Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

The built world is constructed on a set of hidden assumptions. The design of a chair, the shape of a doorknob, the steps to a house: nearly everything human beings make is assistive technology, meant to bridge the gap between body and world. Yet unless the misfit between our body and the world is acute enough to be considered 'disability,' we may never consider the ideas on which the everyday world is based. In a series of fascinating, provocative explorations that draw on cutting-edge disability theory, Sara Hendren translates this secret language of design and invites us to reboot it.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Author's Note (p. xi)
• Introduction: Who Is the Built World Built For? (p. 1)
• A lectern for a Little Person and a laboratory with surprises. Where is disability? The universally assisted body.
• Limb. (p. 33)
• Cyborg arms vs. zip ties: Finding the body's infinite adaptability and replacing the things that matter.
• Chair. (p. 65)
• From "do-it-yourself murder" to cardboard furniture: Is a better world designed one-for-all, or all-for-one?
• Room. (p. 95)
• DeafSpace, a hospital dorm, and design that anticipates life's hardest choices. Rethinking "independent living."
• Street. (p. 131)
• Geography and desire lines: Atypical minds and bodies navigate the landscape. Making space truly common.
• Clock. (p. 161)
• Life on crip time. When the clock is the keeper of our days, what pace of life is fast enough?
• Epilogue: Making Assistance Visible. (p. 197)
• Acknowledgments (p. 207)
• Notes (p. 211)
• Bibliography (p. 223)

Excerpt provided by Syndetics

INTRODUCTION: WHO IS THE BUILT WORLD BUILT FOR? Every day every body is at odds with the built environment. Bodies come up against stairs and sinks and subway plat‑ forms, sometimes with ease and grace and sometimes blun‑ dering and awkward, over hurdles, even in a sudden clash. Each flesh envelope is miraculous and mundane in this way, lugging all its gear and getting where it needs to go. Maybe you handle a sharp knife with enjoyment of its grip; maybe you wince as you sit down in or get up from your office chair. All the jostling around doorways and furniture, all the hustling down the crowded sidewalk--it would be a vast and endless choreography, a dance of one multiplied by millions, if you could see us all from above. How we meet the built envi‑ ronment depends on both bodies and worlds. There's no custom-fit solu‑ tion arriving for any of us, but if you could zero in on that moment of body-meets-stuff--flesh up against metal or concrete or plastics--if you could slow down the tape right at the instant of connection, you'd see it packed with information. And no one understands this more than Amanda, who came to my suburban college campus outside Boston on a frigid day in January. She was one of the first guests invited to collaborate with a cohort of two dozen engineering students who'd signed up for my class in design that semester. Amanda is an art historian and a curator of contemporary art. She is Australian by birth and still speaks in the lilt of her native accent, even as a longtime transplant to Southern California. She has a comfortably professorial air, at ease in the front of the room in the geometric clothing that's favored by the gallery set, and she's also a Little Person. Amanda has a form of dwarfism, so her stature, at just over four feet tall, is shaped outside the standard range of average heights for humans. Her entrance to an unremarkable college classroom is a whole curriculum unto itself, because her presence has a way of casting the surrounding environment into stark relief, making some of us pause and really see it, as if for the first time: the dimensions of the space, the heights of the light switches and various media outlets, the sizes of our tables and chairs. Amanda arrived, laptop in tow, and walked my students through a visual overview of her work as a curator, pointing to slides as she talked about all the ways she works with artists and museums to bring an exhi‑ bition to life. She told us, for example, how she'd installed one contempo‑ rary photography show at a lower wall height than standard--making it more accessible to Little People but also to wheelchair users and to children. She invited the students' many questions about how she presents her work, but also about her daily life and her experience of her body in the world, because she wasn't just a guest lecturer. Amanda was with us because she had an idea, a proposal for all of us to take up as a project-- she, together with me and my eager young engineering students. She had come to ask us to design and build with her a piece of furniture, a tool that would address some of the specific features and requirements of her profession and her body: a lectern, for giving talks and for welcoming audiences to her museum shows. A lectern, it has to be said, is so often just the architecture for a lot of hot air--that tap-­tapping on the microphone that careens into feedback before settling in for the drone of voices warming to their themes and standing between you and lunch. It plays such a sturdy supporting role in so many formalized rituals--commencements, sales pitches, seminars, sermons--that, at a glance, it hardly seems worth remarking on. Think how many lecterns there are, just standing around in anticipation in the world's many hotel conference rooms and auditoriums, generic models covered in wood veneer and all more or less alike, a nondescript part of the background. Except: a lectern is also a blunt announcement, carried in the shape of an object, about who's expected to be standing behind it. A lectern assumes a world where everything is created for people whose stature ranges from just over five feet and up. Amanda wanted a lectern at her scale. She wanted to be able to do the speaking her job entailed without a device that required her to enact the repeated awkwardness of bringing her body to the dimensions of a room at odds with her physicality, usually some structure behind an ordinary lectern. "Typically, it would be some kind of little pedestal or something, right?" she told us. It was an accommodation she'd made do with for much of her life, but she didn't want to do that anymore. She wanted a more flexible design. To present her master's thesis in graduate school, she'd commissioned a wooden model on wheels; it was gratifying for that event but it was heavy, not really portable. She'd come to our class for a new version entirely, a lectern that had to do more than stand at the correct height. She wanted to take it with her when she traveled for work, so it had to be built in such a way that it would easily fold to a flat shape, and then open back up in elegant and simple steps. It had to be lightweight for easy carrying, spacious enough to hold her notes, robust enough to support her laptop and a bottle of water and hold up under repeated use. Nothing even close was available for purchase. My students were easily captivated by the sheer mechanics of the chal‑ lenge. The entire classroom was clear-eyed, awake, eager to get going even on a winter morning. But there was still more to understand: Amanda would say she is disabled--not differently abled, not specially challenged, or any other similar variation. Like many people in the disability community, she would use that term by choice, preferring it even to person with dwarfism . For her, disabled is not a derisive word. Amanda would say very plainly that she lives with the disabling conditions of the world. She must bring her body to the built environment, with workarounds, in dozens of ways every day, and the qualities of that interaction, body meeting world, are what render her disabled. She finds, too, that disabled as a descriptor connects her experience to other people with bodies that don't easily match the built world, bodies both like and utterly unlike hers. It's a subtlety that my nondisabled students had to consider at length to understand, and that my students with disabilities recognized in them‑ selves, whether visibly or not. But the unexpected language guided our unexpected project. The task in front of us would not be a tool for assist‑ ing Amanda's body with the room. It would be the opposite--a tool for bringing the room, provisionally, to Amanda. My students had signed up for my class expecting, quite reasonably, to use their engineering skills in a straightforward manner: designing and building prosthetics or assistive technologies for people who need them. Prosthetics or assistive technologies--tools and devices made for people whose bodies fall outside the established range of normal functioning. This would be their chance, they'd assumed, to apply all the skills they'd gathered thus far--all the mathematical equations they'd learned to run, all the fabrication practice they'd had in the wood and metal shops, all the principles of mechanics that they knew as the gorgeous underlying grammar of the physical world. In this first discussion with Amanda, their minds were already racing: Had she considered something inflatable? Or with a pop-­out frame, like a tent? Building stuff, getting their hands dirty for a good purpose--this is what they had signed on for. But they couldn't have anticipated the presence of Amanda herself. She commands the room like the experienced public speaker she is, and here she was, at ease in her own body and presenting us with this singular re‑ quest. She wanted a product that was useful, yes, but its requirements weren't just a technical list of needs. The request also came from Amanda's wishes. It arose from her imagination--from her sense that the shape of the world might, in a small way, be made more flexible. Contrary to the students' well-­meaning assumptions, it actually wasn't a prosthesis that she wanted, at least in the strict sense of a medical device. Instead, she was presenting us with an invitation to collaborate on a material object to suit a particular situation, one shared by relatively few other people: a lectern for short stature. A bespoke design for one person, at least at first glance. Excerpted from What Can a Body Do?: How We Meet the Built World by Sara Hendren All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Kirkus Book Review

