A new generation of disability scholars, activists, and designers is developing innovative approaches to accessible built environments, beyond demanding regulatory compliance. This field, known as Critical Access Studies, is questioning the ideological, epistemological, and practical underpinnings of access. Going beyond minimum standards and functional understandings of access, Critical Access has developed rich terminologies and cutting-edge design practices, both of which could transform the ways that architects understand why access matters. However, the field has made little impact on these disciplines to date. By enabling cross-disciplinary conversations between the disabled experts developing these new concepts and practices, and disabled architects specializing in accessibility, Disability Meets Architecture amplifies the creative potential and practical application of these new ways of thinking and doing accessible design. Through short films, live events, and published materials, this project fills a vital gap in architectural discourses and practices.

Aimi Hamraie is associate professor of medicine, health, and society and American studies at Vanderbilt University, where they direct the Critical Design Lab, a multidisciplinary and international collaborative of disabled artists, designers, and researchers. Hamraie’s interdisciplinary research and practice focuses on critical approaches to disability and design. They are the author of Building Access: Universal Design and the Politics of Disability (University of Minnesota Press, 2017) and host of the Contra* podcast on disability design justice. In 2022, Hamraie was awarded a United States Artists Fellowship in Media with Critical Design Lab and was appointed to the United States Access Board, the federal agency that develops disability access guidelines. With Critical Design Lab, Hamraie has spearheaded projects such as Mapping Access, the Remote Access Archive, and the Critical Access Primer. Their collaborative projects include #CripRitual (an exhibition of 25 disabled artists), the Society of Disabled Oracles, and Labs for Liberation. Hamriae’s role is to lead the project, in collaboration with partners and contributors, and to coordinate its activities and outputs with related Critical Design Lab projects.

Jos Boys is cofounder and codirector of The DisOrdinary Architecture Project, based in London. She studied architecture at The Bartlett University College London (UCL) in the 1970s and was one of the cofounders of Matrix feminist design collective, as well as coauthor of their book Making Space: Women and the Man-Made Environment (Pluto, 1984/Verso, 2023). Always a design activist, Boys has also been a journalist, critic, researcher, consultant, educator and photographer. She is author of Doing Disability Differently: An Alternative Handbook on Architecture, Dis/ability, and Designing for Everyday Life (Routledge 2014); editor of Disability, Space, Architecture: A Reader (Routledge, 2017); and coeditor (with Anthony Clarke and John Gardner) of Neurodivergence and Architecture (Elsevier, 2022). Boys acts as project advisor, bringing her extensive knowledge of disability scholarship arts and activism related to built environment disciplines, and of disabled and nondisabled architectural networks in the United Kingdom and Europe.

Scarlett Barclay acts as project manager for The DisOrdinary Architecture Project. They are a neuroqueer architectural assistant working part-time with The DisOrdinary Architecture Project. They are currently completing a master’s in architecture at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London (UAL), United Kingdom, having previously studied at the University of Cambridge. They have previous experience leading codesign projects and competitions for cultural institutions. Barclay is a project developer and management role with DisOrdinary Architecture, and was graphic designer and production assistant for Many More Part Than M! (The DisOrdinary Architecture Project, 2024).

Tim Copsey is an independent filmmaker, who produces motion-graphics, documentaries, and corporate videos. Clients include British Film Institute, Macmillan Cancer Support, Commonwealth Foundation, House of Lords, and many community and arts organizations. He is The DisOrdinary Architecture’s regular filmmaker, and provides filming, editing, closed captions, and transcripts as part of making accessible resources. Copsey has also programmed two short film festivals, the London Independent Film Festival and the Holmfirth film festival.

Nadine Monem is a writer, editor, publisher, and lecturer. She works in hybrid forms of speculative nonfiction and radical archival practice for which she has been recognized with the 2022 Queen Mary University Wasafiri New Writing Prize and the 2023 Black Warrior Review Nonfiction Prize. Monem is the founder and publisher of small press, common-editions, and has edited over fifty books on art, architecture, and culture, collaborating with some of the most celebrated artists and authors working today. She teaches curation, criticism, and culture at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London.

Vanderbilt University, founded in 1873, is a center for scholarly research, informed and creative teaching, and service to the community and society at large. Vanderbilt upholds the highest standards and is a leader in the quest for new knowledge through scholarship, dissemination of knowledge through teaching and outreach, and creative experimentation of ideas and concepts. In pursuit of these goals, Vanderbilt values most highly intellectual freedom that supports open inquiry, equality, compassion, and excellence in all endeavors.

Critical Design Lab, founded in 2014, is a multidisciplinary arts and design collaborative centered in disability culture and crip technoscience. The work of Critical Design Lab pivots around the concept of access: access as ethic, creative content, and methodology. Critical Design Lab uses digital media and social practice to craft replicable protocols that treat accessibility as research-creation, an aesthetic world-building practice, and an invitation to assemble community. The Lab embodies crip interdependence in form, aesthetics, and content. It defines critical design as disability culture’s challenges to existing social and built environments. This work is approached with joy, relationality, and a commitment to embodied design processes. Critical Design Lab embraces interdependence as a political technology and design methodology. The Lab’s work is rooted in disability justice. Forms of accessibility rooted in anti-Blackness, settler colonialism, and white supremacy are rejected by the Lab. Technologies of remote and collective participation to enable accessible world-building across time-zones, disciplinary boundaries, and access needs are used. Critical Design Lab centers sustainability and community as the basis of our work.

The DisOrdinary Architecture Project is a nonprofit platform that starts from the experiences, expertise, and creativity of disabled artists. Led by diverse disabled artists, designers, and architects, DisOrdinary Architecture aims to shift paradigms about disability, access and inclusion across built environment and cultural sectors. This is done by centering the lived knowledges and experiences of disabled people as a creative generator for design, rather than a problem to be solved; and as a critical challenge to societal norms about whose bodies and minds are prioritized and whose are marginalized in the design of our built surroundings. DisOrdinary Architecture intends to show how much can be learnt from paying attention to, and valuing, the richness of our bio- and neurodiversity. Since its founding in 2007, DisOrdinary Architecture has developed and collaborated on projects both in the United Kingdom and internationally with wide-ranging outputs: across architectural installations, experiential workshops, consultancy, podcasts, talks and research. The growing network and breadth of projects and publications shows how thinking about disability differently not only enables improved accessibility to spaces and events, but is also central to cross-movement ideas and actions that can challenge normative educational and professional practices, social inequality, and the climate crisis. Throughout, the work is deeply informed by wider disability arts, activism, and scholarship, and by international networks of creative disabled people pushing beyond conventional access and inclusion narratives and instead centering social, spatial, and material justice. DisOrdinary Architecture starts from difference, and aims to challenge underlying attitudes, assumptions, and practices that frame disabled people in particular and limited ways, both in everyday life and through the education and practice of architectural and urban design.