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The curb-cut effect

The curb-cut effect: A range of people of all ages next to a crossing, road, and park show how the curb cut design for disabilities benefits everyone

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The curb-cut effect illustrates how when we design to benefit disadvantaged or vulnerable groups we end up helping society as a whole.

Angela Glover Blackwell explains how campaigning by students with disabilities in Berkeley in the early 1970s led to adding curb cuts to the Berkeley sidewalks to make access easier for those in wheelchairs. Yet it wasn't just people in wheelchairs that it helped. Curb cuts also made life easier for people pushing children in strollers, people using trolleys for deliveries, people pulling a suitcase, those wheeling bikes or on skateboards, and it also helps save lives by guiding people to cross at safe locations.

Another example is adding closed captioning to TV that helps anyone watch in a noisy bar, a waiting room, or watching an airline safety video. Or a classic example of universal design in the OXO Good Grips range originally made to be comfortable for holding a peeler even if you have arthritis.

It's also a useful analogy for "how laws and programs designed to benefit vulnerable groups, such as the disabled or people of color, often end up benefiting all," (PolicyLink ) whether that be increasing broadband access, improving public transport or taking cuts out of curbs.

Here's a short, fun video of Gary Karp explaining the curb-cut effect .

Thanks to my patron Quintin Balsdon for sharing it with me.

Published 23 May 2021

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Keep exploring

Survivorship Bias illustration: two analysts observe bullet damage, depicted by red dots, on a fighter plane returning from battle. They propose that heavier armour is added to all aircraft in the most hit areas of the plane. A third onlooker wonders whether this surviving plane tells a different story in that it returned because the most vulnerable areas weren't hit. Maybe heavier armour should be added to those areas?

Survivorship bias

Mangroves illustration: showing the coastal habitat and their benefits in protecting, stabilising, nurturing and sequestering

Sneaky averages: A statistician sinking in the deep part of a pond by a sign saying the average depth is 3ft

Sneaky averages

Eponym examples, explanation and etymology explained in a sketch with Erno Rubik of the Rubik's Cube, the Jacuzzi brothers, the 4th Earl of Sandwich, Lázló Biró, Etienne de Silhouette and Rudolf Diesel and his diesel engine

Some sensible interaction design principles

Some sensible interaction design

Sitting at the piano without any music is a great way to get started composing

Want to compose? Just sit down without any music

So the story goes, as told by Stephen Sigler, Nature May 1989: "The US military studied fighter planes returning from missions to try to improve their survival rate and were considering adding heavy armour to those parts of the plane that tended to show the greatest concentration of hits from enemy fire, until statisticians pointed out the fallacy of that argument. The more vulnerable parts of the plane were those with the fewest hits; planes hit there tended not to return at all. The single most vulnerable part, the pilot’s head, was without serious scar in the sample of planes that returned." It’s easy to draw correlations from what we see in front of us. But what we see usually represents just a small part of what has happened. Focusing on the evidence we can easily see at the expense of that we can’t leads to survivorship bias. To say it another way, when Bill Gates drops out of college and starts Microsoft it might seem like dropping out is a path to success for others too, but that ignores all the dropouts who didn’t create Microsofts and consequently you didn’t hear about. Silent evidence — the evidence that we don’t or can’t easily choose to consider — is a term from Nicholas Nassim Talleb. When trying to discover the veracity of the planes story I enjoyed Bill Casselman’s American Mathematical Society article on The Legend of Abraham Wald. The postscript points to some of the source behind the story including a mention of Stephen Sigler’s letter in Nature quoted above. I covered survivorship bias before, but I like this story so much I thought it was worth doing again.…So the story goes, as told by Stephen Sigler, Nature May 1989: "The US military studied fighter planes returning from missions to try to improve their survival rate and were considering adding heavy armour to those parts of the plane that tended to show the greatest concentration of hits from enemy fire, until statisticians pointed out the fallacy of that argument. The more vulnerable parts of the plane were those with the fewest hits; planes hit there tended not to return at all. The single most vulnerable part, the pilot’s head, was without serious scar in the sample of planes that returned." It’s easy to draw correlations from what we see in front of us. But what we see usually represents just a small part of what has happened. Focusing on the evidence we can easily see at the expense of that we can’t leads to survivorship bias. To say it another way, when Bill Gates drops out of college and starts Microsoft it might seem like dropping out is a path to success for others too, but that ignores all the dropouts who didn’t create Microsofts and consequently you didn’t hear about. Silent evidence — the evidence that we don’t or can’t easily choose to consider — is a term from Nicholas Nassim Talleb. When trying to discover the veracity of the planes story I enjoyed Bill Casselman’s American Mathematical Society article on The Legend of Abraham Wald. The postscript points to some of the source behind the story including a mention of Stephen Sigler’s letter in Nature quoted above. I covered survivorship bias before, but I like this story so much I thought it was worth doing again.

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