Sneak Peek: Disability Design

Josh Halstead: Are we understanding disability through a medical or a social lens?  Through the medical lens which is the most common if we're coming into disability without much exposure to disability communities or disability culture is to think about disabled bodies as problematic, bodies that are in need of fixing.  So oftentimes with design groups that are thinking about disability-related design projects through a medical lens, the design projects seek to kind of remedy or fix someone's body, and that's not necessarily a good or bad thing, but it is a specific direction.  So because the cultural understanding of disability has been highly and historically medicalized that folks-- even if they're well intentioned-- default to disabled bodies are themselves problematic. Moving away from that means that we're recognizing disabled bodies as just part of human diversity, and if disability isn't located in the body but is instead located at the intersection of bodies and spaces it really gives a lot of agency to designers to unmake and remake environments.

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