A World of Possibility

The story of disability is, in part, about challenging expectations and assumptions. The same can be said for the work of artist and researcher Sara Hendren. With the young engineers in her Adaptation + Ability Group at Olin College of Engineering in Massachusetts, and in her own projects, Hendren advances creations that are both functional and gently provocative. Among them are a more dynamic version of the blue-and-white wheelchair-user symbol and a collapsible “Alterpodium” for a speaker who has dwarfism. In her new book, What Can a Body Do?, she examines how design can help make the world better suit more of us.

You describe your approach to design as a “social practice.” What does that mean to you?

It is about transparency in the process and an expanded canopy for who does the design work and where good ideas come from. There are people with disabilities who are not looking for the next bionic limb; they might be looking for something much more modest. The social practice comes alive when someone with a different question—not an expert rehabilitation engineering scientist, but a person with a non-normative body—comes into the room. A desirable world is built in lots of different ways.

The products designed in your lab are often not for mass use. Do you hope they have a different kind of impact?

Design has been described as a meeting in the middle between art and engineering—where art is the realm of questions and helping us reframe our world, and engineering is about functionality, efficiency, speed, and so on. I’m committed to doing both. The lectern that lab members created for Amanda Cachia, an art historian and curator who is also a dwarf activist, had to hew to all kinds of engineering constraints. But it’s also a suggestion of a world that might be more flexible for her. When she drives a car or shops at a grocery store, she’s coming to the world. With that lectern, the world moved its structures a little bit toward her.

Why is flexibility important when thinking about disability?

Think about the other ways that the world has been altered. The massive roll-out of curb cuts was a huge infrastructural change to the way that sidewalks meet the street. That was the built environment making room for wheelchairs and wheeled luggage and folks using walkers and bikes. Nobody could have imagined that we would force the hard concrete of the world to shift its shape a little bit, and yet it did. What art has always done is to reconfigure the little connections in our brain to go, “Have I accepted the world as it is too easily?”

Is the disability-studies concept of a “misfit” between non-normative bodies and the world relevant for all of us?

Misfitting arrives for everyone in the span of a life. You enter into states of misfitting: You use crutches for eight weeks or you have a prolonged bout of depression. When that arrives, I want people to say, I have a rich variety of characters in my head suggesting the challenge might not be just mine to solve. The concerns of disability are collective ones.

You collaborated on a revision of the International Symbol of Access, featuring a more dynamic wheelchair user. What inspired you?

After the birth of my son, who has Down syndrome, I was on the receiving end, with him, of all these expectations and stereotypes about who he is and would become based on his genetic status. So many people could not see him as a person first. As a result, the symbol started to become more meaningful to me. The conversation about the International Symbol of Access is always about, like, who’s cheating by having a fraudulent sticker on their car. People have such small imaginations with regard to what it’s really about. When I started saying, “I’m paying attention now to isotypes that are interesting and dynamic, and this symbol is not,” people would ask to see the original one for comparison, after seeing the new design. Often they hadn’t really looked at it, ever. But side by side, they understood.

What was your aim in designing a kit of ramps for both wheelchair-users and skateboarders?

I was trying to get people to force together a weird Venn diagram between skateboarding and wheelchair use in the city, because people never think of those two things together. They’re both wheeled mobile-gear users, but skateboarders are read as doing this rebellious, athletically virtuosic thing, and wheelchair use is thought of as a kind of sad version of not walking, like a medical tragedy. And I thought, if you could force the Venn diagram via a built object, would you ask yourself whether wheelchair use could be balletic and playful in the same way that skateboarding is?

You’ve said that design can draw on the particular assets of people with disabilities. How have you tried to do that?

Alice Sheppard, a wheelchair dancer who approached us about making ramps for dancing, was not looking for a way to overcome the wheelchair. The ramp and her wheelchair allow her to do this incredibly graceful kind of glissando in her dancing. That’s not available to walking people. And there were moments where I could tell the students wondered, “Would it be OK for me to do that?” They were jealous, in other words, of that liquid motion. There are other experiences that are not available to ambulatory people or to hearing people, and for me, reframing the entire situation is the beginning of a better way of seeing each other.