Episode 2.10: Contra*Maintenance with Leah Samples - Show Notes and Transcript
Simple English summary:
How are accessible spaces and designs maintained, and how can paying attention to maintenance challenge our ideas about design as always driven by innovation? In this episode of Contra*, I talk to Critical Design Lab member Leah Samples about her work on mapping the infrastructures of accessibility and designing protocols for the maintenance of technologies such as elevators.
Themes:
Accessibility mapping
Maintenance of accessibility (vs. innovation)
Competing access needs
Differences between institutional access and informal, user-driven access
Links:
People and Projects Referenced
Mapping Access project
Lee Vinsel (maintenance studies)
Asian American Literary Studies Open in Emergency
For more about Open in Emergency Mimi Khuc on Season 1 of Contra*
Definitions
More on the access issues with scooters
GIS: Geographical Information System. More on GIS
A article defining fatphobia
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Introduction Description:
The podcast introductory segment is composed to evoke friction. It begins with sounds of a wheelchair rhythmically banging down metal steps, the putter of an elevator arriving at a person’s level, and an elevator voice saying “Floor two, Floor three.” Voices begin to define Contra*. Layered voices say “Contra is friction…Contra is…Contra is nuanced…Contra is transgressive…Contra is good trouble…Contra is collaborative…Contra is a podcast!…Contra is a space for thinking about design critically…Contra is subversive…Contra is texture…”
An electric guitar plays a single note to blend out the sound.
The rhythmic beat of an electronic drum begins and fades into the podcast introduction.
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Episode Introduction:
Welcome to Contra*: the podcast about disability, design justice, and the lifeworld. This show is about the politics of accessible and critical design—broadly conceived—and how accessibility can be more than just functional or assistive. It can be conceptual, artful, and world-changing.
I’m your host, Aimi Hamraie . I am a professor at Vanderbilt University, a designer and design researcher, and the director of the Critical Design Lab, a multi-institution collaborative focused on disability, technology, and critical theory. Members of the lab collaborate on a number of projects focused on hacking ableism, speaking back to inaccessible public infrastructures, and redesigning the methods of participatory design—all using a disability culture framework. This podcast provides a window into the kinds of discussions we have within the lab, as well as the conversations we are interested in putting into motion. So in coming episodes, you’ll also hear from myself and the other designers and researchers in the lab, and we encourage you to get in touch with us via our website, www.mapping-access.com or on Twitter at @criticaldesignl
How are accessible spaces and designs maintained, and how can paying attention to maintenance challenge our ideas about design as always driven by innovation? In this episode of Contra*, I talk to Critical Design Lab member Leah Samples about her work on mapping the infrastructures of accessibility and designing protocols for the maintenance of technologies such as elevators.
Interview Transcript:
Aimi Hamraie:
I am so excited to be here today with Leah Samples, who is a PhD candidate in the History and Sociology of Science program at the University of Pennsylvania, and also has a graduate degree from Vanderbilt University, as well, which is where we met many years ago. Welcome, Leah.
Leah Samples:
Thank you for having me. I'm very excited to be here and talk all things maintenance and access.
Aimi Hamraie:
Yes, so excited. So I'm really excited to talk to you because you have been in the Critical Design Lab pretty much since the beginning, and you've worked on mapping access and kind of brought your own frameworks and ways of thinking about accessibility to that project. I thought we could just start with kind of what the early iterations of mapping access were like. We can sort of talk through that, and then get to your elevator maintenance project too, which I'm very excited to talk about because I tell people about it all the time. So now, there will be this podcast that I can be [crosstalk 00:01:08].
Leah Samples:
Refer to.
Aimi Hamraie:
Yeah. It was many years ago now that you were the first graduate students that I had hired to work on mapping access with me, and it was through a funding stream at Vanderbilt through the library called the Library Dean's Fellowship. So at that point, you were doing a Master's degree in Community Research and Action. Is that correct?
Leah Samples:
Yeah, that's correct.
Aimi Hamraie:
Yeah. With that project, we were thinking about a bunch of different things. One was the quality of the data that we were going to collect, but then also a big part of your job was learning how to code and do GIS and stuff. Yeah. So what do you remember from the early parts of that project, in terms of the questions that were coming up and the skill sets and stuff that you were being asked to develop?
