In 1990, the Americans with Disabilities Act mandated curb cuts at intersections across the country. The requirement was specific: Wheelchair users needed a ramp from sidewalk to street. What happened next was probably unexpected. Cyclists used the cuts. Parents with strollers used them. Delivery workers with hand trucks. Travelers with rolling luggage. A design solution created for a specific need ultimately became the standard for everyone, because it addressed a real human constraint instead of an imaginary “average” user.
Nobody who has ever rolled a suitcase down a city block thinks of curb cuts as accommodation. They are just how intersections work now. That shift, from specific solution to universal standard, is the pattern worth understanding.
Most products are built around a central idea of the user: capable, focused, operating under reasonably favorable conditions. That definition makes design manageable. It narrows the problem and creates a stable reference point for decisions. It also means the product is optimized for conditions that many people encounter only some of the time. When those conditions shift—hands are occupied or balance is uncertain or the body is working differently than it was last year—the assumptions start to show.
DESIGN FOR THE DIFFICULT CONDITIONS
Designing for the hardest conditions takes those assumptions away. If you cannot count on a precise grip, you have to study how the hand actually meets the object across every approach someone might take. Attention is rarely full, so the interaction has to make its purpose obvious without anyone reading instructions. Movements vary from one person to the next and from one day to the next, which means the design has to hold up across a range of paths instead of rewarding a single correct one. Each of those requirements pulls out an assumption that was creating friction for everyone.
You can see the same pattern once you start looking for it. Closed captions were developed for people who are deaf or hard of hearing. Now they run in airports, gyms, waiting rooms, and open offices—anywhere sound is hard to catch. The constraint surfaced a need that had been there all along, unmet because no one had been required to design for it.
DESIGN IN PRACTICE
The bathroom is where this shows up in our own work. People reach for the shower wall or the edge of a shelf every day, whatever is within reach: a child finding footing on a wet floor, someone stepping carefully to avoid slipping, a person home from a hospital stay who is not yet steady. For most households, there is nothing on that wall meant to be held.
The usual fix is a grab bar, and almost nobody installs one before they have to, because it announces that someone in the house has a problem. We designed the Linden line to take that choice away. It came out of our Design With process, the ethnographic work we do alongside older adults and people with disabilities that shapes our Design for Every Body collection. The Linden towel bar holds towels and holds a person—same fixture, same installation, neither job announcing the other. The shower grab frame is shaped like a trellis and reads as a tile niche, not hospital hardware. None of it looks like accommodation. It looks like the bathroom was designed well.
That is the entire point. A teenager grips the bar to balance on the edge of the tub. A parent leans on it lifting a child out of the water. The person it was technically built for uses it the same way everyone else does, and no one in the room notices a difference. The support is there when needed and unremarkable the rest of the time.
The business case follows directly. Products built around a narrow definition of the user perform well under ideal conditions and thin out as conditions vary. Homes age. Bodies change. Routines get busier and more crowded. A product that holds up across that variation gets used more often, for longer, by more people. The market expands because the product works in more of the situations people actually find themselves in. That reach comes from how the thing performs across a household that keeps changing.
IT’S ABOUT MORE THAN ACCOMMODATION
There is a temptation to file all of this under accommodation, something added to a product to serve a group that could not use it before. The curb cut corrects that. Nobody poured curb cuts into existing intersections as an afterthought for a narrow set of users. The constraint produced a better standard, and the standard turned out to serve everyone who uses the street. The same logic holds for a fixture that steadies a hand or a caption that carries information into a noisy room.
That is the question worth asking at the beginning of any design process. Not who this is for. But rather, what conditions does this need to handle, and is that range wide enough to cover how people actually live?
The most valuable products rarely emerge from designing for the average. They emerge from understanding where design breaks down, then resolving those points of friction so thoroughly that the solution becomes useful to everyone. What begins at the edge often becomes the new center. That is how standards change.
Ben Wintner is CEO of Michael Graves Design.
