Disability
I am going to focus my reflection on Christine Sun Kim: Friends and Strangers (Kim, 2023.). Sun Kim is a deaf artist born in 1980, a similar age to me.
I was really excited to see her name because I realised that I unknowingly collaborated with her on her Manchester International Festival project. As former Head of Design at Selfridges, I oversaw the creative teams in Selfridges Manchester; responsible for the production and installation of her piece Captioning the City (Manchester International Festival, 2021). So this really resonated with me. I found the concept of flying the plane over the city where she pushed the boundaries of intersectionality as an Asian, female, deaf role model and stated, “Caption everything, Caption the sky” – literal blue sky thinking.
My nephew-in-law is deaf and uses ASL, which is obviously different from BSL. His story made me notice Sun Kim’s recent exhibition at the Wellcome Collection on sign language (Wellcome Collection, 2025.). Wellcome is an example of design accessibility at its best – beautiful and considered braille captions, contemporary, not an afterthought but a clear tool of communication.
Sun Kim’s comments on intersectionality as a female artist and mother working in Berlin, and not having to pay for childcare, really struck me. (I am a working-class mum in London bringing up two children and working full time – this really was an eye-opener for me that they didn’t have to pay for childcare.) This is something that I, and many others, feel penalises women in today’s society in the UK. It can damage your career, adding to the career gap and social divide – something @FlexAppeal and @MotherPukka fight to raise awareness for. The pandemic massively changed the workplace in a positive way for women, but I fear it’s reversing as more and more industries go back to 3–5 days in the office, and the political landscape changes in what I see as very negative ways. Brexit and US President Trump and his reversal of EDI and women’s and trans rights are having a big impact on the workplace.
From being pregnant with HG on the tube / navigating London transport to work, and experiencing firsthand a hidden, debilitating disability that I’d never had lived experience of before, I was thankful to have the ‘baby on board’ badge. EDI has been, and is, a large part of my design language and consideration. I now know that you can get a ‘Not all disabilities are visible’ badge on TFL, so we’ve come slightly further than when I worked on the Great British Public Toilet Map (Royal College of Art, 2011.) for my MA at RCA (I needed a RADAR key for IBS) – so this meant a lot to me post-childbirth.
People like Sun Kim have fun challenging perceptions and showcasing the positive side of being deaf. I learned, working with the Valuable 500 on SYNC20 Tokyo, who aim to end disability discrimination in the workplace, that we do not use ableist language such as ‘hearing impairment’ because this has negative connotations. There’s a contemporary list by Gov.uk (an award-winning site at the Design Museum annual awards – won by [then] Public Digital’s Ben Terrett team with Margaret Calvert). Calvert is an intersectional female designer of UK motorway signs – arguably the world’s most safe and inclusive design.
I love design work that elevates disability superpowers, like Sun Kim’s, and also the Channel 4 Paralympic campaign by Lyndsey Atkin, a fellow LCC alumni graduate, which really inspired me and my students (Campaign Live, 2023). As does the Samaritans campaign and Supermundane’s work “It’s OK not to be OK”.
Working at Tate on their wayfinding with specialists who worked on the most inclusive games to date – London 2012 – and doing workshops with the exec and SLT (Senior Leadership Teams) in finding the prayer room or navigating Tate Britain vs Tate Modern in lifts as a mum with kids or as an older person in a wheelchair, has been a defining learning curve for me.
My career as a design leader at some of the UK’s largest public-serving institutions – and now teaching on DPS Diploma in Professional Studies, supporting around 80 students navigate their way into the competitive world of design, in today’s phygital and evolving world of work) – has often made me consider accessibility. From ‘learning and interpretation’ at Tate, V&A and NHM, across digital and permanent exhibitions, to touring exhibitions where you need to consider legibility of captions, silent hour for neurodivergent visitors, testing the NHM SLT on getting to South Kensington Exhibition Road from the SK tube with no lifts – Victorian infrastructure prevents this for all of SK, including Science Museum and V&A.
I, like Sun Kim, considered EDI at V&A on their marketing campaigns, invites and social. At DPS, I have collaborated with Valuable 500 on ending disability in the workplace and set a live project for 5 students where we discussed ableist language – inspiring the next generation. (Other generations can be resistant to new language and lock into things like SEND, which is Gov / Education based but not current terminology.)
I’ve had the white CIS privilege of promoting the use of pronouns internally in big organisations like Selfridges and working on Queer British Art at Tate, and London Fashion in the 80s at V&A – all inclusive eras, and the history is so fascinating. Using my pronouns ‘she/her’ is important to me, from growing up with a trans friend Lucy (formerly Luke) – who was in the Absolut campaign Labels aren’t for people – a personal friend navigating being trans now, like people at NHM when we had Fantastic Beasts by J.K. Rowling – problematic systemic transphobia.
We discussed in our breakout groups how we support students going out into industry. Most big companies offer reasonable adjustments and are really good on this with their diversity teams. We offer ISAs, EC and disability support, counselling and self-certification – which is great because you don’t need to go through the lengthy process of proving a disability, when this is a challenge in itself as part of being neurodivergent. I’m supporting an autistic female in a current class, who needs extra support, and all of these exhibitions that are raising awareness help us to get the support they might need – e.g. a mentor from the year above, also female (females have often masked signs for years), autistic and a printmaker, so can relate.
It has helped me understand myself and my own intersectionality struggles as a female with ADD, OCD and autistic parents – through counselling, reading and learning lots on the subject. It has been (until very recently) uplifting to see companies and education putting EDI and working class inclusion at the forefront of their hiring (Royal College of Art, 2022). NHM, for example, requires you to interview a candidate with a disability unless there is a very good reason not to.
Bibliography
Campaign Live (2023) McCann Worldgroup bolsters creative leadership with Lynsey Atkin as London CCO. Campaign. Available at: https://www.campaignlive.co.uk/article/mccann-worldgroup-bolsters-creative-leadership-lynsey-atkin-london-cco/1877771 [Accessed: 26 June 2025].
Kim, C.S. (2025) Friends and Strangers [Video]. Wellcome Collection. Available at: https://wellcomecollection.org/search/images?source.subjects.label=”Sign+language” [Accessed: 26 June 2025].
Manchester International Festival (2021) Captioning the City by Christine Sun Kim. Manchester: MIF. (Please add full URL if available).
Royal College of Art (2011.) Great British Public Toilet Map. Available at: https://www.rca.ac.uk/research-innovation/projects/great-british-public-toilet-map/ [Accessed: 26 June 2025].
Royal College of Art (2022) The RCA Working Class Collective Presents. Available at: https://2022.rca.ac.uk/collections/the-rca-working-class-collective-presents/ [Accessed: 26 June 2025].
Wellcome Collection (n.d.) Sign Language Exhibitions. Available at: https://wellcomecollection.org/exhibitions/1880-that[Accessed: 26 June 2025].
https://wellcomecollection.org/search/images?source.subjects.label=%22Sign+language%22
https://www.nhm.ac.uk/visit/access-at-south-kensington.html
https://www.tate.org.uk/visit/accessibility
Assistance cat NHM dino snores
Retail accessibility https://www.selfridges.com/GB/en/features/info/accessibility/
we also did breastfeeding friendly areas across all stores for inclusivity
London 2012 inclusivity Paralympics https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2012/aug/11/olympic-games-review-blake-morrison
Wayfinding 2012 Channel 4 idents by 4 creative and Lyndsay akin
Inclusive language – name training LCC
https://www.shapearts.org.uk/Blog/language-and-disability-rights-an-evolving-relationship
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