Leah Samples:
Yeah. So that project was really excited for a number of reasons. One, because I was getting my degree in Community Research and Action, I was really felt like this project was a good mix of being able to really engage the disabled and non-disabled community at Vanderbilt to sort of open up this conversation about, "What is access? What does that look like here on campus?" And then, how can we have that conversation and actually develop some tools for opening that conversation even wider?
Leah Samples:
When I think back on that project, I think very fondly of the focus groups that we did, where we were actually able to talk with different users on Vanderbilt's campus, and really think ... I think, when you think about the word "access," not limiting it just to disability access, but also thinking about what that means for gender, race, class. That was really exciting.
Leah Samples:
When I think back and I think some of the more frustrating or complicated aspects of the project, I think that really comes down to when we collected the data and the quality of that data. I think, as well, just learning the code and learning GIS mapping and all sorts of these more technical skills that I wasn't super familiar with before I came into the project. I think there was always a huge learning curve. So yeah.
Aimi Hamraie:
Yeah. It's interesting when I think back to the early semesters of the project, where we were kind of ... Our methods were, in part, determined by the funding that we had. So we had this funding that was like, "We're going to do a GIS project." Really, from a more social science or humanities perspective, the quality of the data was what was most important, and being critical about the data, and asking different questions, maybe on an [ADA 00:04:18] audit, and that kind of thing. But then, at the same time, we were met with this monolith of what the technology was that was going to represent this data, visually and textually. It wasn't that user friendly, or usable. I just think about that all the time in terms of what those technologies are created to do, and how all the coding that you are learning was so that there could be pop-ups, like in this map of it.
Leah Samples:
Right.
Aimi Hamraie:
But that was not the point of the project, either.
Leah Samples:
Yeah. So that was a really interesting process. I think one of the cooler things that we were able to develop from that project was the map-a-thon that we did with undergraduate students. I think that was really neat because I think sometimes, when people think of map-a-thons or doing sensibility surveys, they think it's sort of a straightforward ... like you develop the survey, and then you pass it out, and people go and do audits. I think it's really neat because I think that with the event that we did, I think that we were able to complicate or problematize that process.
Aimi Hamraie:
Are there any moments that you remember from doing the map-a-thons where those presuppositions about accessibility mapping were put into question?
Leah Samples:
Yeah. I think we would get a lot of undergrads that ... You know, for some of them, this was sort of their first exposure. A lot of them were able-bodied. Not all of them, but many of them were. I think it was really eye-opening for people to try to even find the accessible entrance on some buildings. A lot of them had never even had to think about that before. So I thought it was really neat that a lot of the students were able to encounter how frustrating it can be to even locate these points of access. So I think of that. It was really interesting. As well, I think we were able to, again, complicate what a lot of the students thought of as accessible spaces, because we were also mapping lactation rooms, different gender bathrooms, etc. So I think that was cool too.
Aimi Hamraie:
Yeah. It was really interesting to observe people in that process of figuring out what things meant on the accessibility survey that they had been given. But some of those things were purposefully also open-ended or asked questions that forced them to be like, "Wait a minute? How could I really know whether there are chemicals in the air or whatever?"
Leah Samples:
Right.
Aimi Hamraie:
Then they would come back and say those things and have a discussion about it. It was really satisfying to watch people learn to ask the questions, rather than just delivering the data. That's like a separate project, I think, than creating a usable [crosstalk 00:07:30] or whatever. But it has really come to the forefront of how we're thinking about this phenomenon more generally. It's like, how do you create opportunities for people to learn to ask other questions about the built environment?
Leah Samples:
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Aimi Hamraie:
It's part of an STS science and technology studies sensibility as well, I think, to think about the epistemology of material practices, like making. We were thinking about that in different ways in that initial project, in terms of doing the focus groups to create the surveys, and doing the data collection with various groups on campus, and things like that. But I wonder, are there any other ways that came up for you from that process that were about asking, "What is knowledge about accessibility, and what does that look like?"
