41 While designers like
Henry Dreyfuss and Thomas Lamb responded to
a postwar flash of publicity around disabled veterans, the next generation experimenting with
universal design responded to a new awareness of
disability not as a special separate concern, but
one that had relevance to a broader public. Their
41
Facilities for the Elderly and Handicapped, Bay Area Rapid
Transit District, San Francisco, January 1975, Harold L. Willson Papers,
Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley; Charles D. Goldman,
Architectural Barriers: A Perspective on Progress, Western New England
Law Review 5 (1983): 46593.

221
Getting a Grip
early responses included experiments in process
and form to address the entirety of human users,
not just the estimated 95 percent median.
In the 1970s, a number of designers and engineers proposed new technical models to address
a more diverse user group than were represented
in midcentury anthropometric calculations. Henry
Dreyfusss office published a revised edition of The
Measure of Man in 1974, now retitled Humanscale,
including a set of charts with measurements for
persons in wheelchairs, using canes and crutches, and
with limited vision and reach.42 Dreyfusss protgs
admitted that adding these new groups into the pool
of potential users made for a more difficult project
of accommodating diverse bodies. They acknowledged the problems of using the median measurements but found that to include the extremesthe
very large and small peopleis also impractical, for
it is nearly impossible to cover this range in a single
design without jeopardizing the comfort, efficiency,
or safety of the majority.43 An article published in
Industrial Design in the same year, however, suggested
a different conclusion. In May 1974, the magazine
ran a twenty-page feature article titled The Handicapped Majority, suggesting the commonality of
handicapping design interactions, not their specialness. The article featured photographs of people
struggling to open familiar products and packaging:
fumbling with a milk carton, tearing with their
hands and teeth at a cracker box, and struggling to
pry open blister-packs and pop-tops. The article
argued that these functional obstacles affected a
broad swath (a majority) of the population. One
designer noted that a normal person is [also] liable
to fall on a polished floor, slip in the bath, or trip over
a threshold he has limitations of reach, and can
only see over a limited distance. Student participants in a workshop on disability asked, How many
Americans are really normal?44
The premise of the Industrial Design articlethat
the design concerns of the disabled had relevance to
the broader field of usersechoed through a number
of design forays of the period. Rolf Faste, a design
professor at Syracuse University, developed a new
chart linking parts of the body to design features. This
chart, called The Enabler, differed in look and logic
42
Niels Diffrient, Alvin R. Tilly, and Joan C. Bardagjy, Humanscale 1/2/3: A Portfolio of Information, 1. Sizes of People, 2. Seating Considerations, 3. Requirements for the Handicapped and Elderly (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 1974); Niels Diffrient and Henry Dreyfuss Associates,
Humanscale 4/5/6: Manual (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981), and
Humanscale 7/8/9: Manual (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981).
43
Diffrient, Tilly, and Bardagjy, Humanscale 1/2/3, 45.
44
The Handicapped Majority, Industrial Design 21 (May 1974): 25.
from earlier human factors charts based on a select

anthropometric spectrum (figs. 56).45 In place of
the representative figures in Measure of Man was a severely abstracted human form tagged with physical
limitations, from Difficulty interpreting information at the head to Inability to use lower extremities and Extremes of height and weight at the
foot. In accompanying charts, Faste connected these
functional characteristics to design recommendations. His lines linked particular impairments to
design features, such as light-touch controls and enlarged knobs. His charts emphasized the overlaps
among impairments, showing, for example, that difficulties in comprehension, sight, and mobility all corresponded to design strategies for hand controls and
buttons. Describing his charts in 1977, Faste echoed
the idea of a handicapped majority as he noted that,
through study of manual disabilities, it becomes
quite apparent how much contortion the normal
hand must go through to accommodate itself to
the form of a product.46 In focusing on limitations,
rather than a typical 95 percent of bodily dimensions, The Enabler sought design improvements
that could potentially improve function for all users.
Many designers made first forays into addressing
disability in educational and experimental projects
in the 1970s. In 1975, the Industrial Designers Society
of America reported that 51 percent of departments
included at least one project to design for users with
disabilities during a students career.47 Some of these
projects explicitly set out to revise existing approaches
to design for the disabled. In 1974, the Armco Steel
Corporation sponsored a series of workshops on
Designing to Accommodate the Handicapped,
presenting the topic as an area of forward-thinking
and experimental design.48 Students argued that
addressing this population did not necessarily hinder
creativity and innovation. Participants developed prototypes with easy hand-holds and simple interfaces, with
soft angles, large buttons, and snap-in elements in
products including a wall-mounted emergency kit, a
television set, and a lever-shaped doorknob with an
45
Rolf Faste, Design with Disabled Persons in Mind, typescript,
Syracuse University School of Architecture, ca. 1977, Richard Hollerith
Papers, Hagley Museum and Library; Rolf Faste, New System Propels
Design for the Handicapped, Industrial Design 24 ( July 1977).
46
Richard Hollerith, Make Everyday Products More Usable
for Those with Disabilities, in Human Factors and Industrial Design
in Consumer Products (Medford, MA: Tufts University, 1980), 93.
47
Government Affairs Committee, 1975 Survey of Industrial
Design Educational Institutions and Educators of Awareness of the
Problems of Handicapped and Aging, Industrial Designers Society
of America, 1975, Richard Hollerith Papers, Hagley Library.
48
Designing to Accommodate the Handicapped: 1974 Armco Student
Design Program (Middletown, OH: Armco Steel Corporation, 1974).

