Intro: Who is the built world built for?

• But on day the "why" arises, and everything begins in that weariness tinged with amazement. — Albert Camus
• "Design calls for all [these] things together: trade-offs and opportunities for mixing utility and significance. It's a mix that's hard to get right." (8)
• The idea of a normal body, comparing statistics among a population, is fairly recent: only from the 1840s
  • Leads to aggregative fallacy: assuming what's characteristic of a group is true for any given individual in the group
  • Legacy of common → natural → right; normal as a paradoxical ideal
  • Ironic, then, that ~1 billion people classify as disabled! A common part of life.
• Ability/disability are also produced by flexibility/rigidity oh the built world— disability as an interaction, a societal concept, misfitting.

Limb: Finding the body's infinite adaptability and replacing the things that matter.

• Donna Haraway → "Late 20th c machines have made thoroughly ambiguous the difference between natural and artificial, mind and body, self-developing and externally designed... Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert."
• Designing a high-tech prosthetic that can theoretically, someday, do everything vs many small "life hacks" to help someone accomplish functional and desired every day tasks right away— opening a jar, writing a letter, changing a diaper

Chair: Is a better world designed one-for-all or all-for-one?

• Rather than people designing chairs "in response to the realities of the body," such as its needs for movement and support, "the industrialized body has devolved in its needs a d succumbed to chairs." (76)
• Similar superficial trends in much of industrial design— not keeping the actual user in mind, let alone people with disabilities.
• In response: universal design— "designers gain surprising and powerful insights from looking closely not at norms and average... but instead at people and scenarios at the margins of experience, so-called extreme users." (82)
  • Ex. Aeron chairs, OXO Good Grips line, easy-to-flip switches, closed captioning
  • Concept introduced by wheelchair user Ronald Mace
  • Principles = simple & intuitive use, perceptible information, low physical effort, tolerance for error
  • Making the right design for specific people in specific contexts, not compromising

Room: Rethinking "independent living."

• Ex. Architectural design of DeafSpace to flow of communication by sign language & movement without auditory cues— colors contrasting with skin tone, gently curved halls, low walls (no need for sound barriers), wider hallways
  • → architecture built around the ways relationships are mediated by language, how buildings can "help do the metaphysical work of what... Heidegger called true dwelling—a social triad made of people, one to another and in their environments." (107)

Street: Making space truly common.

• Each person, each body → constant stream of choices in what we wear, how we move, etc. to manage the sensory world and create our habitable personal universe...
• For some with sensory processing disorders, more explicit/externalised methods needed to meet the "fundamentally human need: to build bridges that temporarily edit the shapes, or sounds, or sights of the world." (141)
• In remodelling if Illinois Institute of Tech, first captured desire lines and lived habits of students, then "enclosed" the space to create a campus center → human-centered design
• "Walking is a mode of making the world as well as being in it." — Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust
• De Hogeweyk nursing home for pts with dementia in the Netherlands— designed with not just health but also life's pleasures, favourable surroundings in mind
  • Environment designed to maintain orientation and calm → less agitation, fear → less use of drugs

Clock: When the clock is the keeper of our days, what pace of life is fast enough?

• Singapore's Green Card system— senior citizens can scan card at intersections to add time to crosswalk time
• Pace of schools and workplaces calibrated to the average, able-bodied productivity, as ideal of speed and efficiency
• How to design for other time scales?
  • Small businesses run by of employing people with intellectual disabilities
  • Hybrid college programs, curriculums including life skills
  • Programs where they are also on the giving end
• Danielle Allen → education is "causal force" behind democracy; ideal result is people with participatory readiness: civic agency, ability to "deliberate... about desirable futures." (195)

Epilogue: Making assistance visible.

• Interrogative design: making things not just for solving problems, but to ask questions
  • Ex. graffiti/street art
  • Many of the cases discussed = examples of "what if" questions in material form— Maxine Greene's social imagination
    • Greene → "shared power of art in a three-way exchange that happens when two or more people gather and deliberate about some expressive artifact in front of them" (203); results in "conscious possibility," "thinking of things as if they could be otherwise."
    • "Our social imagination is the capacity to invent visions of what should be and what might be in our deficient society..."