Leah Samples:
Yeah. I think through that project, it made me think that ... I don't know, I think for me, it sort of put into perspective how we oftentimes take for granted what access is, and what it means for a space to be accessible, and how we know a space is accessible. I think, also, we were collecting ... When we did that map-a-thon, we were collecting data about a moment in time, that day. Then we were using that on a map. But again, that data that we collected was just from these couple hours. So it sort of raised, for me, how do we collect data and share information about access as something that is dynamic and ever-changing? I mean, it makes me even think of - this is probably off topic - but the bird scooter situation in Nashville, so we could map these different [points] of access, but then those spaces of access get interrupted or new barriers arise.
Leah Samples:
So it made me think, how can we ... whether it's an app or ... I don't know, what's a way that we can information-share about access as a dynamic process?
Aimi Hamraie:
Yeah, totally. Because there is so much data to be collected, and it is always changing. It raises all these questions, because as we learned in that process of doing mapping access and engaging with the facilities management folks at Vanderbilt, they are always collecting tons and tons of data about the [crosstalk 00:10:18] environment. It's really for maintenance purposes. They have to do the report, the status of the door or the bathroom or whatever, for all these federal funding things. That information is not meant to be usable by people on campus, or visitors or whomever. But it could be really useful. The reason they don't share it is that it is a snapshot.
Aimi Hamraie:
On the other end of the spectrum, you've got Google Maps driving ... the car that drives around and takes pictures of your house and stuff. Those get updated at intervals of eighth months, or I don't even know. That is an apparatus that is able to collect all this data and do something with it, but it also Google, and everyone goes with that and the surveillance dimensions of it.
Aimi Hamraie:
I remember being really inspired by some more informal ways of sharing access information on campus that I had seen when I first got there. One was students in one of the buildings which was where all the science classes usually are, Stevenson. It's kind of a confusing layout. A lot of people are like, "Where am I?" But people had created these informal signs that they would just stick to the walls, and they were often in different languages too, that would be like, "The lab is this way," or, "The lecture hall is this way," or whatever. That directional information-sharing is part of the informal way that we communicate with other people about the spaces that we're in. But we don't often then share it with people that we don't know. So it's interesting to think about what forms that should take, and what uses there might be for these kinds of ad hoc networks, too.
Aimi Hamraie:
When mapping access, at the very beginning of it before there were really any students working on it, there was an ice storm. We were having a speaker on campus, and we had to be able to tell people the wheelchair accessible route from parking to get to the speaker in the event without encountering ice. And ice is such a ... it can melt. So that was four years ago.
Leah Samples:
I know.
Aimi Hamraie:
Almost five. Actually, coming up on five years, right? Because of the [crosstalk 00:13:05].
Leah Samples:
Yeah, wow.
Aimi Hamraie:
By the time this episode airs, it will be 2020. In that time, you finished one graduate degree in Community Research and Action, and during that, you were doing work with disability organizations locally and stuff. Right?
Leah Samples:
Yeah.
Aimi Hamraie:
And then you went to UPenn for a PhD program in a pretty different field.
Leah Samples:
Yeah.
Aimi Hamraie:
It seems like it's pretty central to the way that you were thinking. What are some of the perspectives from the field of science and technology studies, such as the field that you're studying now, that have kind of shaped how you're thinking about access now?
Leah Samples:
Yeah, so I think this started my interest in STS and then even history of technology. History of science really started at Vanderbilt. It really started in a class that I took with Dr. Laura Stark, sort of an intro STS course. Honestly, when I took the class, I wasn't sure ... At the time, I didn't know how influential that course was going to be to the rest of my career. I took that course and was introduced to STS and these ways of thinking about epistemologies and ways of knowing and how we know what we know, and these sorts of things. I was like yeah, this is putting words to a lot of the questions that I've had about disability, and that I've had about even that mapping access project and other projects that I worked on during my time at Vanderbilt. That's how I got introduced to the program at Penn.
Leah Samples:
Like I said, I really sort of think of Vandy as the first place that I was really starting to think these ideas. As I got deeper into the graduate program and moved on from mapping access to a new project with the lab, it was really cool to be able to merge STS theories, history of science, and then disability studies. I really think that those three areas is what's really influencing my thinking now, both in projects that I'm working on with the lab, which I'll talk about in a little bit, as well as just my broader scholarship.
