Deaf education design in the spotlight at AIA25

Robert Nichols, Assoc. AIA, is the chairman and co-founder of the non-profit World Deaf Architecture (WDA), an organization devoted to bringing together deaf and hard of hearing architects, designers, and educators for the purpose of professional networking and career development. In a Wednesday session at the AIA Conference on Architecture & Design® 2025 in Boston, “Deaf Education Design: How to Create a Learning Building,” Nichols helped attendees understand the emerging concept of deaf education design.  

Since 2016, the WDA has existed as an affiliate of the AIA’s Office of Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion. According to Nichols, this affiliation has provided little benefit to WDA members, citing the office’s prioritization of programs focused on racial, ethnic, and gender equity (which he applauds) but generally discounting the needs of the deaf community. This stems from a lack of understanding about how the deaf communicate, or rather, the varied ways by which they can.  

“During the hiring process, accommodation for a disability is rarely considered without an explicit demand by the candidate,” Nichols wrote in 2021 article for Architect magazine. “Another common oversight is the prerequisite that a prospective employee possesses oral communication and/or presentation skills in the support of team collaboration," he says. "However, do employers consider the different modes of communication that team members can utilize to exchange information?”

The number of AIA members who are deaf or hard of hearing is small but not insignificant. (Conservative estimates place the number at less than 1 percent of registered members.) In his ongoing efforts to educate the larger design community and ensure those within the deaf community feel welcome in the profession, Nichols says he is happy to engage with any group to keep the needle moving.

Building a Knowledge Community

On a recent Zoom call, Nichols, who is deaf and spoke with the assistance of a live translator, told me that the lack of support services for deaf architects is the core problem. This extends to the need for American Sign language (ASL) interpreters, professionals trained in audiology and disability studies, and tangential members of the deaf community, including CODA (children of deaf adults) and PODC (parents of deaf children). “Many deaf architects have opted to withdraw their AIA membership,” Nichols says. “There needs to be more diversity in the organization, but they don’t have anyone [to address it].”

The work of fostering a more inclusive and equitable environment for deaf architects is an uphill battle. But Nichols prefers to frame the challenge as one of collaboration, not contention. In that spirit, the WDA has proposed transitioning into a new Knowledge Community, or working group, that would effectively bring the WDA into the AIA fold. “There’s a big change that needs to happen within the design community … We want to educate our members that if we separate completely, we can’t be successful,” he says.

The end goals of these efforts are to increase employment opportunities for the deaf, grow membership of the deaf and hard of hearing among AIA’s ranks, provide training for AIA members on the benefits of hiring and developing deaf architects, and leverage the AIA’s comparatively vast capital resources “to promote the WDA’s agenda,” he says. More so, Nichols wants individuals with hearing loss to become more involved in the “arenas of health care, education, social justice, and affordable housing, among others, and to infuse new resources into existing programs and public meetings,” according to his 2021 article. To achieve just that, the larger profession will require a deeper understanding of the diverse abilities and needs of the deaf community.  

Promoting deaf education design

Designing for inclusivity is the focus of Nichols' presentation at AIA25. Going a bit deeper, this session aims to “unveil the unique relationship in spatial organization that American Sign Language communication has historically overlooked,” according to the program summary.

A common misconception is that ASL fluency is universal within the deaf community. But this isn’t so. “The reason we are doing this presentation at AIA is because we need to change the future of education,” Nichols says.  

In the last three decades, the use of cochlear implants—which are surgically implanted neuro-prostheses that help individuals with hearing loss to perceive sounds and understand speech to varying degrees—has steadily increased, especially among children with hearing parents. With younger recipients of the implants, Nichols says, “some may also be taught to learn sign language, or maybe oralism, so they can learn to lip read as they’re growing up.”  

Very few schools for the deaf are eager to move on from making the ASL the gold standard, he says. He cites young implant recipients who come from deaf families “who may want to focus on learning ASL. And that’s fine!" he says. "But in some classrooms, you have 50% students who use ASL and 50% with cochlear implants who don’t know sign language. So, the design of classrooms really needs to change to accommodate different modes of learning.”  

A key question implied in Nichols’ upcoming AIA seminar is the issue of how curricula can “take both audiology and design and make better, more equitable environments” for students so that learning levels don’t fall behind those without any level of hearing loss. Communication access in these learning environments is paramount. This requires enhancing spatial awareness with the use of different technologies, pedagogies, and design tools. Whatever the solution looks like, the subtext of Nichols’ work is clear: deafness is not a handicap.

Encouraging empathy

When ASL was first developed a little over 200 years ago, it “enabled the deaf to communicate easily with one another, and it helped dispel the popular belief that people who couldn’t hear were mentally deficient and therefore uneducable: ‘deaf and dumb’,” wrote David Owen in a recent article in The New Yorker that investigates emerging technologies which allow people with hearing loss to read speech transcriptions in real time with the aid of special eyeglasses. In the ensuing decades, and particularly in the latter half of the twentieth century, clashes within the larger deaf community over the supremacy of ASL (aka manualism) versus other modes of communication has led many to decry the growing prevalence of cochlear implants.

Nichols doesn’t seem interested in engaging in that debate. Rather, he wants to nurture a more empathetic design culture that treats deafness not as some monolith but as a state of being that encapsulates a vast range of abilities, and learning tools, and technologies, and so on. This journey begins in the classroom. It continues when deaf learners begin to see the value in pursuing careers in design. Where this journey starts to bear fruit is when the larger design community understands the value these individuals bring to the profession and make the necessary adjustments to their practice.

“Handicap is not a kind word; it’s not the correct word,” Nichols says. “We're trying to encourage [the AIA] to change their language and focus more on the profession having equality between everybody in the community.”

For the time being, Nichols remains very much in grassroots mode. He makes frequent visits to conferences and institutions of higher learning, seeking input from design colleagues and encouraging more emerging professionals to join the WDA. This is fitting work, given that the WDA was conceived when Nichols paid a visit to Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C., the world’s sole institution of higher education for deaf and hard of hearing students (and famously the site of the Deaf President Now protests in 1988), “to discuss the possibility of establishing a new conference for deaf architects,” he says.  

While not every institution, including Gallaudet, has warmly received Nichols’ efforts to recruit deaf pupils into the design field, he is clearly undeterred. “We’re contacting different people; we’re speaking up for equality. We’re never going to give up working for our rights,” he said.  

Justin R. Wolf is a freelancer covering architecture and green design. He lives in Maine.