Kroglabbet – Making Hospitality Accessible
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Hospitality is built around making people feel welcome. Yet many restaurant experiences still depend on being able to read a menu, navigate a space visually, or negotiate access with staff. Kroglabbet (The Restaurant Lab) explores a simple question: do restaurants and cafés actually work for everyone?
Developed as an MFA thesis in Embedded Design at HDK-Valand, University of Gothenburg, the project was carried out through co-design collaborations between people with visual impairments from SRF and UTOPIA — including co-designers Ther Tomma, Tor Tollhag and Annette Wilhelmsson — and hospitality businesses in Gothenburg like Mormors, Da Matteo and Schmaus in Germany. Kroglabbet creates spaces where those who experience barriers and those who shape restaurant experiences can design together, translating lived experience into practical changes that businesses can implement and maintain over time.
Rather than treating accessibility as an add-on, the project explores how it can become part of everyday hospitality: the information guests receive, the routines staff follow, and the signals that communicate who belongs. Kroglabbet works on two levels simultaneously: raising awareness of exclusion in hospitality settings while developing practical interventions that strengthen a business’s capacity to welcome a wider range of guests.
These interventions include accessible menus, website improvements, a staff training tool built around real service situations, and the “Who Let the Dogs In?” campaign promoting the inclusion of guide dogs. Several have already been developed and implemented in collaboration with cafés and restaurants, allowing the project to move beyond critique and into everyday practice.
By starting with hospitality, Kroglabbet opens a broader conversation about designing services and public spaces around human diversity rather than an imagined “average user.” Accessibility becomes part of good hospitality: the conditions that allow guests to access information, enter without negotiation, and shape their experience on their own terms.
Kroglabbet continues beyond the thesis, working with restaurants, cafés and cultural spaces ready to make hospitality genuinely hospitable.