Symbol of Accessibility Redesign
UIA + RI Competition
[Logo Redesign]
Opportunity
The International Union of Architects and Rehabilitation International (RI) are jointly inviting submissions for a twenty-first century symbol of accessibility to represent their core values of rights and inclusion, independence, physical and virtual accessibility for all, including people with disabilities.
The competition invites professional architects and graphic designers as well as architectural and graphic design students to design a new graphic symbolof accessibility, to be proposed to the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) for adoption as the new international symbol of accessibility.
The challenge is therefore to develop a new symbol of accessibility that better represents the variety of people who use buildings and other types of built environments.
Solution
I began by exploring accessibility as an opening, an opening for ideas.
The cost of innaccessibility is limiting ideas and voices of those who need to be heard most.
The symbol abstracts the feeling of assembly. It's not our looks or physical attributes that resonate with others, but our shared ideas, feelings, and perspectives, which we can confer with them.
*Inspired by a 1993 report from Sandia National Laboratories aimed to communicate a series of messages non-linguistically to any future visitors to a waste site.*
Result
While this icon was considered, it was ultimately not selected. However, the opportunity to explore accessibility yielded an engaging design process and a unique symbol.
The deliberate choice of switching from an “icon” (wheelchair) to this new “symbol” was made because the necessity to be universal outweighs the necessity to be representational for long-term use.
Disability is different for every person and if this logo is used for extended periods of time it needs to champion a more encompassing idea than just one form of disability.
The adherence to DOT pictogram style allows the logo to be implemented alongside current physical, vision, audio and other impairment icons seamlessly.