Aimi Hamraie:
It's interesting how STS as a field encompasses a lot of conversations that we have around critical design, even though they're not always named that way, and about disability, too. STS is kind of pushing disability studies on issues around technoscience and making and stuff. Simultaneously, the disability studies is pointing out some of the gaps in STS thinking around power and ableism. So what are some of the theories that you're most interested in that come from STS?
Leah Samples:
I think there are some interesting relationships between actor network theory and STS and disability studies. Obviously, like we were just talking about, with power there have been some huge criticisms of actor network theory from the field of disability studies and critical disability studies about how the theory sort of levels the playing field, and doesn't necessarily pay attention to those power dynamics. But I think, on the other hand, it can be useful to think with, especially when we're considering spaces of access, objects like the elevator which I'll be talking about later, and the users interact with it. I think there are some interesting ways that we can put in conversation, theories of STS and disability studies.
Leah Samples:
I think, as well, there has been a recent turn in STS toward maintenance. Maintenance, theories around maintenance and this pushback on the field of history of technology and science and technology studies more broadly, that they pay to much attention to innovation, that they pay too much attention to the new, toward the exciting, toward the heroes, etc. And not enough attention to the ongoing banal practices that keep our world running.
Aimi Hamraie:
Yeah. So that's work that was offered by people like Lee Vinsel. Now there's a whole conference on it [crosstalk 00:17:51]-
Leah Samples:
Of course.
Aimi Hamraie:
... and stuff. There's sort of a network of thinking about that. What do you find productive about maintenance studies for your work?
Leah Samples:
I think, and this sort of goes back to mapping access ... I think a lot of the questions that I had coming out of working on the mapping access project and even the map that we created was, "How are these spaces of access that are dynamic, how are they maintained? When the handicap button breaks on a door, who reports that? When a user can't get in, what happens? Do they just not go to class? How do they alert somebody?"
Leah Samples:
Actually, a lot of my initial questions in thinking about maintenance came from the mapping access project. In a lot of the focus groups, students would talk a lot about this. They would say a lot of their biggest frustrations came from breakdowns and the repairs not happening fast enough. I think that's where my interest in maintenance came from. Yeah.
Aimi Hamraie:
Yeah. Something that you said reminded me that maintenance is especially helpful when we're talking about access and infrastructures. Sometimes when we're talking about a building or whatever, we assume it's kind of this one-off thing. But in a planned space, like a campus, there are all these parts and they are connected, and there are people who are supposed to be clearly in charge of different parts of them. There are bureaucratic processes, etc. That's where the majority of the work is actually happening. The majority of the work is not the new construction of buildings, or deciding buildings should have different uses, or whatever, although that stuff gets lots of publicity. Meanwhile, over here, this other thing is really not working.
Aimi Hamraie:
I think that that's just really important for us to ... Kind of as a way of talking about scale and accessibility, that maintenance and that human labor element of it, and the social relations that happen around it becomes more evident when we're talking about a space that is under a jurisdiction of some institution versus my house, or something like that. Even though my house also requires maintenance. It has a different politics.
Aimi Hamraie:
Let's talk about the project that you've been working on for the lab more recently, which is focused on maintenance.
Leah Samples:
Yeah, absolutely. I love what you were just talking about, and I think that leads directly into my project. If you think about Vanderbilt and Penn, they're both very old campuses. I think, when you think about the politics of maintenance, you're also talking about this tense relationship between historical preservation and maintenance and access. So yeah, being at Penn and being on a campus that has a lot of history, the building that my program was housed in was actually the original medical school at the University of Pennsylvania. So obviously it's been around since the early 20th century. There are a lot of upkeep and a lot of maintenance problems in the building.
Leah Samples:
I rely on the elevator. It's four floors, and you enter on this basement level floor, so you'd have to climb three or four flights of stairs to get to my office. So I was frequently relying on the elevator, the one elevator in the building, that frequently was breaking down. Even if you want to think about the temporal politics, it took a really long time. If you think about a lot of the users in the building that relied on the elevator were frequently having to plan out 10, 15, 20 minutes to even be able to get to where you needed to go. It even became a running joke within the department. There were frequently emails sent out about the elevator and it's frequently breaking down. It was through this that I started thinking about, "I think this elevator will be a really interesting case study for thinking about the politics of maintenance and access more broadly." When there was an opportunity for the Critical Design Lab and to expand the lab, I started thinking that this would be a really cool project to focus on this particular elevator.
