There’s much more detail to come on this, but you can see here some images from Slope : Intercept’s most recent iteration, a collaboration with dancer Alice Sheppard. MediaCity Seoul invited me last year to design some ramps for the biennial that opened last month (September ’16), and in the meanwhile, my lab worked with …
Next Thursday and Friday, August 14 and 15, I’ll be back in Toronto with Interaccess and the Inclusive Design Research Centre, to give a lecture and run a workshop and panel based on my ongoing project, Slope : Intercept. All of it is free and open to the public, held at 49 McCaul Street, so …
Liz Jackson writes about her experience as a cane user, among other things, on her blog: The Girl With the Purple Cane. She pointed me to this particularly strong post about the ways her cane functions not just as a technological object, but a cultural one too. Like many people, she doesn’t need this piece of …
Artist and researcher Sarah Ross’s Archisuits are a hilarious and pointed look at soft bodies in hard spaces—all the ways the built environment is a mismatch for human needs. At times, the ill fits seem matter-of-fact: just a look at the negative volumes of space that indicate various built surfaces that are more or less amenable to …
Artist team Llobet-Pons Jasmina Llobet and Luis Fernandez Pons created this installation they call No One Wins: a basketball board with hoops at multiple heights. This is one of those charmingly accidental universal designs—suited for players with all kinds of bodies and skill sets. It’s permanently installed in Teshima, Japan. Via designboom and on the Llobet-Pons web site.
From my post over at Medium: All Technology is Assistive Technology—6 dispositions for designers on disability: “Making a persistent, overt distinction about ‘assistive tech’ embodies the second-tier do-gooderism and banality that still dominate design work targeted toward ‘special needs.’ ‘Assistive technology’ implies a separate species of tools designed exclusively for those people with a rather narrow …
If you’re receiving this email, you signed on for updates from Abler—notifications on new posts and such. I’m about to make Abler a searchable archive over at the nearly-completely-done Sara Hendren site. But I’m reconfiguring it in a couple of ways, and I wanted to hear how it might be useful to people as a … Continue reading
Friends, I’m so happy to say that my first book is under contract with Riverhead/Penguin! I’m just thrilled—I can’t even tell you. The book is about the unexpected places where disability is at the heart of design, from everyday household objects to architecture, street and city planning, pointing to larger systems design questions at the end. It … Continue reading
I’m sitting on the thesis committee for a graduate student in biomechatronics—a PhD project that will be entirely technical. This student reached out to me to ask about placing engineering for disability in a larger social context, and I’m glad for the opportunity to think about what’s an essential primer in disability studies, appropriate for … Continue reading
Finally live: aplusa.org! A + A is the Adaptation and Ability Group, my lab at Olin College. It’s the first of a three-in-one site designed to keep distinct the work of the lab, the ongoing Abler archive that points to other people’s work, and then my own site for personal projects, essays, and the like. … Continue reading
Readers, there’s a brand new site coming soon: a 3-part site, with lots of overdue documentation of new work, my lab, teaching, writing. The featured image is from a collaboration with Alice Sheppard that I’ll tell you all about. I can’t wait! But for now—a commencement speech I gave for Olin’s 2016 class. My first: … Continue reading
I’m so pleased my talk at Eyeo is now online, with closed captions available, and another version with audio description. Eyeo folks are super to work with, and I’m grateful to have had the chance to look back at my last ten years of work and identify the big themes and turning points. I tell … Continue reading
This fall’s version of Investigating Normal will include several dream collaborators: Lacy Gillotti of NEADS, a service dog training organization, Alex Geller of Fathom Info, with whom we’ll be exploring disability and the school-to-prison pipeline, Mel Chua, a postdoc at Olin who is deaf, has spent her life “passing” as hearing, and will be getting a cochlear … Continue reading
