What can a body do? : how we meet the built world / Sara Hendren.
Publisher: New York : Riverhead Books, 2020Copyright date: ©2020Edition: First hardcoverDescription: 228 pages : illustrations ; 24 cmContent type: text Media type: unmediated Carrier type: volume001: 022070691ISBN: 9780735220003; 073522000XSubject(s): Design -- Human factors | Barrier-free designDDC classification: 745.4 | 729.087 LOC classification: NK1520 | .H45 2020Summary: "A fascinating and provocative new way of looking at the things we use and the spaces we inhabit, and an invitation to imagine a better-designed world for us all"-- Provided by publisher.Item type | Current library | Collection | Call number | Copy number | Status | Date due | Barcode | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Book | MAIN LIBRARY Book | 745.4 HEN (Browse shelf(Opens below)) | 1 | Available | 113725 |
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.
Includes bibliographical references (pages 223-228).
"A fascinating and provocative new way of looking at the things we use and the spaces we inhabit, and an invitation to imagine a better-designed world for us all"-- Provided by publisher.
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
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.There are no comments on this title.