222
Fig. 5. Rolf Faste, The Enabler, 1977. From Rolf Faste,

New System Propels Design for the Handicapped, Industrial Design, July 1977, 51. (Rolf Faste Foundation for
Design Creativity.)
oversized key (figs. 78). Photographs of the project showed these items as aesthetically inviting,
following design conventions of electronics and
home dcor rather than a medical or institutional
appearance.
In another venture, a young designer named
Patricia Moore used a hands-on research method
to explore issues of design for the elderly. In 1978,
Moore took leave from the prominent New York
design firm of Raymond Loewy and immersed
herself in the issue by dressing in theatrical makeup
and costumes to pass as a woman in her eighties.
In her book Disguisedpart memoir, part design
manifestoshe reported that while people were
willing to carry her bags or open doors, she felt irrelevant to the culture of consumption and design
as an older person. Attending a design conference
in costume, Moore noted that an old lady of eightyfive was someone to be ignored. She was not the
object of hostility or resistanceit was just that

she didnt count.49 Dressed up, she saw with fresh
eyes the problems of delicate switches and buttons,
confusing technologies, and fast-paced, crowded
urban spaces. Like Faste, Moore articulated the idea
that designing for the few (older people) could have
broader implications: By designing with the needs
of older consumers in mind, she wrote, we will find
that the inevitable result is better products for all
of us.50
These various projects that explored disability
in design appeared independently in the 1970s, with
little awareness of each other and no common term
to describe their ethos. The term universal design
can be traced to this time period as well, although
it was not widely recognized for another decade.
Ron Mace, a North Carolina architect who used a
wheelchair after a childhood case of polio, coined
the term in the early 1970s.51 Mace and his collaborators defined universal design as simply designing
all products, buildings, and exterior spaces to be usable by all people to the greatest extent possible.52
The term encapsulated the idea that many had asserted over the years: that design for people with
disabilities was not a separate chore apart from general design concerns, but instead could contribute to
improved function for all.53 The term also challenged
assumptions, particularly prevalent in architectural
design, that accessible or barrier-free design was ugly
and a burden imposed by government.54 If barrierfree and design for the handicapped sounded like
boring technical requirements, universal suggested
a new idea and a creative challenge.55
49
Pat Moore and Charles Paul Conn, Disguised: A True Story (Waco,
TX: Word Books, 1985), 3940.
50
Ibid., 163.
51
Ronald Mace, Universal Design: Barrier Free Environments
for Everyone, Designers West, November 1985; Moore and Conn,
Disguised; The Ronald L. Mace Collection, Special Collections
Department, North Carolina State University, 1999.
52
See http://www.design.ncsu.edu/cud/about_ud/about_ud.htm.
53
Katherine Ott, interview with Ruth Lusher [2005], typescript,
Division of Medicine and Science, National Museum of American
History, Washington, DC; Elaine Ostroff and Daniel Iacofano, Teaching Design for All People: The State of the Art (Boston: Adaptive Environments Center, 1982); Wolfgang F. E. Preiser and Elaine Ostroff, eds.,
Universal Design Handbook (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2001). My thanks
to Katherine Ott, who has interviewed and collected documents to
trace the many design professionals who participated in universal design, particularly Maces collaborators.
54
Mace, Universal Design, 18.
55
Mary E. Osman, Barrier-Free Architecture: Yesterdays Special Design Becomes Tomorrows Standard, AIA Journal 63, no. 3
(March 1975): 4044; Michelle Morgan, Beyond Disability: A
Broader Definition of Architectural Barriers, AIA Journal 65,
no. 5 (May 1976): 5053.

223
Getting a Grip
Fig. 6. Rolf Faste, Controls, 1977. From Rolf Faste, New System Propels Design for the Handicapped, Industrial Design, July 1977, 53. (Rolf Faste Foundation for Design Creativity.)
For most of the 1970s, designers efforts to address disability in new and appealing ways remained experimental, reflected in design charts,
product prototypes, and exploratory pieces like Pattie
Moores undercover research. In the 1980s and
1990s, several product designers put these initial
ideas to work, creating mass-market products with
functional and visual elements that responded to
limitations of the body. While these products reflect
changes in design approaches to disability, however,
their marketing messages show a more complex story.
As the next section will show, the earliest mass-market
products that incorporated disability-related features
made little or no reference to disability or physical impairment in media or marketing materials. In contrast
to early environmental products pitched to an ecoconscious market, the consumer products that incorporated research on physical disabilities rarely touted
these particular benefits. Instead of creating a new
niche market of those who identified as disabled, universal design translated these concerns into overall
marketing appeals based on function and aesthetics.
Universal Design on the Market
The products that emerged from a universal design approach had certain characteristics in common. They were generally functional hand tools,
they fell into the category of kitchen and home
wares, and they shared a certain aesthetic, with
smooth surfaces, tactile controls or handles, and
Fig. 7. Television prototype, 1974. From Designing to Accommodate the Handicapped: 1974 Armco Student Design
Program (Middletown, OH: Armco Steel Corporation,
1974). (AK Steel.)