Leah Samples:
So what I did is I reached out to all the different sorts of users that might interact with this elevator, as well as the actually people that work for the university that were responsible for maintaining the elevator itself. I asked them different questions about what they use this elevator for, what if they can't get to class, etc. These sorts of questions. So that was my initial ... I did these interviews with them. From there, a lot of them referred to there being an online maintenance form that you could submit if the elevator did break down, so I found this form online. I thought, "Well for the next iteration of this project, I want to get feedback from these 10 to 15 different users about what do they think about this form, do they feel like it actually identifies their needs correctly, etc."
Leah Samples:
I printed out the form and I distributed it to them. I was able to get really interesting feedback from users. These users, some were undergrads, some were grad students, some were faculty, some were maintenance staff, some were disabled, some were not. All had different reasons for needing to use the elevator. The different pieces of feedback that I got was a lot of them saying that they felt like this maintenance request form didn't really allow them to express how much of a pain in the ass it was when they weren't able to get where they needed to go, and this iterative process that I had with the users and the form allowed me, in my role in the lab, to think broader about these politics of access.
Aimi Hamraie:
Yeah. So the people you were engaging with, they took that form and offered feedback.
Leah Samples:
Yeah.
Aimi Hamraie:
What happened after that with that feedback?
Leah Samples:
After that I was ... We have a lot of different conversations in the lab every week about how we can think differently about producing knowledge around access. One of those that Aimi had mentioned was ... I think it was the Journal of Literary Asian Studies, is that right?
Aimi Hamraie:
Asian-American Literary Studies.
Leah Samples:
Yeah, Asian-American Literary Studies had done a similar process with the DSM, and had provided this hacked DSM where they took the DSM and then wrote on top of it individuals' actual experiences with diagnoses. So that was inspirational for me to thinking about this maintenance form. So I took the [inaudible 00:25:55] feedback that I got and produced a similar type of hacked maintenance form about how this was just a neutral form, but a form that was in a lot of ways hiding the politics of access and maintenance that was underlying it. That's where I'm at in the current stage of the process, is wanting to think more about what it would mean to correct this maintenance process, and how we might think of this in a more dynamic way.
Aimi Hamraie:
Are you imagining creating a kind of annotated version of the maintenance form to give to the facilities people?
Leah Samples:
Yeah, yeah. So they've been pretty receptive to engaging with me. I haven't sent them the annotated form yet, so that's my next stage in the process is to see what we can do. Yeah, so my next stage in the process is to think how we can take these bureaucratic processes and encrypt them and think about them differently. Yeah. I'm going to be writing and reporting a little bit about what these conversations look like with the different facilities people. If they're not receptive toward thinking about maintenance in a different way, that doesn't mean that we can't still have this conversation and push back and have some different on-the-ground ways of documenting and recording access on campus.
Aimi Hamraie:
Totally. Are you imagining also redesigning the form or creating a new form?
Leah Samples:
Yeah. If we want to think in terms of practically working with the facilities people, it'd be great if we could create a cohort, a focus group or something, where we could create a form that was more amenable toward a variety of users' needs.
Aimi Hamraie:
Yeah. I wonder, too, what it would be like to create that form as a way of creating a database of how often the elevator's been broken and who it's affecting and stuff, and then presenting the information also, which I'm sure that the people who are doing the maintenance labor would actually really like to know, and it's important for them to know. I'll be really curious to find out about how that all plays out.
Leah Samples:
Yeah, me too. You're as curious as I am. I'm very curious, as well. It's been a really interesting process. Because even this ongoing project about this elevator, even during this project which has probably been a little over a year, during this time when I started the project, it was a really old elevator. In the middle of my project, they actually replaced the elevator, and we're really hopeful that this brand new elevator would get rid of it frequently breaking down, etc. But that hasn't happened. They have a new elevator, and I think the next day after they installed the elevator, it broke down two or three times. So it's an interesting story about maintenance on the one hand, but also about the life of a technology on the other.
