The Unfulfilled Promise of Belonging: Aesthetic Accessibility

Born profoundly Deaf, I have used a multitude of assistive technology solutions (AT) throughout my 42 years of life, to compensate for my disability. My first set of hearing aids, at age two, came with a bulky battery pack, and my mother sewed decorative pockets into my clothes to camouflage the battery box. But there was no hiding its awkward form, and oftentimes, when I did cartwheels at the playground, the battery pack fell out and hit me on the chin or nose. Though the design changed and the battery box disappeared by the age of seven, the hearing aids were not aesthetically appealing to me. I still despised them so much that I once took them outside and buried them in the garden of our house, faking I had lost them at school.

I have come to believe that the trauma from the lack of empathetic and relatable aesthetic, in part, became a defining force in my handling of ATs through hacking. The ATs I grew up with may comply with regulations, but the garish aesthetics and institutional feel of them did stigmatise me as a spectacle. So, to subvert the negative effects of them, I taught myself to negotiate when and how to use them through the practice of crip technoscience which is described as acts of designing, hacking and tinkering as forms of disability politics against norms and social structures.¹ 

Through this, I have come to speculate that the access sans aesthetics provided by ATs might be rooted in a technoableistic paradigm², which is fixated on compensating for deficits in society or the disabled person rather than supporting and expanding on named identity, value, dignity and belonging.³ Thus, the lack of aesthetics in ATs contributes to reinforcing an ostracizing view of disability as something alien and undesirable, and by cripping it, we, the disabled, try to make sense of its stigmatisation of us and turn it around.

Inspired by critical disability studies¹, affective interaction design⁴ and critical design thinking³, this article explores the effect of aesthetics in the functionality of past and current assistive technology (AT), designed to support Deaf individuals in their everyday lives and interactions. To do this, I will conduct an analysis in which I: 

1. Share four personal vignettes which illustrate how aesthetic neglect in ATs conveys feelings of stigma and negativity, and how these feelings can be subverted through the practice of crip hacking.
    
2. Try to situate the ATs and hacks mentioned within the frame of disability design thinking by contrasting the traditional technosolutionistic and compensatory logic with an emerging model grounded in co‑design and universal design – e.g. the relational model of disability. 
    
3. Argue that reframing design processes by applying aesthetics in accessibility design solutions through a relational and interdependent participatory design and crip technoscience holds the potential to empower and strengthen feelings of belonging.

Assistive technology in the welfare system: A technosolutionistic market

A brief overview of the Danish welfare system behind the distribution of ATs for people with disabilities is needed to understand the systemic and operative procedure.
ATs are – at the time of writing – registered, supplied and administered through the Danish Authority of Social Services and Housing (DASSH) from which the Assistive Technology Centres within the municipalities can browse and purchase ATs to be distributed to the approved applicant – in most cases a disabled citizen – through a caseworker. The ATs at DASSH are listed on AssistData, an external website owned by DASSH, and data on those are registered by third party product developers (suppliers). There are regulations and requirements that need to be met in order to have a product listed on AssistData, but none of the requirements consider aesthetic properties. The focus here is solely on functionality, usability and regulative requirements. 

AssistData is used by private citizens, professionals in the field of assistive technology, and suppliers of assistive products. All suppliers (distributors as well as importers) in the EU/EEA can register their own assistive products in AssistData. The DASSH’s definition of ATs is defined as quoted: “products considered to have the potential for optimising a person’s functioning and reducing disability”.

The municipalities have caseworkers who specialise in processing applications concerning ATs. These caseworkers follow a specific procedure for approval or rejection, and in this process, proof of disablement is required. This can be obtained through a variety of channels, but in almost every case, a formalised approval from a medical professional (certified health worker, nurse, doctor, therapist) is needed. For persons with hearing loss, it usually requires an audition test, and for persons with impaired sight, it would require a vision test and so forth. 

When the approval goes through, the applicant gets to choose between a predefined set of relevant ATs which are available for pick up or delivery at the local Assistive Technology Centre, or to acquire a similar AT from a private distributor within the same price range.

DASSH stipulates that they follow the dialectic understanding of the notions of functioning and disability, in which functioning encompasses human properties and skills as a precondition for an ideal of interaction and the potentials for interaction between the individual and the environment, while disability encompasses human properties and skills being limited in relation to the same ideal⁵. But as stated by DASSH, the purpose of developing AT is to optimise a person’s functioning and thereby reduce disability. This wording reflects a technosolutionistic⁶ philosophy, with disability being something that has to be reduced or eliminated in order to optimise the disabled individual’s ability to perform according to norm. DASSH also states that “accessibility for persons is about facilitating access to performing activities, to living independently, and to participating in society and social life”. This view again points at technosolutionism insofar as the ATs developed are also meant to rehabilitate and make disabled people independent, and thereby able to perform according to the norm. By applying the disability technology philosophy, DASSH accentuates the conflicting interplay between technosolutionism, normative thinking⁷, accessibility, design, and the development of assistive products through a prioritisation of function over aesthetics in ATs marketed by DASSH and AssistData.

