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Part II

Exploring the Infrastructures of Access-Knowledge

“Knowing what defines a more accessible world depends, in one sense,
on how much we know, and in another, on the politics of knowing- making.”

—Aimi Hamraie, Building Access: Universal Design and the Politics of Disability (2017), p. 223

A compilation of two separate images features workshop literature from an accessible design workshop held by the Massachusetts College of Art Design and the MIT Laboratory for Architecture and Planning (1982). A photograph on the workshop pamphlet depicts a classroom full of scholars who actively engage dialogue. The classroom is plastered wall-to-wall with various hand-drawn concept maps. The second image presents one of the primary archival resources from this workshop. The graphics of this pencil-sketched concept map portray artistic embellishments and renderings of architectural structures. IMAGE REFERENCE: Aimi Hamraie. (2017). Figure 5.14 [primary sources]. University of Minnesota Press, p. 173.

THRESHOLD CONCEPT:

access-knowledge (n.): specific arrangements of knowing and making that inform accessible design

SUPPORTING CONCEPT:

Universal Design (n.): a term, recently popularized in the twenty-first century, which references the idea that inclusive design benefits everyone regardless of their disability or age [1]

Click “play” to access an auditory transcription of the following webtext (Part II), as written and read by Rachel Rubino.

In their book Building Access: Universal Design and the Politics of Disability (2017), Aimi Hamraie details a cultural and theoretical history of accessibility. Their work considers Universal Design by interrogating the historied politics of knowing in the United States over the last three centuries. The epistemological framework of Universal Design, Hamraie argues, is one that has been specifically mobilized by access-knowledge, or “specific arrangements of knowing and making” (5). Hamraie foregrounds access-knowledge as a phenomenon with active interstices in the fields of technoscience and disability studies theory.

The past three centuries of rapid industrialization have turned over various social, economic, and political exigencies throughout the United States. So too, the conception of the “user” emerged, explains Hamraie. Throughout the 1800s, rapid industrialization informed a dominant basis of access-knowledge that muddied distinctions between human and machine, and ultimately notions of the “user” altogether. Hamraie explains that,

“For the nineteenth- century science of work, the ‘user’ and the ‘human factor’ were terms that described inevitable human vulnerability— and therefore the uncertainties and complications that workers would invariably introduce into systems. Fears of the user’s vulnerability were entangled with concerns about industrial efficiency” (42-43).

Hamraie makes an important distinction here. Namely, they imbue language as a site of socialized knowledge and meaning-making. This opens us to acknowledge the implications that arose—and, contemporaneously, still arise— from the mutual imbrication of “user” and “human factor” as conceptual terms.

Hamraie’s focus on the concurrent advent of “user”-based terminology and the technological boom prompts us to consider the material ramifications of access-knowledge. For access-knowledge, as “a regime of legibility and illegibility, emerged from interdisciplinary concerns with what users need, how their bodies function, how they interact with space, and what kinds of people are likely to be in the world” (Hamraie, 9). As a simultaneously transparent and obscured approach to knowing-making, access-knowledge implicates the ways we structure information and build environments for users.

In fact, scientific models of productive labor continued to influence discourses of user-centered design into the twentieth century. According to Hamraie, by the mid-1900s, “increasingly specialized areas of expert study…shaped not only the engineered systems of work but also the social relations of liberal belonging” (62). By historicizing the influence of capital growth economics within the westernized structures of access-knowledge, Hamraie positions us recognize the act of making as a practice of power. Along shared lines, the jussive force of American industrialism has politicized the act of knowing. To this end, we are pressed to consider the entanglement between access-knowledge and concept maps.

The previous section of this project identifies concept maps as tools used to structure, organize, depict, and disseminate knowledge. To recall one of the aims of this research, I am interested in identifying the stakes that the concept map holds in questions related to intended audience and design. Hamraie grounds the nexus of these concerns in their scholarship as they broadly inquire, “who counts as everyone and how can we know?” (5). This question invokes access-knowledge as a generative paradigm for considering the infrastructure of concept maps. What position has dominated the means of their making? And to these ends, what structures have informed popular conceptions about how concept maps should be constructed, or how interlinking ideas should be evidenced?

It remains important to ask these questions as we recall the enmeshed relationship between “user” as a terminology, and the vulnerability of human actors who occasion precarity within the otherwise systematic, streamlined approaches of knowledge production. As we attune to factors that have come to inform contemporary notions of meaning-making within the U.S., we locate a history that has engineered distinct boundaries around preexisting limits of knowledge representations. It is upon this basis that I frame my analysis as one that considers concept maps as rhetorical sites of investigation. To this end, I seek to renegotiate the terms from which concept maps are effectively rendered and employed as tools to communicate information and engage broader knowledge networks.

[1] Definitions for both “Universal Design” and the precedingly listed term “access-knowledge” are paraphrased from the “Introduction” on page 5 of Hamraie’s Building Access. See “References” to access an extended citation of Hamraie’s book.