Differential vs. Universal Design

The field of Sensory Design is an outgrowth of the Universal Design movement of the 1990s, which had as its goal to develop “design for the most amount of use by the most amount of people” (Potvin 2019: 336; Mace et al. 1997). Sensory Design subscribes to many of the same principles as the latter - namely, inclusivity or “accessibility” (e.g. ramps in place of curbs or stairs to accommodate people in wheelchairs), flexibility, and “perceptible information” (e.g. sonic traffic signals to accommodate blind people). There is much to be said for the idea that by having something for each of the senses there will be something for everyone. However, from our team’s critical sense-based perspective, there are significant limitations to design thinking.

First, such thinking is highly psychologistic and phenomenological in orientation. It ignores the social life of the senses, such as breaking research in the history and anthropology of the senses has brought to light (Smith 2007; Classen 2014; Le Breton 2017; Howes 2018). It needs to be augmented by research into the “ways of sensing” or techniques of perception of different social groups (Howes and Classen 2014). Cultural and social diversity is a further source of sensory alterity (never once addressed in Lupton and Lipps 2018). As a further case in point, within Sensory Design, disabled people are exclusively seen as “lacking” the full complement of human senses and therefore as having “special needs.” Drawing on the significant work done in disability activism and scholarship, we turn this assumption upside down by acknowledging that all human beings are needy in different degrees at different moments in their life, and asking: How might the experience of blind or deaf people be a source of and for diversification (rather than universalization) as the starting point for design (Boys    ; Classen 1998, ch 6; Dokumaci 2018; Liebergesel et al 2019; Graif 2018)? Our wager is that the notions of Deafgain and blind gain, which come out of Critical Disability Studies, can open new doors of perception.

Differential Sensory Design is the name we give to the transformation in sensory design thinking that we promote in this research program by engaging critically with the construction of the senses in the extant literature from the standpoint of sensory studies