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Winner of the 2021 Science in Society Journalism Book Prize
A fascinating and provocative new way of looking at the things we use and the spaces we inhabit, and a call to imagine a better-designed world for us all.
Furniture and tools, kitchens and campuses and city streets—nearly everything human beings make and use is assistive technology, meant to bridge the gap between body and world. Yet unless, or until, a misfit between our own body and the world is acute enough to be understood as disability, we may never stop to consider—or reconsider—the hidden assumptions on which our everyday environment is built.
In a series of vivid stories drawn from the lived experience of disability and the ideas and innovations that have emerged from it—from cyborg arms to customizable cardboard chairs to deaf architecture—Sara Hendren invites us to rethink the things and settings we live with. What might assistance based on the body’s stunning capacity for adaptation—rather than a rigid insistence on “normalcy”—look like? Can we foster interdependent, not just independent, living? How do we creatively engineer public spaces that allow us all to navigate our common terrain? By rendering familiar objects and environments newly strange and wondrous, What Can a Body Do? helps us imagine a future that will better meet the extraordinary range of our collective needs and desires.
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
August 18, 2020 -
Formats
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Kindle Book
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OverDrive Read
- ISBN: 9780735220027
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EPUB ebook
- ISBN: 9780735220027
- File size: 5986 KB
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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Starred review from June 1, 2020
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(2020) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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