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

A disabled person, caught up at odds with the mechanized and economic tempo of life, isn’t merely apologizing for lateness. That person is diagnosing not the slowness of a body but the unyielding, ossified containers for quick and efficient productivity—the expected time that life will take, life for everyone.

Misfitting encompasses not just the shape of her body, but the shape of the world, too, together and also working against one another—peg and hole mutually at odds, as the saying suggests, and then perhaps arriving at other, creative ways to work in something like concert.

Designers work from what’s called a brief—a challenge presented to them by a client or collaborator with a more or less straightforward goal. It’s a description of what’s required at the end of the collaboration: a building, a playground, or a product, for example.

One is that while the dominant model of universal design has disability at its center, the very success of the innovations it generates tends to obscure their origin stories, as in the case of the OXO peeler. That success erases the very real, ongoing barriers to an adaptive, flexible world for disabled people. Universal design also tends to stoke

How much do we organize around our academic or professional training, versus our social and behavioral growth and our wider connections to our communities?

The medical field . . . has a long tradition of describing disability in reference to time,” writes disability scholar Alison Kafer. “‘Chronic’ fatigue, ‘intermittent’ symptoms, and ‘constant’ pain are each ways of . . . describ[ing] disability in terms of duration.” Time is everywhere in disability language, writes Kafer: “‘Frequency,’ ‘incidence,

A social model of disability, by contrast, invites you to widen the scenario from the body itself to include the stuff around it: the tools and furniture and classrooms and sidewalks that make it possible or impossible for the body, however configured, to do its tasks, and the larger structures of institutions and economies that make human flourish

The OMA group studied desire lines and used them to plan the campus center, unified by a long single roof. The building wasn’t so much a new creation as an observation of extant use: it effectively enclosed the pathways and connections between activities on campus that were already established.

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