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Rethinking Disability: Paradigm Makers Moonlit Minds Journal
Rethinking disability to foster disability inclusive societies for advancing social progress
Jess Price
December 08, 2025
Welcome to the 15th edition of Paradigm Makers Moonlit Minds Journal.
Table of Contents
Jess’ Monthly Reflection
Each year on 3 December, I celebrate the United Nations International Day of Persons with Disabilities (IDPwD). As one of the 1 in 6 people living with disability, this day has become a chance to celebrate my community and reflect on the annual theme. In 2025, the theme is fostering disability inclusive societies for advancing social progress.
The World Health Organisation defines disability as "part of being human", resulting from the interaction between individuals with a health condition and personal or environmental factors.
As someone with an invisible disability, I don't talk about my experience publicly very often. That's been a deliberate choice, shaped by mentors who don't share the same privilege. I move through the world with a kind of invisibility cloak, choosing when and where to disclose.
That choice comes with risk. I once had a manager say they wouldn't have hired me if I'd disclosed in the interview - despite the fact I’d been doing the job successfully for months. I've been told multiple times that I can't be disabled because "I don't look sick."
In Australia, about 4.4 million people live with disability, and an estimated 80% have an invisible disability. But we are not our disability. That's one of the reasons I was excited to participate in the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre's recent IDPwD video as part of my role as a member of the Accessibility Advisory Committee.
In this edition, I wanted to trace the evolution of how people with disability have been treated and how those choices still shape our systems today.
Enjoy December’s Cold Moon (the final in a trio of supermoons!)
Jess Price
Founder & Chief Vision Officer
P.S. I'm experimenting with a new format based on feedback and a talk I recently gave at Swinburne's AI+X Leadership Summit (you can watch an extended version on YouTube). Let me know what you think!
P.P.S. I recently joined Adam Murray on the Subtle Disrupters podcast to talk about my creative process and what I'm building.
EXPLORING THE HISTORICAL CONTEXT
Research Approach: AI-assisted synthesis to access and distil credible historical and contemporary sources; insights cross-checked; sources included. Synthesis is also non-exhaustive, highlighting specific events relevant to this theme. These eras are based on the most widely accepted dates of the four industrial revolutions.
Before Inclusion: How Exclusion Became the Norm
'Fostering disability-inclusive societies' sounds hopeful, but it sits on a long history of exclusion. Across time, disability has been explained and managed through four commonly discussed models:
Medical: Treats people with disability as defective and in need of fixing to fit into a 'normal' society.
Charitable: Frames people with disability as vulnerable and dependent on others for help.
Social: Argues most limitations come from inaccessible systems and environments, not from people themselves.
Human rights: Recognises that people with disability have the same rights as everyone else, and that governments and institutions must uphold those rights.
Pre-Industrial (before 1760)
In London, Bethlehem Hospital (Bedlam) was one of Europe's earliest institutions for the 'mad'. People with mental illness and cognitive disability were shackled, ridiculed, and exhibited for entertainment. Visitors paid to watch, reinforcing the idea that disability was a spectacle. Here, medical and charitable logics intertwined. Disability was framed as defect, madness or a moral failing.
First Industrial Revolution (1760-1840)
In 1792, French physician Philippe Pinel became the chief physician at a Paris asylum, ordering the removal of chains from many patients, some of whom had been restrained for 30 or 40 years. His work suggested that social and psychological stresses could shape mental illness. But as factories reshaped work, disability was still treated as a deficit. If a person could not be "improved" to meet industrial demands, institutionalisation was the fallback option. The medical model framed disability as something in the person to diagnose, manage or hide away.
Second Industrial Revolution (1870-1914)
In 1880, educators and policymakers met in Milan to decide the future of Deaf education. They endorsed "oralism" and banned sign language in schools. This led to what is often called the "Dark Age of Deaf Education", with a sharp decline in Deaf professionals and cultural life. This decision was officially renounced on 11 July 2025 by the World Federation of the Deaf, the European Union of the Deaf and the Italian National Association of the Deaf, affirming that sign languages are full and natural human languages.
Third Industrial Revolution (1970-2006)
In the 1970s, disability activists in Berkeley began pouring their own concrete curb cuts at intersections. At the time, kerbs were sheer drops, so anyone using a wheelchair or pushing a pram could only cross where driveways dipped to the road. Their work helped pave the way for legal change. In 1990, the Americans with Disability Act (ADA) made disability-based discrimination unlawful and mandated accessible built environments. Australia followed with the Disability Discrimination Act (DDA) in 1992. In 2006, the UN adopted the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD), with a record number of signatories on its first day.
These developments signalled a shift towards social and human-rights models. Curb-cut activism reframed access as an urban design problem. Laws like the ADA, DDA and CRPD framed disability as a rights issue and shifted responsibility to governments, employers and institutions rather than individuals and families.
