An extraordinary article on designing for the "disabled," or assistive technology. Rather than posit a norm for design based on a modern, standardized expectation of the body, the author begins with the premise that all design is really "assistive;" for example, headphones enable all to better access sound. The author then creates assistive standards for all areas of design tech, because: "After all, how cultures define, think about, and treat those who currently have marked disabilities is how all its future citizens may well be perceived if and when those who are able-bodied become less abled than they are now: by age, degeneration, or some sudden—or gradual—change in physical or mental capacities. All people, over the course of their lives, traffic between times of relative independence and dependence. So the questions cultures ask, the technologies they invent, and how those technologies broadcast a message about their users—weakness and strength, agency and passivity—are important ones. And they’re not just questions for scientists and policy-makers; they’re aesthetic questions too. Second, in many cultures—and certainly in the US—a pervasive, near-obsession with averages and statistical norms about bodies and capacities has become a naturalized form of describing both individuals and populations. But this way of measuring people and populations is historically very recent, and worth reconsidering. Disability studies scholar Lennard Davis writes that “before the nineteenth century in Western culture, the concept of the ‘ideal’ was the regnant paradigm in relation to all bodies, so all bodies were less than ideal. The introduction of the concept of normality, however, created an imperative to be normal, as the eugenics movement proved by enshrining the bell curve (also known as the ‘normal curve’) as the umbrella under whose demanding peak we should all stand. With the introduction of the bell curve came the notion of ‘abnormal’ bodies. And the rest is history.” Bending Over Backwards: Disability, Dismodernism, and other Difficult Positions
Posted on: Sat, 28 Sep 2013 00:20:39 +0000