Vignettes: four assistive technologies and the aesthetics of stigma

In the following, four specific ATs I have used throughout my life will be narrated, analysed, and reflected upon in vignettes applied through an autoethnographic method⁸ to accentuate the actions I have undertaken to compensate for their lack of aesthetics.

The Beautification of the Disability Badge

When I was ten, my parents were advised to bolt a state-issued yellow plate saying “DØV” (Deaf) to the rear end of my bicycle. The idea was that the badge would warn drivers of my potentially slower reactions to traffic. When I bicycled around the town, I felt outed, naked and vulnerable: I was unable to defend myself and my unwanted presence, which was being projected for everyone to see, know, pity or detest. This was subverted through the unconscious use of crip technoscience: Some of my Deaf peers hacked their plate by putting googly eyes or colourful stickers on it, ultimately hiding the DØV sign and making it look cool. Many opted to obstruct it with bags or jackets tied to the luggage carrier or by walking to school, while others sewed it so its square shape was changed into a different shape, or even painted it black with a permanent marker. 

As an adult, the trauma of this experience has made me dislike the yellow/black colour combo and badges intensely – which makes it difficult for me to make use of the sunflower lanyard, a hidden disability signage to be worn so others can know that you might need help (with emphasis on might), even in situations where it would be beneficial. To me, wearing it is in equal parts discrediting and disabling. As Goffman notes, stigma arises when a person’s social identity is spoiled or discredited⁹, and so the bicycle badge, which had been created with the intention of making the world safer for me to venture out and vice versa, discredited my identity, by outing me against my will. I was the problem of which others should be made aware; and it was done by forcing a branding sign onto me without my explicit consent, without taking my opinion into account: here the technology had the last word when it came to solving the issue of marking out deaf people. It embodied a system that saw disabled bodies as hazards to be managed and rehabilitated through technology rather than a world lacking accessibility solutions.

The Alarm Clock and the Nokia Hack

In my late teenage years, when I had to learn how to handle my daily hours without aid from my parents, I was issued a specialised waking clock. It was a bulky black box with glaring red digits and flashing lights, attached to a huge vibration pad. It felt more like a medical equipment than a personal gadget. When the vibrating pad fell out of the bed and onto the floor, every person in the vicinity heard it vibrating against the furniture. At the boarding school, the vibrations of the pad would be felt through the walls and floors, so people who are living in the adjacent neighbouring room would feel it too. The flashing lights, which I often turned off, were so intense that they could be used as a disco ball for the late evening parties in the dorm rooms where the bass was turned up at full volume and we danced to the blinking lights of – yes – a waking clock. This too is a supremacy of rehabilitative disability technology: created to solve a problem without taking into consideration the lived experiences of the deaf, and how we – too – wanted to fit in.

Along with other students, we hacked the issue of the much despised clock by taking turns waking each other manually by touch (e.g. a tapping hand on the bed, shoulder, or back of the sleeping student), allowed through the sharing of dorm keys. 

A wonderful thing happened when the first cellphones by Nokia were launched: someone had invented the accessibility option to turn the vibration function on when receiving messages! We instantly hacked their vibration function into a waking clock: by putting the cellphone below the pillow just before we went to sleep, we could wake up in the morning through the receiving of several messages from a fellow student. These compact phones were also stylish and enabled SMS communication, which was an absolute wonder for us Deaf youngsters who wanted access to the lifestyle of our millennial generation. This unintended criptastic hacking of a mass‑market technology product proved more accessible and aesthetically appealing to us than the purpose‑built technology device – and what mattered even more: through these devices we were able to take back our agency and choose for ourselves which solution we felt applied most to us. This hack cost me DKK 1.500 (the equivalent of DKK 2.500 today), which was a lot of money for a 17-year old student at a boarding school, but I still remember it as one of the best investments I ever made for myself. I still use the vibration of my phone as my waking clock – and it is a testament to the Nokia phone that I have yet to experience the same kind of vibrating quality with newer smartphone models.

