Designing for a future self: how the architect Stéphane Beel empathises with wheelchair users

Architects tend to design following their own values and concerns. As such, designing for imaginary users, especially disabled ones, may pose major challenges. Drawing on aspects of focused ethnography, we show how the architect Stéphane Beel’s anticipation of using a wheelchair in the future due to a progressive-regressive disease influences his willingness and ability to empathise with, and design for, wheelchair users. We study a museum building in Belgium that he, as part of a larger design team, helped to restore, renovate, and expand, paying special attention to (wheelchair) accessibility. We rely on interviews, observations, design documents, and two tours guided by Stéphane. Our findings suggest that Stéphane’s ability to empathise with users benefits from his flexible use of his embodied self, and his moving between positions in various design stages. Foregrounding bodily resonances with wheelchair users seems to facilitate incorporating the other as self and reaching affect. At the same time, thinking of the self as other promotes looking at designs through someone else’s eyes. Empathy brought Stéphane to design inclusive environments, not because he has embodied knowledge derived from his use of a wheelchair or his technical knowledge as an architect, but because he feels affected by his own future possibility. Set against indifference, this affect triggers a powerful response in his architecture.