A granular inquiry into a fascinating question: "Who is the world designed for?" Hendren, an artist and design researcher who teaches design for disability at the Olin College of Engineering, enthusiastically studies how both abled and disabled bodies confront the relative rigidity or flexibility of the built world and how disability derives in part by the (built) shape of the world, its rigid and scripted sense of what the body can do, and how it organizes space. "It's the interaction between the conditions of the body and the shapes of the world that make disability into a lived experience," writes the author, "and therefore a matter not only for individuals but also for societies." She dissects the prevalence of "average," its physical and moral qualities and its false projection of cultural worth. Hendren sees the world as it might flex and bend to better fit a variety of interpretations of universal ideas. It's about being adaptive, acknowledging how environments can be built to compensate for our bodily limitations or to refine our capacities. The aim, writes the author, is for "workhorse pragmatism" and "charismatic" presence. With intimacy, curiosity, and a bright sense of possibility, Hendren investigates the creation of elegantly designed prostheses from low-cost, readily available materials, devices whose social meaning does not preclude alternate possibilities of individual experience. She also considers the three-dimensionality of sign language and its distinct sensory ecology. Most pointedly, perhaps, the author investigates the concept of dependency. "Dependency and the care it requires," she writes, "may be the most distilled definition of disability and also the most universal. Some scholars claim that disability may well be 'the fundamental of human embodiment.' The fundamental aspect? What a notion--that the universalizing experience of disability, states of dimensional dependence from our infancy through the end of life, might be the central fact of having a body, or rather being a body." A nimble exploration of the ways our diverse bodies interact with the world around us. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.