What Can a Body Do?: How We Meet the Built World

A use-centered lens recasts the meaning of prosthetics when they land in our own lives, compelling us to think both about the material of the object and about the real wonder that’s happening with all replacement parts: the wonder of human adaptation.

world. In a purely medical model, the body is the location of impairment, which suggests that the person with the impaired body bears the responsibility for it—for telling a story of coping, or surviving, or overcoming, or any number of other possibilities, all of which require the individual person to contend with a personal condition.

The condition of disability is present whenever a body finds itself in what scholar Rosemarie Garland-Thomson has called a pointed “misfit” relationship with the world—not the melodrama of a tragedy to overcome, not merely a “defect” of the flesh, but a misfit: a disharmony that runs both ways, body to world and back.

Cosmopolitan localism unites small practices and communities to a connected, globalized network for sharing ideas.

Amanda was enacting a question and teaching us to ask it also: Who is the world designed for?

Design makes possible or impossible the means of practical use, but it is also a pointed commentary on the meaning of bodies that move through spaces. A city with only hard-angle ups-and-downs, curbs, and steps to all its doors and entrances is a city that assumes a strong ambulatory body, unencumbered by injury of any kind, unaccompanied by an old

“At first I tried to think about fully automating the task,” he said to me, hoisting Felix onto the table. A diaper-changing robot! But Melissa had wisely reminded him that diaper time wasn’t just a task; it’s also a moment of parent-child connection.

Physicist Carlo Rovelli writes that the nature of time is so hard to characterize that it’s more accurate to call it an event rather than a structure, “more like a kiss than a stone.” All physicists will tell you the same: that time is a slippery thing appearing every day in the guise of the exacting clock, unable to yield its measures for us, “wai

Even in these temporary states of change, it’s easy to see only loss and diminishment, or to imagine that only narrowly defined replacement parts would answer our body’s extended needs. But when the idea of wholesale replaceability reveals its limitations, what else is out there for the body in flux?