224
Fig. 8. Door handle prototype, 1974. From Designing to Accommodate the Handicapped: 1974 Armco Student Design Program
(Middletown, OH: Armco Steel Corporation, 1974). (AK Steel.)
contrasting, sometimes brightly colored graphics.

Another significant commonality is that they were
marketed to a general, mainstream market with little to no mention of disability in advertising or
brand names. While their designers all drew on
awareness of disabilitiesoften related to the personal experiences of friends and loved onesthey
deliberately presented the products as useful and
appealing to a broad potential audience. Honing
the forms and graphics of these products to move
easily through the hands or communicate clearly to
the eyes, these industrial designers implicitly endorsed the concept of a handicapped majority
and the benefits of these design improvements to all.
The first mass-market product that integrated
universal features was the 1978 Cuisinart food
processor, a new design for a top-selling appliance.
The company Cuisinarts first introduced their food
processors in 1973 as a licensed reproduction of
the French Robo-Coupe Magi-Mix, a professionalgrade mixer with a sharp, rotating blade that
turned within a cylindrical plastic chamber.56 The
French-sounding Cuisinart stood out in a market of
lower powered blenders and reported strong sales
even at its relatively high price point.57 Its popularity
brought competition, with at least a dozen similarly
shaped imitators by 1978.58 The company hired Marc
Harrison, a professor at the Rhode Island School of
Design (RISD), for an update to help distinguish their
product. Rolled out in 1978 as the DLC-7, the
56
Barbara Allen Guilfoyle, After Cuisinart, the Deluge,
Industrial Design 22 (May 1978): 44; Selected Objects, Julia Childs
Kitchen at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History,
http://americanhistory.si.edu/juliachild/jck/html/textonly/ob22.asp.
57
Mimi Sheraton, Mixing It Up, New York, September 29,
1975; Deck the Halls, Clear the Shelves, Time, January 9, 1978.
58
Guilfoyle, After Cuisinart, the Deluge.
new Cuisinart food processor became an icon of

1980s housewares design and a status symbol for
gourmet chefs and cosmopolitan consumers.59
The cream-colored plastic monolith and sans-serif
block lettering that Harrison chose for the Cuisinart
nods to his training in modernist, unadorned form, but
it also reflected research into disabilities (fig. 9).60 The
Cuisinart is an assemblage of basic three-dimensional
forms: a cylinder atop a solid block. It resembled
high-design lines from brands like Braun and Alessi;
one commentator placed it among several American
designs that mimicked sleek imported goods to
appeal to status-conscious upwardly mobile consumers with Europeanized tastes.61 These consumers would not, however, likely identify the features
that related to more than a decade of research into
design for disabilities, gained through Harrisons
teaching at RISD. Harrison won a federal grant
in 1965 to fund student collaborations on rehabilitation equipment and introduced disability into many
student projects, such as a demonstration house for
the International Lead Zinc Research Organization
designed and built between 1970 and 1977.62 In
the house, students included flat thresholds for
wheelchair access; large, lever-shaped faucets; door
handles easily used by people with manual disabilities;
and light switches and outlets at reachable heights
(figs. 1011; note the original design model of the
Cuisinart in the kitchen photograph). These basic
elements translated an understanding of manual
and mobility impairment into smooth, simple forms
that would be difficult to distinguish from other designer housewares of the period.
Harrison drew on the knowledge he had gained
through teaching in his private work for Cuisinarts,
shaping specific design features to improve usability.
In preliminary sketches for the food processor, he
explored variations on large, simplified controls,
such as a bar-shaped lever and a round dial control
(figs. 1213). Harrison explained his design approach
59
The Food Processor Revolution: Act II, New York, November 13,
1978, 78.
60
Harrison studied at the Pratt Institute and Cranbrook School of
Art, two bastions of American modernism in the 1950s. He counted
among his influences Rowena Reed Kostellow, who installed a
Bauhaus-inspired design curriculum at Pratt. Marc Harrison, curriculum vitae [1985], ser. I, box 8, Marc Harrison Papers, Hagley
Museum and Library; Gail Greet Hannah, Elements of Design: Rowena
Reed Kostellow and the Structure of Visual Relationships (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton Architectural Press, 2002).
61
John Wall, U.S. Designwith Old-World lan, Washington
Times, February 10, 1986, Insight sec.
62
Development and Implementation of Student Design Projects
in the Area of Vocational Rehabilitation, n.d., Marc Harrison Papers,
Hagley Museum and Library; The ILZRO Industrialized Housing System
(New York: International Lead Zinc Research Organization, 1977).

