The Relevance of Universal Design for Mediation in the Context of Museums

Universal Design (UD) has been proposed as a framework for culture mediation which is defined as every attempt to encourage publics to understand or appreciate culture. This is motivated by the fact that accessibility devices are not generalized, and do not target all publics with disabilities. However, UD devices are rare and do not concern all publics neither. This paper questions the relevance of UD in the context of museum mediation, as well as the shortcomings of museums in applying UD due to a lack of guidelines (as demonstrated in recent literature). Since the discourse of museum mediation is rooted in language, I therefore propose a new transposition of UD for Mediation (UDM) that focuses on all communication modes.