This text suffers from a fundamental contradiction that undermines its own arguments: while championing simplicity and challenging universal design, it romanticises elite consumer products that are themselves inaccessible to many disabled users. The iPod worship is weird, celebrating a device with no tactile feedback beyond a smooth wheel and minimal physical controls as some paragon of inclusive thinking. The author gestures at Peter and Steve’s differing preferences but never interrogates why someone like Tyler would need to feel “self-confident” using a phone in public, treating internalised ableism as personal taste rather than a design failure. The golden prosthetic hand and Aimee Mullins’s carved wooden legs are presented as liberating alternatives to discretion, yet these bespoke art objects are available only to those with money, barely a decent vision of disability design.
The tension between “fashion meets discretion” reveals the author’s shallow engagement with power dynamics in disability. Dismissing pink plastic hearing aids as shameful while celebrating expensive designer eyewear ignores that frames cost hundreds of pounds, discretion through flesh-coloured plastic may be the only affordable option for many users. The suggestion that “fashion designers should be involved as a matter of course” treats aesthetics as a universal good without acknowledging that high design often increases cost and decreases repairability.
The “flying submarine” metaphor encapsulates the text’s elitism, better to have multiple specialised and beautifully designed products than one versatile compromise. This definitely works if you can afford a wardrobe of prosthetics or a collection of single purpose devices, but it’s design thinking for the wealthy masquerading as liberation. The text never acknowledges that universal design emerged precisely because disabled people couldn’t access or afford specialised alternatives.