The Dystopian Doorbell

Later, in my first year as a university student living in my own apartment, I was issued a new doorbell/phone call system with a connecting light system, which was meant to be an improvement of an older model that I grew up with. The idea behind this was that the light would blink at two different frequencies depending on whether the doorbell or the telephone was ringing. This improved version was all-white, and the light it emitted was a kind of pale strobe; each ring during the evening hours turned my living room into a horror flick. To make it even worse, it was hard to discern whether the pulses emitted signalled a phone call or an in-person visitor, causing much confusion. I ended up unplugging it – thanks to the advent of the cellphones, phone calls were slowly becoming obsolete – and opting for the old fashioned way to receive visitors: by making appointments beforehand or just being glad when someone unexpectedly showed up.

When the Philips Hue system came out in Denmark, it was instantly hacked by Deaf peers: its coloured, dimmable lights signalled visitors without disrupting the atmosphere, and moreover it could be colour-adjusted to signal whether it was a phone call or an in-person visitor. Again, the contrast shows how conscious and unconscious hacking reduced feelings of stigma, of being ostracised – and increased the feelings of well-being and satisfaction within me.

The War of the Baby Alarms

Fast forward some fifteen years to when I had my first child. Here I was once again dependent on state-issued tools so I could react appropriately if my child woke up from his slumber and made the world aware of his immediate needs. I was provided with two black boxes – for some reason ATs tend to come in either black, grey or white – one being a sender and one a receiver. These boxes were almost indistinguishable, and I often had to do a lengthy test to find out which was which. The receiver – which I was supposed to have on me whenever my kid was out of my sight, napping, or when we slept at night – had three small LED-light dots that pulsed either red or green when the sender registered a sound. The receiver also had a vibrating function. These 1980s-inspired pager‑like baby monitors had two buttons: one for turning them on/off and one for turning up/down the volume. The volume button was interconnected with the vibration settings and thereby was either hypersensitive or sluggish. You could turn it up, and it would register anything from someone taking out the trash, to the wind blowing, the birds singing, the rain pattering or conversations nearby, turning naps into frantic checks. You could turn it down, and the baby had to be crying very loudly before the alarm registered it. 

It was so stress-inducing that I ended up replacing it with an actual baby alarm from Neonate that vibrated, flashed and offered a camera – in a neat-looking package. Its design and the choices it offered, combined with its reliability, made it far more suitable for me, though I had to pay for it myself as opposed to the state-issued baby alarm (which, again, was free of charge due to having a disability). This underscores the mismatch between policy‑issued devices and user expectations: when designers ignore aesthetics and do not invite users to provide their crip expertise, users abandon them for options that blend function and style.

By outlining the role of the Danish welfare system in issuing ATs for persons with disabilities and sharing four personal autoethnographic vignettes, I have tried to underline three main points:

First, how the technoableistic² and technosolutionistic⁶ processes in the design, production, registration and distribution of welfare AT solutions – expressed through a lack of empathetic aesthetics – embodies a functional rehabilitative view of disability, e.g. disability technoscience, which emphasises an aim to reduce disability through technological solutions. Secondly, how the projected and perceived aesthetics and accessibility of ATs have been reinforcing the negative self-perception of people with disabilities and the corresponding feelings of oppression, exclusion and stigma.⁹Thirdly, how crip technoscience¹ has been used to tinker with ATs to subvert the technoableistic narratives. 

Buttering the bread on both sides - Framing disability within the design process

“…designers may not have made themselves more caring or have, in Saidiya Hartman’s words, “ameliorated indifference”. Instead, they may have “only confirmed the difficulty of understanding.” ___Bennett and Rosner, The Promise of Empathy, 2019 ¹⁰

Disability Models and Technoableism and their Influence on Design

How does the history of disability design thinking influence contemporary assistive technology? Most of the assistive technologies are designed with a technoableistic² and technosolutionistic⁶ focus, e.g. prioritising, hiding, fixing and solving the disability over supplementing or supporting it. As illustrated in the vignettes, the foundation of these solutions lies in a belief in the power of technology as something that has the potential to eliminate disability altogether at any cost. The functional model of disability sees disability as a loss or limitation of ability which can be mitigated through rehabilitation, adaptive technology and environmental modifications. DASSH’s AssistData solution aligns with the technoableistic and technosolutionistic view, treating AT as an optimisation task. 

“...engineers decomposing bodily functions, designing mechanical equivalents and evaluating success quantitatively”. — Aimi Hamraie, Building Access, 2017 ¹¹

In this context, the ATs devices aim to mitigate lost function efficiently, which provides clear and efficient performance metrics aiming to enhance independence but at the cost of ignoring users’ identities, emotions and social participation. The vignettes above describe how the designing process views users as subjects to be tested, not co‑creators. 

