http://goo.gl/rUoL6B
After the accident, de los Reyes wondered what would become of that sprawling dreamscape. Nothing felt right anymore. He barely even felt like himself. Then, after months having not checked his email or used his cellphone, his sister brought him a laptop. He checked his email. He checked his voicemail. Among the hundreds of messages, there were dozens from a romantic interest, baffled at his sudden and total disappearance. The outlines of his former life began to return. He knew that to feel right again, he had to go back to work. Within three months, he did.
The return was bracing, but not in the way de los Reyes expected. Being back in the office was actually a balm, because the workplace had been fastidiously designed to accommodate wheelchairs, with wide halls and low elevator buttons. The problem was the rest of his life. De los Reyes, despite his mild demeanor, has never been content to let things happen slowly when they could happen fast. After the accident, he had methodically set about trying to do as many things as he’d ever done. Yet the limitations soon become obvious. He’d try to meet friends at a favorite restaurant, only to discover that he couldn’t quite get inside because of one tiny curb that some contractor had overlooked. He’d be steering his wheelchair down the sidewalk, only to be met with a tipped-over garbage can, which would force him to circumnavigate an entire block.
To de los Reyes, these myriad frustrations shared one thing: They didn’t actually speak to his own limitations. They spoke instead to the thoughtlessness all around him.
You could describe this in that old cliche that necessity breeds invention. But a more accurate interpretation is that in empathizing with others, we create things that we might never have created ourselves. We see past the specifics of what we know, to experiences that might actually be universal. So it’s all the more puzzling that design, as a discipline, has so often tended to focus on a mythical idea of the average consumer.
The idea is that by designing with the disabled in mind—designing so that the disabled can have universal access—we can create products better for everyone else. After his accident, de los Reyes now had no choice but to think about one classic example of universal design: the curb cut, those low concrete ramps that allow wheelchair users to mount a sidewalk, but which also help everyone from the elderly crossing the street to kids toting their bicycles.
De los Reyes wasn’t proposing that Microsoft become a sidewalk company. He was proposing a metaphor. He was hoping to find the digital world’s equivalent of the curb cut, something elegant that let everyone live a little easier.