225
Getting a Grip
Fig. 9. Marc Harrison, Cuisinart DCL 7-PRO, 1979. (Marc Harrison Papers, Hagley Museum
and Library.)
in a note scrawled across the bottom of a 1986

Cuisinart advertisement: Large handle. Large
paddle-like controls. (Gross motion vs. fine-finger
acuity). Large white letters on dark field for maximum contrast. Lettering on controls at angle of view
when using product (fig. 14).63 This was the language of rehabilitation and occupational therapy,
reflecting research on arthritis, Parkinsons disease,
and visual disabilities.64
63
A New Fruit Dessert: Fresh and Frozen Fluffs, handwritten
notes on magazine advertisement clipping, n.d., ser. I, box 4, Marc
Harrison Papers, Hagley Museum and Library; Harrison or a Cuisinart
representative used similar language in an internal, undated product
description: Cuisinart DLC-X Food Processor, n.d., ser. I, box 4, Marc
Harrison Papers, Hagley Museum and Library.
64
While Harrison left few explicit explanations of his design
process, he noted research on arthritis, Parkinsons, and visual deficits in a questionnaire for a gallery exhibition. Marc Harrison,
Questionnaire for Katonah Gallery, November 1983, ser. I, box 8,
Marc Harrison Papers, Hagley Museum and Library.
Though Harrison articulated disability-related

benefits in internal documents for Cuisinarts, the
companys advertising never mentioned anything to
do with physical impairment, describing the appliance
instead as simply the best.65 The company promoted this and other products designed by Harrison
as highly functional and highly sophisticated. Pitching to the bridal registry market in particular,
Cuisinarts sought to establish their food processor as
a part of the requisite toolkit for the well-heeled household.66 It frequently appeared in Craig Claibornes
65
The Food Processor Revolution: Act II; Cuisinart Model
CFP-9: Good as It Was, Its Better Now, advertisement [1976],
ser. I, box 4, Marc Harrison Papers, Hagley Museum and Library;
Craig Claiborne, She Demonstrates How to Cook Best with New
Cuisinart, New York Times, January 7, 1976, Food Day sec.
66
Do You, Cuisinarts, Promise to Commit Yourself to the
Bridal Market? advertisement, n.d., ser. I, box 4, Marc Harrison
Papers, Hagley Museum and Library.

226
Fig. 10. Model house kitchen, 1977. From The ILZRO

Industrialized Housing System (New York: International
Lead Zinc Research Organization, Inc., 1977), n.p. (International Lead Zinc Research Organization, Inc.)
gourmet recipes in the New York Times, was stocked

alongside Le Creuset cookware at imported food
shops, and was included in design shows at the
Whitney Museum and the Philadelphia Museum
of Art.67 Such was its position as a chic appliance
for the up-to-date household, it was even rumored
that the Cuisinart was a design inspiration for the
Apple Macintosh, first released in 1984.68
More than ten years after Harrison designed
the new version of the Cuisinart food processor,
another industrial designer drew on personal observation of disability to develop a successful and
distinctive household product. In 1989, a retired
kitchenware designer named Sam Farber was vacationing in France with his wife, Betsy. Betsy had
arthritis in her hands and struggled with the oldfashioned metal kitchen tools in their rental
house. Sam and Betsy devised clay models for a
larger, more forgiving handle, and when they returned to New York, they worked with the up-andcoming firm Smart Design to develop the OXO
GoodGrips line of kitchen tools.69 The oversized
67
Claiborne, She Demonstrates How to Cook Best; The
Pampered Chef, New York, March 3, 1975; Whitney Museum of
American Art, High Styles: Twentieth-Century American Design (New
York: Whitney Museum of American Art in association with Summit Books, 1985); Philadelphia Museum of Art, Design since 1945
(Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1983).
68
Wall, U.S. Designwith Old-World lan, 5657.
69
See http://www.design.ncsu.edu/cud/projserv_ps/projects
/case_studies/oxo.htm; Sam Farber, personal communication, February
2, 2008.
rubber handles with rippling fins at the top were