The social-relational model of disability would be better suited for a more inclusive welfare approach through its emphasis that disability emerges from an interaction between bodies and social environments, and consideration of the role of “enablers” and “limiters”, which are the two sides of each sphere of influence depending on how you apply them, as explained in “Disability as a socially-relational process - and so what?”.¹² These enablers and limiters are described as being 1) communication and recognition, 2) power and powerlessness, 3) professions and collaboration, and 4) disability and empowerment.¹² If you don’t communicate or recognise the importance of participation, you limit – but if you do, you enable. Similarly with the power/powerless, professions/collaboration and disability/empowerment continuum: the more you put the ideas of relational and interdependence in it, the more inclusive, affective and empathetic your technology becomes – and the less you do, the more exclusionary, neutral and indifferent it is. One can argue that the social-relational model conforms to the morality of inclusion as practiced by DASSH, because it retains the social model’s focus on oppression, while acknowledging the role of disability – both within the interpellating field of enabling and limiting. By looking at factors that enable and limit, this model demands that designers consider not only physical access but also how design choices position design users and design experts within social relationships.

Recent research confirms that ignoring aesthetics is not simply an oversight. It directly affects uptake, social engagement and user identity, which underlines the importance of aesthetics in creating appealing and relatable ATs. A 2019 study on blind people using smart glasses versus the white cane found that prioritising aesthetics in assistive technology lessened the traditional negative symbolism of assistive technology.¹³ This in turn led to reinforced positive acceptance in both the blind person and the surroundings, whereas ATs with visible disability markers (e.g. underprioritisation of the aesthetics and overprioritisation of functionality) are more likely to be rejected and ostracised by both. Moreover, the lack of aesthetics acts as a key factor contributing to stigmatisation. A study into online product reviews shows that consumers with disabilities care about the look, texture and even smell of assistive devices, and that embarrassing aesthetics can lead to abandonment.¹⁴ The very same study also highlights that users seek devices that express their individuality rather than conceal their disability.¹⁴ 

To sum it up, the aesthetics of assistive devices significantly influence adoption, and devices with modern aesthetics are clearly preferred to those with a sole focus on technological functionality. These findings suggest that when design thinking ignores aesthetics, it reproduces the medical model’s underlying assumption that disabled people should be grateful for any access, even at the cost of dignity. 

How can Reframing Design Thinking Elevate Aesthetics as a Tool for Inclusion?

Applying the relational model¹² and crip technoscience¹ means designing for interactions rather than compensatory functionality: products mediate relationships among users, technologies and social norms. In practice, this calls for co‑design with disabled people, following Charlton’s maxim “Nothing about us without us”¹⁵, so that devices reflect lived experiences and aesthetic preferences. It implies ensuring human oversight in algorithmic systems to avoid biased decision‑making and treating users as active agents rather than data points. Finally, it embraces maker culture¹⁶ and crip technoscience, encouraging hacking and personalised modifications as legitimate forms of design. Such methods empower communities and open possibilities for self‑expression.

Toward aesthetic accessibility

My personal stories demonstrate the unfulfilled promise of assistive technology: devices that grant access to the physical world often strip away social and aesthetic agency. The disability badge outed me. The alarm clock alienated me. The doorbell made my home feel like a clinic. The baby alarm ostracised me. These experiences illustrate a broader problem: design thinking that prioritises compensation and compliance over relationality and beauty perpetuates oppression in the name of access.

How, then, can assistive technology be both aesthetic and accessible? The answer lies in reframing design as a relational practice. Designers and institutions must move beyond seeing disabled users as problems to be solved. They should adopt universal design as an aspiration rather than a minimum. They should engage users in co‑creation, provide options for self‑expression, and recognise that aesthetics is not frivolous but fundamental to dignity. Policy‑makers must fund devices that prioritise beauty and choice rather than enforcing one‑size‑fits‑all solutions. Corporations can learn from the success of consumer devices like Nokia and Philips Hue: mainstream products can meet assistive needs when inclusive design is embedded from the start. And contrary to common assumptions, accessible design doesn’t need to be plain. Guidelines on colour contrast, typography and semantic structure can enhance the visual rhythm and hierarchy of interfaces. Selecting harmonious colour palettes that satisfy contrast requirements and pairing fonts for readability can produce experiences that are both elegant and usable. Offering devices in multiple colours and materials allows self‑expression and aligns with universal design’s principle of flexibility in use. Therefore, aesthetics should be considered a primary design parameter rather than an afterthought.

Finally, we might ask: what would our cities and homes look like if aesthetics were considered a right? If future designers applied relational models, crip technoscience and universal design to public spaces, could we see a world where accessible infrastructure blends seamlessly into the environments and reflects the diversity of humankind? Such a world would be a worthy goal to work towards. And the work begins by integrating the principles of crip technoscience and aesthetics into accessibility.