Fourth Industrial Revolution (2011-now)
In Australia, people with disability, advocates and governments pushed for a more coherent support system. The National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS), legislated in 2013, was designed to give people with disability more choice, control and tailored supports.
Over time, however, trust eroded. An independent review released in 2023 identified inconsistent processes, poor participant experiences, administrative gaps and a lack of coordination with mainstream services. Many participants, and their carers, described the planning process as adversarial and draining.
In parallel, the Royal Commission into Violence, Abuse, Neglect and Exploitation of People with Disability (established in 2019) released its final report in 2023, with hundreds of recommendations to reshape laws, policies and practices to uphold the rights and safety of people with disability.
On paper, these frameworks adopt social and human-rights models. In practice, systems often revert to medical or charitable habits when resources are tight or design is weak. People are still asked to prove their deficits to access support, and services are still set up around institutional convenience rather than human variability.
What this reveals
Across each era, the “problem” of disability has been located in people rather than in the design of society. Confinement gave way to diagnosis, institutionalisation, corrective education and assessment. Each era added new tools, policies and language, but kept the same underlying belief: systems could stay fixed; people had to adapt. Even our most progressive laws struggle to undo that legacy. Rights can be written into policy while processes still require people to justify their needs, repeat their stories and navigate structures that were never built with them in mind.
IDENTIFYING THE LOGIC WE’VE INHERITED
How Inherited Logic Limits Disability-Inclusive Progress
Medical and charitable thinking that once justified containment and pity now reappear in modern forms through deficit-based assessments, inaccessible infrastructure and systems that expect individuals to adapt.
Our systems are not broken. They are working exactly as designed. To understand why progress feels slow, we need to look at the structural logics we've inherited.
1. Our systems still treat disability as a personal shortfall to be managed, rather than a design failure to be fixed.
From Bedlam to NDIS, disability has been framed as a defect to be managed rather than a mismatch between people and systems, with any deviation becoming the individual's burden. Recent Australian data shows how this impacts people with disability today:
Of the 3.2 million Australians with disability who needed assistance, 49.9% had their needs fully met (down from 59.7% in 2018). For people with profound or severe limitation, only 36.7% had their needs fully met.
Among working-age people with disability, 56.1% were employed, compared with 82.3% of people without disability. Only one third (33.4%) worked full time, compared with more than half (57.9%) of those without disability.
These are not individual failures. They are signs of systems built around narrow expectations and rigid processes.
2. Accessibility still functions as an afterthought because our systems were never designed for human variability.
Access improvements often arrive only after exclusion becomes visible. Curb cuts came after decades of inaccessible streets. Many buildings, websites and public spaces are still adapted only when complaints or legal risks surface.
Recent indicators include:
Among people who needed assistance or had difficulty with communication or mobility, more than a quarter (580,800 people) reported difficulty accessing buildings or facilities in the past year.
A 2025 WebAIM analysis found 94.8% of the top 1 million home pages have detectable WCAG 2 (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) failures, despite years of awareness and guidance.
Each era has taught institutions that redesigning systems is costly and optional. The easier path is to leave structures intact and bolt on fixes later, even when we know universal design benefits everyone.
3. Declaring rights is not the same as designing systems capable of delivering them.
The third and fourth industrial revolutions brought a shift towards social and human-rights models of disability. Laws like the ADA, DDA, CRPD, and NDIS state participation is a right, yet lived experience shows a persistent gap between legal aspiration and daily reality.
Some snapshots:
The International Labor Organisation reports that workers with disability earn on average 12% less per hour than other employees, and much of this gap cannot be explained by factors such as education, age or type of work.
Across OECD countries, the employment rate for people with disability is roughly 27 percentage points lower than for people without disability.
Rights frameworks emerged after centuries in which people with disability had little agency or inclusion. Bureaucratic processes, fragmented support ecosystems and deficit framing all carry forward old logic.
Redesign at the Level of Meaning
Many current tensions come from the meanings we inherited:
Inclusion as accommodation.
Accessibility as optional.
Disability as deficit.
Support as charity.
Rights as paperwork.
These aren't neutral labels; they are the consequence of design decisions. To build disability-inclusive societies, we need to redefine the concepts that steer our decisions by asking:
What does dignity look like in practice?
What does genuine participation require? and
What do systems owe the people they exist to serve?
The opportunity now is to understand the logic we've inherited and use new design principles, based on inclusion, to build societies where everyone can participate by default.
CREATING A NEW PARADIGM FOR TOMORROW
Replacing inherited logic with inclusive design principles
If the systems we inherited were designed to exclude, the systems we build now must be designed to include. For most of history, systems stayed fixed while people were expected to adapt. To redesign, we need to begin by reversing this logic: systems must flex around people.