applied to twelve initial products, including a vegetable peeler, can opener, pizza wheel, and orange
zester (fig. 15). With their thick bar handles, oversized curves to protect the hand from sharp blades,
and a name that could be read upside down or
backward, OXO GoodGrips, like the Cuisinart,
blended a bright modern style with features for a
spectrum of physical abilities. While the Cuisinarts
geometric sleek lines projected an image of professionalism and sophistication, OXOs grips suggested familiarity and reliability, even in products
that looked quite different from their competition.
The design team purposefully chose a shape and
texture that would resemble bicycle grips, so that
users would intuitively sense their sturdiness and
soft grip.70 As Farber described them, the handles
say Im special. Come feel me and youll see how
special I am.71
OXO avoided reference to arthritis or other
kinds of hand pain in marketing, following the
pattern of Cuisinart in emphasizing function and
style. Still, some materials hinted at the design
source of the characteristic black handles. Hands
in the images were both male and female and of a
range of ages; one hand sported a Band-Aid, suggesting injury (fig. 16). Ad copy forming outlines
around the various products noted that the handles let users hold the tools the way you want to
hold them, not some way youre forced to hold
them and promised that the grip is as unique
as your fingerprints. This message of reassurance
makes no explicit reference to disability but instead puts the focus on broadly familiar themes
of comfort and security. One line of text suggests
a winking reference for those who might be in the
know about universal design, noting that a universal design makes Good Grips easy for everyone
to hold on to and easy for everyone to use.72 By this
moment in the late 1980s, the term universal
was becoming more common among design insiders
and those familiar with the politics of disability.
In other cases, established companies discovered
disability research as an avenue to new product improvements. The Fiskars scissors company, one of
the longest-operating product manufacturers in
Europe, produced a solid, reliable product line of
scissors and other cutting tools for 400 years before
Pilar Guzman, Handles with Care, One, 2000, 142.
Sam Farber, personal communication, February 2, 2008.
72
Gadgets You Can Grip Are Tools You Can Use, OXO
GoodGrips catalog, ca. 1990, Division of Medicine and Science,
National Museum of American History.
70
71

227
Getting a Grip
Fig. 11. Fixtures, 1977. From The ILZRO Industrialized Housing System (New York: International Lead
Zinc Research Organization, Inc., 1977), 18. (International Lead Zinc Research Organization, Inc.)
See http://www.fiskarsgroup.com/corporation/corporation_2
the tools on the tabletop as they cut (fig. 17). After focus groups of various demographics responded well
to the new model, the Golden Age line was renamed
Softouch, emphasizing the products benefits without making explicit reference to an older age group.76
Concurrent with Fiskarss new product development, another big name in consumer products,
Tupperware, was also searching for new updates
to their classic designs. After Earl Tuppers death
in 1983, the company struggled to adapt to social
trends such as the increasing use of take-out food
and microwave ovens and the presence of working
women who did not have time to give or attend
Tupperware parties.77 In 1992, the company hired
Scissors and Shears, Consumer Reports, October 1992, 67273.

Molly Follette Story, James L. Mueller, and Ronald L. Mace,
The Universal Design File: Designing for People of All Ages and Abilities
(Raleigh, NC: Center for Universal Design, 1998), 9092; Jim
Boda, personal communication, December 10, 2008.
76
James Mueller, The Case for Universal Design: If You Cant Use
It, Its Just Art, Ageing International 22, no. 1 (March 1995); Laura Herbst,
Nobodys Perfect, Popular Science 250, no. 1 ( January 1997): 6466.
77
Patricia Leigh Brown, At Tupperware, Rethinking the Bowl,
Perfecting the Burp, New York Times, June 10, 1993.
opening a subsidiary in the United States.73 By the

1990s, they faced stiff competition in the United
States, with other scissors makers mimicking their
brightly colored handle designs.74 Considering the
older, female customer base for craft supplies seemed
like common sense to the research and development design team, led by engineer Jim Boda and industrial designer Doug Birkholz.75 They developed a
new Golden Age scissors designed to relieve pressure and strain on the hand. The scissors sprang open
automatically, while the handles unconventional
angle, jutting up from the blade, allowed users to rest
73
.html.
74
75

228
Fig. 12. Marc Harrison, food processor drawings, 1978. (Marc Harrison Papers, Hagley Museum
and Library.)
Morison Cousins, a designer known for a clean,

modernist style, as vice president of design.78 Cousins
told the New York Times that he took inspiration from
his mother, Rose, who struggled to use her original
Tupperware containers, when he sought to contemporize the product line. He produced a new version
of Tuppers classic Wonderlier bowls with large floweror lip-shaped tabs to make them easier to open (fig. 18).
He made the new One Touch canisters solid white,
78
Mitchell Owens, Museum Plastics, New York Times, April 3, 1997.
to give a more sturdy look for countertop storage of

snack foods and bulk ingredients, with a lid that extended beyond the base so that they could be, in his
words, opened with an elbow. Cousins described
these changes as responses to the ceremony of Tupperware, bringing focus to the opening and closing
of the containers. In Tuppers era, the plastic bowls
had been known for their burping seals; now they
could be known for easy-to-use lids.79
79
Brown, At Tupperware.

229
Getting a Grip
Fig. 13. Marc Harrison, food processor drawings, 1978. (Marc Harrison Papers, Hagley Museum
and Library.)
As universal design became a more common

tactic and familiar term in the design community,
it came to suggest a new, creative, and progressive
approach to product development. OXO, Fiskars,
and Tupperware may not have emphasized disability in advertising, but they disseminated the
news in other ways. Universal design offered an engaging story for a certain kind of consumer, one who
attended museum and gallery shows, read the home
or design sections of the newspaper and might know
the names of prominent housewares designers. 80

