What Can a Body Do?
But the most interesting creativity often results when there’s an unusual and urgent degree of friction in the meeting of body and world—whether that friction is born of capacity or history or demographic background.Sara Hendren
Overview: This was a fascinating read. People who live with disabilities have long been navigating a world that wasn't designed or built for them. I grew up watching my father modifying and adapting the world to fit his needs. He was blind and was always busy working on one project or another. I also spent the early years as an adult working as support to people with significant physical, mental, and intellectual disabilities. I remember my frustration at the condition of the sidewalk as I walked with a man who used a motorized wheelchair to take care of some errands he needed to do. The sidewalk was narrow and broken, creating a rather treacherous path that was scary to traverse. On top of that, there were no curb cuts anywhere in sight. That sidewalk, which was my friend's only way into town and his access to necessities, was also not safe for anyone to walk on regardless of their ability.
Sara Hendren addresses accessibility issues like this in her brilliantly insightful book. From furniture to campus architecture, Hendren asks, "Must we accept and bend to the norms of the institution? Or can we insist, together, that the institution also bend for us?"
Who this book is for: Anyone interested in accessibility and universal design.
Key Takeaways:
- There is no such thing as a universal design that actually works for everyone. The mass-production, one size fits all approach to designing our world fails us all. In an effort to increase profits, designers of mass-produced junk are creating an increasingly more dangerous world for us to live in.
- Accessibility lies in the margins. It turns out that if we focus on designing for the individual needs of the minority, we find that the design actually benefits the majority.
- True innovation comes from the friction created when a barrier prevents a body from a necessity or a desire.
- "As in nature, where biodiversity is a phenomenon of strength in multiplicity, the idea of neurodiversity, these advocates argue, invites us to see atypical minds and bodies as capable of making a powerful contribution to the world not in spite of but because of their ways of being."
- "...each body makes a stream of conscious and unconscious choices, knitting together a habitable personal universe minute by minute by minute."
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Where to buy: Click here to get your copy!