Aimi Hamraie:
It's striking that the brand new elevator, the innovation elevator, is the one that was broken and needed fixing. [crosstalk 00:29:41]
Leah Samples:
Right. Yeah, and for this commentary even in the emails about ... It was this hope that this elevator would put the old one to its death, and then this new one would solve the issues, which I think you can think of as a larger commentary on innovation. Even with disabilities, [inaudible 00:30:06] a singular fix.
Aimi Hamraie:
Absolutely. It also is this thing about the broader context or system in which these technologies exist. Pretty much any time an elevator is put in, they're still using the same elevator shaft, maybe the same kind of pulley system, or whatever. There's like a face-lift kind of thing on it. Yeah, in my building two or three years ago, we got a new elevator, and it does break down sometimes. Not as often. But the interior of it, it's very inaccessible to me because it has something like 42 little tiny, very loudly buzzing LED lights that are super bright. So whenever I go to work, my office is up several flights of stairs, if I want to take the elevator, I leave my sunglasses on and I kind of plug my ears and stuff, because it's really sensorily overwhelming. Sometimes I get a headache from it.
Aimi Hamraie:
Actually, in the ... I don't think we've ever talked about this in any of the Contra episodes, but the introduction to the episodes where we're all saying, "Contra is whatever," the background sounds of that were actually recordings that I took of the buzz of the lights on the elevator, and then you hear the "floor three" or whatever. It's this juxtaposition of there's blind access because it's declaring what floor it's on, and it's also really inaccessible for this other person, and it forces people ... So I am a person who walks on two legs, and also I benefit from taking the elevator and saving energy, not just climbing up five flights of stairs or whatever, to have to make decisions about which one I'm going to do today based on all of these various severe sensory inputs.
Aimi Hamraie:
There's usually no space for talking about that around accessibility. People would be like, "What are you complaining about? It's a shiny new elevator. At least it doesn't smell."
Leah Samples:
Yeah, no. I think what you're highlighting is another aspect of this project that I think ... or another direction I think I could go with this project, which is like when you're talking about when access needs collide. Like you said, there have been decisions made about what to prioritize and what not to prioritize. Also, how the elevator, as an access space, can be this ... I don't know, this box that you get into that you make decisions about to take or not to take, and highlight the socialities around access. Like if you're walking with a group of people ... Say you're moving into a building with a group of people, and some people choose to take the stairs and some people don't. There are some decisions there that are pretty interesting, and some judgments about why you're taking the stairs versus why you're not, or if you have that choice or if you don't have that choice, that I think are pretty interesting.
Aimi Hamraie:
Yeah. Have you ever experienced a kind of direct or indirect questioning of which one you decide to do?
Leah Samples:
Yeah, yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. I have access needs. I guess technically I could take the stairs, but it would be very ... It's very difficult, especially with the dynamics around what direction you go up the stairs. The stairs in my building, there is railings on the right and left side, but no railing in the center. So depending on if you're going up or down with the flow of traffic, I need the railing. So I frequently take the elevator. When you're walking in ... I've walked in with a group before, and it's that moment where they're walking and you're in conversation, and you're like, "Well, I'll see you up on the fourth floor." Then people sort of pause and they're like ... And some people make this decision of they think that you need comfort, or they're like, "Oh, well I'll ride with you." It's fine. I've met other people that might be like, "Oh come on. You're fine." Just sort of making assumptions about your abilities based on their assumptions, their heteronormative assumptions around what disability looks like, which is interesting.
Leah Samples:
So it can be a frequent point of where you're reminded again about ... I don't know, sort of reminded about the assumptions that come around, even what disability looks like to somebody who maybe hasn't experienced or encountered that a lot.
