Exhibit Overview

This exhibit Filling in the Gap: Universal Design, the Built Environment, and Disabled Doctors begins with a brief overview of what universal design is and its historical origins.  The next section of the exhibit highlights some early advocates of universal design in relation to architecture specifically. Special attention to paid to the disabled architect, Ron Mace, who founded the Center for Universal Design at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, and was the first to use the term "universal design." 

From there, a list of aimed benefits of Universal Design are outlined. The insertion of the word "aimed" is deliberate as the later section "Advocating for Inclusion of Disabled Doctors" seeks to complicate the narrative of benefit vis-a-vis the concept of Universal Design by arguing for the presence of disabled voices. But before the exhibition turns to this critique, it also highlights a fairly recent new movement of the Dochitect created by Diana Anderson, MD and M.Arch. Dochitects are individuals that are both doctors and architects. Giving an overview of this movement and some of its recent scholarship, this exhibit gently points to the fact that the dochitect still focuses on making the hospital and similiar environments more accessible for patients, rather than doctors, and moreover, disabled doctors. At the same time, the Dochitect presents a model about how overlapping identities, and therefore, individualized expertise, can help create and cultivate new insights. The disabled doctor is a lived embodiment of such a paradigm.

Upon which, the penultimate section endeavors to provide a tentative, speculative conclusion on what can be done in the near future to incoorporate the voices of disabled doctors when deciding accessibility needs in the built environments they work in. To this end, the last section provides a precusory list of contemporary scholarship which complicates the relationships between disability, universal design, architecture, and the built environment, in hopes of being a resource for disabled doctors, architects, scholars, researchers and the like.