Articles in the lifestyle sections of the Boston Globe,
Mike McClintock, User-Friendly Kitchens Coming of Age:
Aesthetics and Barrier-Free Access Meet in Universal Design,
Washington Home, July 19, 1990; Patricia Dane Rogers, When the Object Is Ease, Washington Home, September 17, 1992; Suzanne Slesin,
The Once and Future Brush, New York Times, February 16, 1995;
Owens, Museum Plastics; A Discussion about Design, panel with
Herbert Muschamp, Steven Holl, and Niels Diffrient, Charlie Rose,
December 29, 2000, http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/3330.
80

230
Fig. 14. Cuisinarts advertisement with handwritten notes by Marc Harrison, 1986. (Marc Harrison
Papers, Hagley Museum and Library.)
New York Times, and Washington Post and in design

magazines including Metropolis and Popular Mechanics told the story of how designers were taking a cue
from designs for the disabled in pursuit of making
products that are practical for all consumers.81
These stories emphasized the benefit for all when
research into physical disability led to visually appealing, sensuous objects. Its a paradoxical truth that an
elegant solution for a specialized user often makes an
inspired product for everyone else, mused a Boston
Globe reporter in 1993; a New York Times observer of
a 1999 housewares trade show commented that
thick, black, easily gripped rubberized handles
seemed to be on every implement, a la Oxos Good
Grip [sic]. What originated to help people with arthritis cope in the kitchen has gone mainstream.82 In
the 1980s and 90s, when manufacturers were increasingly highlighting affordable design in everyday products, a universal approach provided an
added value to their wares.
In 1998, a new exhibition at the Smithsonians
Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in New York
affirmed that disability had become a hot topic in the
design world. The show, called Unlimited by Design,
described universal design as both socially progressive
and commercially viable, an outgrowth of contemporary cultures emphasis on diversity as well

as an important move toward addressing the large
postwar baby boomer market segment.83 Laid out
on brightly colored exhibition panels that stood
out from the Cooper-Hewitts mansion walls, the
exhibition had a feeling of a trend-focused trade
show, presenting the future of design in sections on
offices, kitchens, and bathrooms. A centerpiece of
the show was a model Universal Kitchen designed
by Cuisinart designer Marc Harrison with his RISD students (fig. 19). For almost a decade leading up to the
show, Harrison and his students had conducted research
with the stated goal to recreate the kitchen, an everyday icon of poor design.84 The Universal Kitchen
responded to specific accessibility concerns with features like open space under work surfaces, adjustable-height counters and cabinets, large bar-shaped
handles and drawer pulls, and slide-out shelves and
compartments to eliminate strain in reaching. Other
features addressed more general usability issues, with
snack stations for the common task of preparing leftovers and enough space for spouses, grandparents, and
children to access food and counters at the same time.
Students also responded to environmental concerns
81
Madeline Drexler, A Universal Handle, Boston Globe Magazine,
December 12, 1993, 8.
82
Ibid.; Florence Fabricant, Food Stuff, New York Times, January
20, 1999, Style sec., 8.
83
Unlimited by Design exhibition, Cooper-Hewitt, National Design
Museum, Smithsonian Institution, New York, 1998.
84
Universal Kitchen poster, Rhode Island School of Design, 1998,
Marc Harrison Papers, Hagley Museum and Library.

231
Getting a Grip
Fig. 15. Sam Farber and Smart Design, OXO GoodGrips

vegetable peeler, designed 1989. (OXO International.)
with proposals for gray-water recycling systems and

plant-based air filtering and proposed three differentsized kitchen plans to address a variety of income levels
and housing types.85
The Universal Kitchen project suggested a future for universal design as a way of thinking about
usability beyond just the question of access. Including
measures for people of different ages and abilities
reflected not only the diverse bodies in a modern
household but also the shift away from the kitchen
as the workspace of just one personthe woman
homemaker. Harrison wrote that awareness of disabilities had helped the student designers escape
their assumptions of what is normal or acceptable
in design. As he reflected in a poster that accompanied the exhibition, physically able human beings
are remarkable in their ability to adapt to poor design. Were completely oblivious to the excessive and
repeated steps we go through every day to do simple things like make breakfast and lunch.86 Considering the concerns of people with disabilities, he
suggested, could lead to awareness of problems in
other arenas, including environmental and social issues.
From the Cuisinart to the Universal Kitchen, with
OXO, Fiskars, and Tupperware in between, disability
ranged from subtext to explicit subject. One New York
Times commentator described this category of products as stealth design, incorporating features for
aging baby boomers who [refuse] to acknowledge
the prospect of failing eyesight, hearing and dexterity.87 But something else also seems to be at work. In
late twentieth-century America, when people with
disabilities achieved a greater measure of inclusion
and older citizens lived increasingly active and long
lives, these product designs reflected some level of
acceptance that physical impairment is not an oddity
or a shame but a part of virtually every persons life
at some point. Despite the beauty and youth-focused
popular culture on American billboards and television screens, the everyday, functional objects seemed
to acknowledge that the body is vulnerable, sensitive
to its environment, and in need of support and comfort. Still, as designers and marketers avoided direct
mention of disability in advertising and emphasized
the benefits to a more homogeneous everyone, they
left a final impression of avoiding or euphemizing disability. Having revised technical definitions of typical
users, they nonetheless left cultural taboos around
disability in place.
85
Ibid.
Ibid.
87
William L. Hamilton, Youre Not Getting Older: Products
Are Getting Better, New York Times, June 27, 1999, F1.
86

