Week 9: Exclusion by Design

Outline#

• “the machine can’t make exceptions” as a sentence that only became available once a machine, not a person, was making the decision
• default paths built around an imagined typical user, and what happens to everyone the gate didn’t imagine
• accessible alternatives that exist on paper but not in practice: distance, visibility, staffing

The argument#

“The machine can’t make exceptions” is a sentence that only became sayable once a machine, rather than a person, was the one enforcing the rule. A staffed gate could always weigh a specific situation; a fare gate can only recognise the cases its designers anticipated, and everyone outside that anticipated shape becomes, by definition, an exception the system wasn’t built to handle.

The accessible alternative usually exists somewhere in the station’s paperwork — a wider gate, an intercom, a staffed counter — but its distance from the default path, in metres and in minutes, is itself a design decision. A gate that’s technically accessible but three platforms away from where everyone else enters isn’t really offering an alternative; it’s offering a technicality that satisfies an audit without satisfying the person standing at the machine.

Question to carry: whose body and situation did the “default” path get built around, and who decided that was reasonable?