Aimi Hamraie:
Right, yeah. So much of the legibility of disability is about people using an assistive technology, for example. You could do that. It may not be very helpful to you. It may just be a really helpful way of getting people to not police your use of the elevator. I've been thinking about that so much, because there are constantly these campaigns about taking the stairs to burn calories, or whatever. These are, of course, extremely fatphobic, and by extension, ableist and directly ableist things. In conversations I have a lot of the time where these sorts of things are normalized, people will be like, "Oh well, but it's okay if someone's a wheelchair user for them to take the elevator." It's like then you have to show that you qualify, and how do you show that you qualify, and what can't be shown, and what if someone is still not satisfied? The gatekeepers are going to gate keep, and what are you going to do?
Aimi Hamraie:
You are probably familiar with these buildings that are sustainable buildings where there's even a debit card system for how often you can use the elevator.
Leah Samples:
Yes.
Aimi Hamraie:
So that sort of thing, I think ... Maintenance theory certainly has something to say about that, that I think is probably very interesting, because all of that sustainable building, like whatever, is caught up in innovation tech speak that ignores how actual humans interact with buildings.
Leah Samples:
Yeah, absolutely.
Aimi Hamraie:
I wonder what some other ways might also be to challenge the norms that are set around who is an elevator user, and to do that through design practices, like the ones that you've been doing with the maintenance forms.
Leah Samples:
Yeah, I know. I've been thinking about this a lot. How do we resist these assumptions about ... that are often centered around ability, and like you said, fatphobia with using the elevator. Even [inaudible 00:37:54] the elevator itself, there's also policing around ... Well, too many people can't take it because then that would clog up the elevator for those who really need it. Yeah, I've been thinking a lot about what something that we could do to sort of push back on these assumptions about gate keeping around the elevator.
Aimi Hamraie:
Yeah. In the example that you just gave, too, of this resource scarcity around the elevator, because a building could have more elevators or it could have bigger ones. But the primary reason it doesn't is that the elevators are very expensive. They are designed with assumptions about who and how many of what type of person embodies [crosstalk 00:38:47]. A lot of power wheelchair users point out that it's very infrequent for an elevator to be big enough for more than one power wheelchair. So if someone also has a child who uses a power wheelchair or is with their friend or colleague, then having to wait for the next elevator. That's by design. It doesn't have to be that way, the same way that doors don't have to be too small for a wheelchair to get in, but they are designed that way.
Aimi Hamraie:
On the flip side of it, there are these elevators that have been designed to be radically accessible in different ways. I've seen ones where they're really big, kind of the size of a freight elevator, basically, which is really ideal. They have both the finger push buttons, but also the roll in buttons. You know those, they're tall kind of strips. They can be rolled into or kicked or whatever. Different placements of grab bars and different ways of announcing what floor you're on, and stuff. So this technological object really has the potential to be really cross-disability access fulfilling. I would want to know about where people get information about their elevator options when they're building a new building. [crosstalk 00:40:29]
Leah Samples:
Yeah, that would be very interesting.
Aimi Hamraie:
Yeah. And then the placement of them, too.
Leah Samples:
Yeah. That's another thing I was going to say about even finding the elevator itself. I don't know, it was frequently ... As we found with doing mapping access. It was frequently an issue.
Aimi Hamraie:
Yeah. In some buildings, they're kind of hidden by evacuation stairwells.
Leah Samples:
Yep.
Aimi Hamraie:
They don't have the status of the grand staircases.
Leah Samples:
Right. That's absolutely true. There are so many buildings at Penn and at Vanderbilt that I wandered around the first floor asking random people, because it was just not clear. Yeah.
Aimi Hamraie:
Which is a huge issue. Yeah. It's an easy fix. You could just have some signage. You know?
Leah Samples:
Right.
Aimi Hamraie:
Or perhaps a map that explains where in the building the elevator is. [crosstalk 00:41:30]
Leah Samples:
Right. [crosstalk 00:41:31]
Aimi Hamraie:
Have you found any campus partners that might be interesting to engage with around this project?
Leah Samples:
I haven't yet, outside of the disability studies group. There's some talk, potentially, with the women and gender studies group, as well. But yeah, that's about it right now.
Aimi Hamraie:
Okay. Well thank you so much Leah. This was a really great conversation, and it was awesome hearing about your project and how it's going.
Leah Samples:
Yeah. This was great. Thanks for having me. It's a great conversation to talk and even reflect on, just sort of where all this started.
Outro:
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