232
Fig. 16. Gadgets You Can Grip Are Tools You Can Use, ca. 1990. From OXO GoodGrips
catalog, Division of Medicine and Science, National Museum of American History, Washington,
DC. (OXO International; photo, Bess Williamson.)
Evaluating Universal Design

In the last decade, as universal design has become
a recognized term among designers, critics, and
consumers, some have raised concerns about its
viability as the best way to address disability through
design. First, as most universal design advocates
will readily admit, the ideal of products and spaces

that truly serve all people, of all abilities, all the
time, is just thatan ideal. In practice, many newly
designed aspects of the environment serve a broad
spectrum of human abilities, but not all. The curb
cuts that marked progress for wheelchair users can
cause problems for blind pedestrians who rely on
Fig. 17. Jim Boda and Doug Birkholz, Fiskars Softouch Scissors,
designed 1990. (Fiskars Americas.)

233
Getting a Grip
Fig. 18. Morison Cousins, Tupperware Wonderlier three-piece bowl set, ca. 1994.
(Tupperware.)
the ability to detect a distinct edge of the sidewalk

with a cane.88 The Cuisinart, as many users will report, may have easy-to-use buttons, but its sharp
blades, hard-to-clean crevices, and significant heft
make it inconvenient for daily use. More troubling,
the topic of universal design remains on the margins
in design education and discourse. In a recent blog
post, Joe Clark, a Canadian graphic and web designer,
declared that universal design is a myth and that
whenever anyone uses the term universal design or
inclusive design, they only ever mean design accessible to disabled people. And they only ever mean
some disabled people. Commenting on a job posting for an inclusive design professor, Clark advised
that schools would be better off with a program in
which every design prof [sic] at the institution has
to teach students how to create [accessible designs],
not just two people who come along after the damage is done and try to deprogram the student body.
Beneath his polemic tone, Clark identifies the persistent view of design for disability, whether dubbed
universal, accessible, or inclusive, as a separate
concern from standard design.89
There is also the question of what universal design in consumer products has contributed to the
broader cause of disability rights and acceptance.
Does being an interesting, inspiring topic in contemporary design reduce the stigma associated with
disability or lessen discrimination? The answer is unclear. Disability is still an unspoken term behind these
88
Architectural and Transportation Barriers Compliance Board,

Summary of the First National Hearings of the Architectural and
Transportation Barriers Compliance Board, June 20, 1974, 2, Harold
L. Willson Papers, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.
89
Joe Clark, Universal Design Is a Myth, Carthage Must Be Destroyed
(blog), http://blog.fawny.org/2009/10/15/universal-design-myth/.
successful mass-market products, suggesting persistent

discomfort with disability, injury, and weakness in
American culture. Further, addressing accessibility
through the mass market brings its own problems.
While people with manual and visual disabilities may
find functional appeal in them, consumer products informed by universal design principles are still subject
to the whims of the market and may change again or
disappear with the next trend or business closing. Although legislation is often seen as a burden and limitation on the design process, its guarantees of baselevel access cannot be accomplished through the
fast-moving cycles of consumer product marketing.
Finally, universal design reflects just one way in
which awareness of disabilities can provide a source
of innovation in design. In a recent book, the British
industrial designer Graham Pullin, who has worked
on prosthetics and communication aids in his own
practice, proposes other potentially provocative
and innovative ways of addressing disability. In his
2009 book Design Meets Disability, Pullin suggests
some alternatives to the model of trying to make
an individual product fit as many users as possible.90
He suggests instead the idea of resonant design, an
approach to specific physical and cognitive issues with
an eye to diversity and individualism, not universality.
He notes that many devices designed with inclusion in
mind simply end up styleless, with bland, neutral colors
or nondescript shapes. He uses the example of eyeglasses as a category of assistive technologies in which
people actively choose expressive, noticeable versions
and even wear them when they do not need them.91
90
Graham Pullin, Design Meets Disability (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 2009).
91
Ibid., 2328.

234
Fig. 19. Universal Kitchen brochure/poster, Rhode Island School of Design, 1998. (Marc Harrison Papers, Hagley
Museum and Library.)
Pullin proposes that the world of assistive technology

design could learn from this model. He helped organize
a design collection with the Royal National Institute
of Design of HearWear: hearing devices fashioned
for style, akin to eyewear. The pieces in the collection, ranging from a pop-art set of protective headphones available in a variety of graphic patterns to a
snakelike silver and gold hearing aid designed by a
jeweler, suggest that fashion and other mass-market
designers consider the specific, rather than the generalized, needs of people with disabilities.
In taking an experimental stance, Pullin is able to
address more controversial and challenging aspects
of disability politics. He addresses the phenomenon
of disability pride among people who embrace an
identity as disabled and thus would reject the idea
that the ultimate goal of disability rights is mainstreaming or sameness. He highlights a project by
the textile artist Freddie Robins, in which she knit customized sweaters for people with disabilities.92 For
Mat Fraser, a comedian and activist whose arms are
shortened due to the effects of thalidomide, Robins
made a sweater with the phrase Short Armed and
Dangerous; for Catherine Long, she designed a garment that made Longs missing arm a decorative focal
point, with an embroidered butterfly pattern at the
shoulder (fig. 20). In these projects, disability is, once
again, a source of inspiration and innovation, but the
designers respond to a social meaning of disability
92
Ibid., 11921.
Fig. 20. Freddie Robins, At One, worn by Catherine Long,

