Changing the official wheelchair symbol would have meant years lobbying a standards body with no reason to act — so the designers skipped the committee and just stuck the new one over the old ones themselves.

the problem

changing an entrenched official standard requires petitioning a governing body that has no incentive to move quickly, and the wait could take years with no guarantee of success

background

the move

In 2011, Hendren and Glenney designed a new access symbol showing a figure in active forward motion rather than a static seated outline, printed roughly 1,000 transparent stickers of the design, and applied them directly over existing wheelchair-symbol signage around Boston without seeking permission from any property owner or standards authority — releasing the design itself into the public domain for free so anyone could use or apply it.

the payoff

A Boston Globe reporter's coverage of the guerrilla sticker campaign brought national attention, and adoption spread city by city far faster than a formal standards process would likely have moved — the redesigned icon is now used by hundreds of institutions and cities worldwide, including New York, Malden and Burlington, Massachusetts, and El Paso and Austin, Texas, moving from illegal street stickers to institutionally adopted standard within a few years.

what came after

The Accessible Icon Project is a frequently cited case in design and civic-innovation circles for how demonstrating an alternative directly in public use, rather than waiting on a slow-moving official approval process, can build the momentum that eventually earns formal adoption — the project's own trajectory from unauthorized street stickers to institutional standard is now itself used as a template for other grassroots design-standard reform efforts.

references

1. [1]How A Guerrilla Art Project Gave Birth To NYC's New Wheelchair SymbolFast Company, 2013fastcompany.com
2. [2]The Controversial Process of Redesigning the Wheelchair SymbolAtlas Obscura, 2019atlasobscura.com

was it genius?

same kind of clever

• 1900 · MichelinA tire company started rating restaurants so France would drive far enough to wear out tires
• 1979 · NASA / United Airlines (Crew Resource Management)Aviation stopped losing planes to captains who wouldn't listen by making it a subordinate's job to make them
• 1999 · Iceland (Icelandic Centre for Social Research and Analysis, with Reykjavík)Iceland fought teenage substance abuse with curfews and sports funding instead of more anti-drug lectures