June 18, 2025 |
The V&A’s new exhibition Design & Disability doesn’t just tick that ‘inclusivity’ box with a neon Sharpie. It’s an unapologetically bold, disability-first takeover of design culture, and it’s doing what museums should have done decades ago – putting disabled creators, thinkers, activists and artists at the centre of the story. No pity, no patronising. Just power, pride and some extremely good design.
Curated by Natalie Kane, who worked with advisory groups including The DisOrdinary Architecture Project, the show is a masterclass in how to stop designing around disability and start designing with it. Kane describes the show as “an invitation for others to see what’s possible.” Over email, she explained that access was embedded from the outset. “We’ve approached it from a range of different disability-first perspectives,” she wrote. “We enabled a lot of space to move around and plenty of seating for rest around the show – the seats themselves give a lot of choice including stools that enable those with shorter stature to get a higher view at cases or step up into seating.”
Rather than relying solely on visual cues, sensory and tactile elements are used to signal mood changes in the space. “We also have tactile signatures for each room for blind and low vision audiences – it should be just visual methods such as paint that show the shift in mood, why not something you can feel?” Kane added. Even DeafSpace design principles were considered, such as reflective panels that allow d/Deaf visitors to perceive movement and anticipate how busy a room is.
The exhibition unfolds in three themes – Visibility, Tools and Living – deliberately contemporary in scope. “There’s no way we could have had a history of design and disability, it would have been too large and too difficult to do,” Kane said. “By having three key themes that look to contemporary ideas about disability and design today, it leaves the door open for others to have more conversations, more discussions, which is what we wanted from this exhibition – I don’t want it to stop here.”
The works on display span archival protest ephemera to future-facing fashion design, but each piece reflects a truth: disability is not something design responds to – it is something that drives it. The DPAC (Disabled People Against Cuts) Piss on Pity T-shirt, a visceral rejection of 1990s charity telethons and the patronising gaze they imposed, sits alongside Katherine Araniello’s video response to Channel 4’s original Superhuman Paralympic campaign. Her work prompted the broadcaster to reframe its approach, bringing disabled voices into the room. “It really shows the impact and legacy disabled voices have on culture and public life,” Kane said.
For Finnish designer Jenni Ahtiainen, inclusion in the exhibition was deeply personal and creatively significant. “Losing my hearing has, in a strange way, been one of the best things that has ever happened to me,” she said via email. “It led to the creation of Deafmetal.” Her brand, which turns hearing aids into fashion statements, began as a personal need – and evolved into an international movement. Her piece in the show, The Viqueen, is made from scorched, acid-treated recycled silver. “I love [the] marks of life. And I love them so much, I need to sometimes do the marks intentionally to make them look like mine.”
‘The Viqueen’ hearing aid by Jenni Ahtiainen of Deafmetal
The relationship between lived experience and design is central to the work of London-based costume designer Maya Scarlette, who also features in the show. Her disability, ectrodactyly, informs both her aesthetic and her design philosophy. “The design should fit the person and not the other way around,” she wrote over email. “When pattern cutting and sewing pieces for clients with a disability, I’ve had to make sure that they are able to use the fastenings with ease for an enjoyable dressing experience.”
Her inclusion in the exhibition marks a full-circle moment. Her carnival costume design – rooted in her Caribbean heritage and ten years of participation in Notting Hill Carnival – is not only vibrant and celebratory, it is also a political statement about visibility. “Growing up I wasn’t able to see myself in other artists, creators and designers in the design industry,” she said. “I’m slowly but surely taking up space in places that ‘little Maya’ would have never dreamed of.”
Scarlette’s work has previously featured on the cover of Able Zine, also on display at the V&A. “I never thought I’d see myself on the front of a magazine cover let alone in a magazine for my design work,” she said. “It really got me thinking about the importance that community has on society but also in the fashion industry.”
For both Ahtiainen and Scarlette, fashion transcends the visual and leans instead into the structural, psychological and political. “I believe that no one is ‘normal,’” Ahtiainen wrote. “Equal treatment is a sign of civility and wisdom.”
Kane echoed that sentiment, emphasising the responsibility of institutions to platform these perspectives meaningfully and consistently. “It’s crucial to involve and design with disabled people in order for us to be a sector that represents society,” she said. “That means, importantly, that access has to be at the beginning of your brief and embedded into your design rather than an add-on.”
The exhibition concludes not with a flourish of triumph, but with quiet insistence. A label reads: “Missing Objects.” It marks the gaps, the stories untold, the archives still to be built. “Disabled people are constantly reinventing the world, themselves and making culture better for it,” Kane said. “We want disabled, d/Deaf and neurodivergent people to feel affirmed and to find community in the space, and for the next generation of disabled designers and artists to find confidence and joy.”
What Design & Disability makes clear is that disability is not an interruption of design – it is design at its most urgent, innovative and human. And it’s time the rest of the world caught up.
Photography courtesy of the V&A.
‘The Birth of Venus’ carnival costume by Maya Scarlette, 2024; photography by Tanasha