2009. From Graham Pullin, Design Meets Disability (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009), 116. (Photo, Rob Hann.)

235
Getting a Grip
that is different from that in universal design. In the
1980s and 90s, Ron Mace and others argued for universal design as a corrective to environments that reinforced the exclusion of people with disabilities.
Expanding functional criteria to include this population was an affirmation of equality, that people with disabilities have the same opportunities as others.93
Projects such as Robinss emerge from a more complicated political landscape, where disability pride mirrors
other rights movements in which participants have
claimed a distinct cultural identity in addition to political equality. Some twenty years after the passage of the
Americans with Disabilities Act in the United States
and fifteen after Britains comparable Disability Discrimination Act, it may be that this sort of creative riff
on disability culture is more possible now that the need
for basic, usable products is less urgent.
Universal design marked a particular historical
moment when the political demands for inclusion
93
Ronald Mace, Graeme J. Hardie, and Janie P. Place, Accessible Environments: Toward Universal Design, in Design Intervention: Toward a More Humane Architecture, ed. Wolfgang F. E. Preiser,
Jacqueline C. Vischer, and Edward T. White (New York: Van Nostrand
Reinhold, 1991), 155.
and equal rights for people with disabilities gained

influence in mainstream, mass-market industrial
design. Emerging in a time of political struggles
to establish physical accessibility as a legal requirement in buildings and transportation, universal design offered the possibility of creatively inspired,
socially progressive design that was also marketable.
In developing forms for the Cuisinart, OXO GoodGrips, and other commercially successful products,
designers departed from the conventional ergonomic
measure of a typical population to seek inspiration
on the margins. Introducing universal design to a
mass market, they implicitly acknowledged the presence of people with disabilities among the consuming public and the relevance of disability in material
life. In their public lives, however, these underlying
principles did not always show. In its commercial success, universal design found an irony: seamlessly integrating features related to disability into mass-market
products could amount to hiding or ignoring actual
people with disabilities. In these products, as in many
of the wild things of modern material life, meaning could be elusive, slipping away just as we think we
grasp it.


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Getting a Grip: Disability in American Industrial Design of the Late Twentieth Century

Author(s): Bess Williamson

Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/669668 .

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MERICAN INDUSTRIAL designers faced

Bess Williamson is assistant professor in the Department of Art

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Winterthur Portfolio 46:4

Judy Attfield, Wild Things: The Material Culture of Everyday Life

farthest ends of the physical spectrum and focusing

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specialists and social workers recommended similar

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Winterthur Portfolio 46:4

design, consulting with former Navy statistician

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on their own bodies, but this proved unsatisfactory

Army-issue dual-hook prostheses. For Dreyfuss and

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Winterthur Portfolio 46:4

Fig. 2. Henry Dreyfuss, Adult Male Driver in Vehicle

rehabilitation medicine, he learned that standard

George Deaver and Mary Eleanor Brown, The Challenge of

Fig. 3. Thomas Lamb, Lim-Rest crutches. (Thomas Lamb

patented Wedge-Lock design incorporated angled

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certain range of motion in the hand to begin with.

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Winterthur Portfolio 46:4

Fig. 4. Cutco Knife Company, Cutco: Worlds Finest Cutlery. (Thomas

in surgical techniques and technologies such as

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from earlier human factors charts based on a select

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Winterthur Portfolio 46:4

Fig. 5. Rolf Faste, The Enabler, 1977. From Rolf Faste,

object of hostility or resistanceit was just that

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Winterthur Portfolio 46:4

contrasting, sometimes brightly colored graphics.

new Cuisinart food processor became an icon of

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in a note scrawled across the bottom of a 1986

Though Harrison articulated disability-related

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Winterthur Portfolio 46:4

Fig. 10. Model house kitchen, 1977. From The ILZRO

gourmet recipes in the New York Times, was stocked

rubber handles with rippling fins at the top were

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Scissors and Shears, Consumer Reports, October 1992, 67273.

opening a subsidiary in the United States.73 By the

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Winterthur Portfolio 46:4

Morison Cousins, a designer known for a clean,

Mitchell Owens, Museum Plastics, New York Times, April 3, 1997.

to give a more sturdy look for countertop storage of

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As universal design became a more common

the names of prominent housewares designers. 80

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Winterthur Portfolio 46:4

New York Times, and Washington Post and in design