Here are some potential new design principles, based on Paradigm Makers Essential Elements:
People: From helping people fit the system to designing systems that fit people
Under the social model, unmet needs and low participation are not signs that individuals are failing; they are signs that environments were not designed for them. This principle reframes inclusion as a design responsibility. Systems must be built to accommodate diverse bodies, minds, energy levels and communication systems from the start. Participation should not require constant advocacy or heroics. It should be assumed.
Question: How might your systems flex to meet people as they are, rather than requiring people to adapt to the system?
Innovation: From adding inclusion to existing systems to treating inclusion as a trigger for redesign
Retrofitting inclusion after problems emerge is expensive, often ineffective and rarely shifts the underlying logic that produced exclusion in the first place. This principle treats disability insight as a starting point, not a late-stage “user test.” People who face barriers see where systems fail and where they can be improved for everyone. When their experience becomes a core design input, innovation expands. We move from patching symptoms to redesigning structures.
Question: What becomes possible if disability insight becomes the starting point for how you redesign value, access and function?
Technology: From using tools to patch disability barriers to using tools that don’t create them
Modern tools, like AI systems and everyday websites, can quietly reproduce exclusion in new forms. This principle repositions our tools to eliminate exclusion before it occurs by co-designing with the people who rely on them most. Accessibility becomes the default because every digital tool can only proceed to production after relevant accessibility checks (e.g. all social media videos are automatically opt out for captions, rather than opt in).
Question: Are the tools you’re using expanding access, or quietly reproducing exclusion in new ways?
Economics: From value equals output to value equals contribution made possible by good design
Traditional economic measures reward speed, independence and uninterrupted productivity, which reinforce disability as 'reduced capacity'. If we redefine value as the contribution made possible by good design, we see systems differently. Rest, care and interdependence become conditions for contribution, rather than inefficiencies. Employment gaps, wage inequities and unmet support needs are no longer personal shortcomings but indicators of poor system design.
Question: How would your funding models or performance measures shift if value was defined by what design makes possible?
Norms: From inclusion is conditional to inclusion is the default rule
Every system carries unwritten rules, including support is available if you disclose your disability and don’t ask for too much. This principle removes that conditionality. When systems proactively anticipate access needs, the burden shifts off individuals. Safety, dignity and predictability become standard. The baseline moves from “you are included if you tell us what you need” to “you are included.”
Question: What unwritten rules shape participation in your context, and who do they quietly push out?
How these principles fit together
We can create disability-inclusive societies by redesigning the logic that shapes our systems.
We inherited systems that asked: "How do I make people fit?" Our new systems can ask: "How do we make belonging the baseline?"
VISION FOR 2075
If we start in 2026: A vision for a disability-inclusive society
If I'm alive in 2075, I'll be the age my nannie (grandmother) is now, so let’s imagine a conversation with my future grandchildren. In this version of the world, we began redesigning systems around these principles in 2026.
A conversation with my hypothetical future 5-year-old grandchild
Note: This conversation was created using AI.
Them: Nannie, is it true that people with disability used to be left out of things?
Me:
Yes. A long time ago, the world wasn’t built for everyone. Lots of places and rules only worked for one kind of person. If your body or brain worked differently, the world made things harder instead of helping.
Them: But… why? That sounds mean.
Me:
Most of the time, people just didn’t think about all the different ways someone might move, see, hear or learn. So doors were too heavy. Buses had big steps. Schools didn’t have the help kids needed. Phones and computers were too tricky. The world wasn’t trying to be hurtful; it just didn’t imagine everyone who lived in it.
Them: So how did it get better?
Me:
Well, we changed it little by little.
In the 2020s, people finally said, ‘Maybe the problem isn’t the person. Maybe it’s the world!’
In the 2030s and 2040s, we started building things in fairer ways. Ramps, quiet rooms, buses that kneel down, screens everyone could use and schools that helped all kinds of kids learn were expected. But changing buildings and rules takes time. Sometimes people argued or didn't understand why it was important. Sometimes money ran out. Sometimes leaders didn’t listen.
In the 2050s, our computers and robots learned to help everyone, not only the people who fit the old rules. But we had to teach the computers not to copy the unfair ideas people used to have, and that was hard.
By the 2060s, we changed how we thought about work. Instead of saying, ‘You must do things this one way,’ we said, ‘What do you need to do your best?'
And by the 2070s, we made a big promise: everyone belongs, no matter what. Not because they ask nicely, or fit the rules, but because belonging is how the world should work.
Them: Will it always stay this way?
Me:
I hope so. But even now, we have to keep trying. Hard things don’t stay fixed on their own. Back when I was young, I learned something important: grown-ups made all the rules about how the world worked. If grown-ups could make rules that left people out, then grown-ups could make rules that welcome everyone in. That’s what we did, and we started building a kinder world. And now it’s your turn to help keep it kind.
End scene.
Thanks for making it to the end! Let me know what you think of the new structure - I think I like it!
Until next time, Jess
P.S The concept of disability inclusion and exclusion didn’t evolve in isolation. If you enjoyed this edition, you might also like:
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