In April 2023, a London borough council published a case study about how they redesigned the screen where tenants manage their housing payments. Fourteen pages. Process maps, user journey diagrams, before-and-after screenshots. The old system forced tenants to click through seven screens to tell the council their situation had changed. The new one required two. The case study called this “a transformative intervention.” I read it the week it came out. I have checked back every quarter since. The council has never published a follow-up.
In November 2019, the city of Melbourne completed an accessibility audit of its tram network. Auditors flagged sixty-three stops that wheelchair users could not reach. The report said the city should upgrade platforms at twelve stops within eighteen months. By January 2024, contractors had completed four. Nobody published that number. I found it by counting construction notices.
Designers, project managers, and council directors love to tell the redesign story. The audit, the consultation, the prototype, the ship date — these have beginnings, middles, and satisfying endings. The months after the ship date offer none of those things. The work turns messy, slow, and the people who built the thing almost never measure it.
I know this because I helped write one of these case studies. Not the London one. A different dashboard, a different council, a different year. When a disabled resident needed a wheelchair, a hoist, or adapted cutlery, they submitted a form. Caseworkers spent an average of forty minutes processing a single request through the old interface. Our team got it down to twelve. The project lead published the case study in 2021. It was gorgeous.
What I didn’t write: six months later, the council restructured its care team. Three caseworkers became one. Requests now sat in a queue that took nine weeks to clear. The dashboard was faster. The person waiting for a shower chair was not.
You might say: that’s not the designer’s fault. You’re right. It isn’t. That’s the point.
Mike Oliver distinguished between impairment and disability in 1983. The body has a condition. Society creates the barrier. Oliver changed how a generation of activists and scholars understood access, and the distinction is now so familiar it has become wallpaper. But his insight carries a second edge that most design teams never touch: the barrier is not static. It moves. It regenerates. A team removes one and the system grows another, often borrowing the language of what was just removed as cover.
The case study is that cover.
I have sat in procurement meetings — a district council in the East Midlands, 2022 — where a director cited a completed accessibility project as proof they did not need to spend any more. The project becomes a shield. “We did the dashboard.” “We did the ramp.” “We did the audit.” Past tense. The past tense is doing the work of a wall.
Here is what done looks like. In 2017, Transport for London installed tactile paving at a station entrance in Zone 3. By 2020, a licensing officer had permitted a coffee kiosk directly adjacent, blocking the guidance path. The tactile paving was still there. It guided people into a counter selling flat whites. Nobody had removed the accessibility feature. Nobody needed to. They just put something in front of it.
The mechanism is the same. The intervention is real. The context around it keeps moving. And the case study, frozen on its publication date, becomes a ruin at the moment of completion.
I contacted the team behind the London housing dashboard in early 2024. A former product manager replied. She was candid. “We know the processing times went back up,” she told me over email. “The bottleneck moved from the interface to staffing. But the case study is what gets shared in meetings. It’s what the director links to. Nobody is going to publish a case study that says ‘we made the screen faster and the wait got longer.’”
She knows. She does it anyway.
Bad design is not the problem. Designers, managers, and commissioners have confused delivering a product with delivering an outcome. A redesigned dashboard is a product. A person receiving their equipment within a livable timeframe is an outcome. The case study measures the first and implies the second. That implication is where disabled people disappear.
I still check the Melbourne tram stops when I visit. Four out of twelve, last I counted. The audit website still shows the original timeline. Nobody has updated it. Nobody has taken it down either. It just sits there, promising 2021, in 2025.
The coffee kiosk in Zone 3 is still open.