INTRODUCTION: WHO IS THE BUILT WORLD BUILT FOR? Every day every body is at odds with the built environment. Bodies come up against stairs and sinks and subway platforms, sometimes with ease and grace and sometimes blundering and awkward, over hurdles, even in a sudden clash. All the jostling around doorways and furniture, all the hustling down the crowded sidewalk--it would be a vast and endless choreography, a dance of one multiplied by millions, if you could see us all from above. How we meet the built environment depends on both bodies and worlds, and no one understands this more than Amanda, who came to my suburban college campus outside Boston on a frigid day in January. She was one of the first guests invited to collaborate with a cohort of two dozen engineering students who''d signed up for my class in design that semester. Amanda is an art historian and a curator of contemporary art. She is Australian by birth and still speaks in the swinging lilt of her native accent, even as a longtime transplant to Southern California. She has a comfortably professorial air, at ease in the front of the room in the geometric clothing that''s favored by the gallery set, and she''s also a Little Person.
Amanda has a form of dwarfism, so her stature, at just over four feet tall, is shaped outside the standard range of average heights for humans. Walking into my classroom as a guest, she could have been preparing to lecture my students on our shared subject: disability that''s made evident and palpable in design. Her entrance to an unremarkable college classroom is a whole curriculum unto itself, because her presence has a way of casting the surrounding environment into stark relief, making some of us pause and really see it, as if for the first time: the dimensions of the space, the heights of the light switches and various media outlets, the sizes of our tables and chairs. Amanda arrived, laptop in tow, and walked my students through a visual overview of her work as a curator, pointing to slides as she talked to them about all the ways she works with artists and museums to bring an exhibition to life. She told us how she''d installed one contemporary photography show at a lower wall height than standard--making it more accessible to Little People but also to wheelchair users and to children. She invited the students'' many questions about how she presents her work, but also about her daily life and her experience of her body in the world, because she wasn''t just a guest lecturer. Amanda was with us because she had an idea, a proposal for all of us to take up together as a project--she, together with me and my eager young engineering students. She had come to ask us to design and build with her a piece of furniture, a tool that would address some of the specific features and requirements of her profession and her body: a lectern, for giving talks and for welcoming audiences to her museum shows.
A lectern, it has to be said, is so often just the architecture for a lot of hot air--that tap-tapping on the microphone that careens into feedback before settling in for the drone of voices warming to their themes and standing between you and lunch. It plays such a sturdy supporting role in so many formalized rituals--commencements, sales pitches, seminars, sermons--that, at a glance, it hardly seems worth remarking on. Think how many lecterns there are, just standing around in anticipation in the world''s many hotel conference rooms and auditoriums, generic models covered in wood veneer, all more or less alike, a nondescript part of the background. Except: a lectern is also a blunt announcement, carried in the shape of an object, about who''s expected to be standing behind it. A lectern assumes a world where everything is created for people whose stature ranges from just over five feet and up. Amanda wanted a lectern at her scale. She wanted to be able to do the speaking her job entailed without a device that required her to enact the repeated awkwardness of bringing her body to the dimensions of a room at odds with her physicality, some structure behind an ordinary lectern. "Typically, it would be some kind of little pedestal or something, right?" she told us.
It was an accommodation she''d made do with for much of her life, but she didn''t want to do that anymore. She wanted a more flexible design. To present her master''s thesis in graduate school, she''d commissioned a wooden model on wheels; it was gratifying for that event but it was heavy, not really portable. She''d come to our class for a new version entirely, a lectern that had to do more than stand at the correct height. She wanted to take it with her when she traveled for work, so it had to be built in such a way that it would easily fold to a flat shape, and then open back up in elegant and simple steps. It had to be lightweight for easy carrying, spacious enough to hold her notes, robust enough to support her laptop and a bottle of water and hold up under repeated use. Nothing even close was available for purchase. Amanda would say she is disabled--not differently abled, not specially challenged, or any other similar variation.
Like many people in the disability community, she would use that term by choice, preferring it even to "person with dwarfism." For her, "disabled" is not a derisive word. Amanda would say very plainly that she lives with the disabling conditions of the world. She must bring her body to the built environment, with workarounds, in dozens of ways every day, and the qualities of that interaction, body meeting world, are what render her disabled. She finds, too, that "disabled" as a descriptor connects her experience to other people with bodies that don''t easily match the built world, bodies both like and utterly unlike hers. It''s a subtlety that my nondisabled students had to consider at length to understand, and that my students with disabilities recognized in themselves, whether visibly or not. But the unexpected language guided our unexpected project. The task in front of us would not be a tool for assisting Amanda''s body with the room.
It would be the opposite--a tool for bringing the room, provisionally, to Amanda. My students had signed up for my class expecting, quite reasonably, to use their engineering skills in a straightforward manner: designing and building prosthetics or assistive technologies for people who need them. Prosthetics or assistive technologies--tools and devices made for people whose bodies fall outside the established range of normal functioning. This would be their chance, they''d assumed, to apply all the skills they''d gathered thus far--all the mathematical equations they''d learned to run, all the fabrication practice they''d had in the wood and metal shops, all the principles of mechanics that they knew as the gorgeous underlying grammar of the physical world. In this very first discussion with Amanda, their minds were already racing: Had she considered something inflatable? Or with a pop-out frame, like a tent? Building stuff, getting their hands dirty for a good purpose--this is what they had signed on for. But they couldn''t have anticipated the presence of Amanda herself. She commands the room like the experienced public speaker she is, and here she was, at ease in her own body and presenting us with this singular request. She wanted a product that was useful, yes, but its requirements weren''t just a technical list of needs.
The request also came from Amanda''s wishes. It arose from her imagination and her sense that the shape of the world might, in a small way, be made more flexible. Contrary to the students'' well-meaning assumptions, it actually wasn''t a prosthesis that she wanted, at least in the strict sense of a medical device. Instead, she was presenting us with an invitation to collaborate on a material object to suit a very particular situation, one shared by relatively few other people: a lectern for short stature. A bespoke design for one person, at least at first glance. 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. You can call the designer''s task a "problem" to solve if you want, and plenty of people do.
But tackling design as a matter of problems misses much of the point. At its best, a brief is packed with questions that can be addressed by any number of methods. A brief isn''t just a recipe-style checklist. It''s a horizon, an imagined end result, and an invitation for working toward that end, with a high degree of openness as to how the work gets done. That openness to interpretation can be an uneasy experience, but it''s this kind of generative encounter that I actively seek to set up for my engineering students. When the work of a design team begins, across messy tables strewn with sketches and coffee cups, amid the building and the talking, there''s a challenge before us, and there are lots of roads we could take to get there. We have practical and aesthetic choices to make. Which way is the best way to make an object that functions but one that also counts , one that can elicit a story bigger than its parts? How will the object work, but also: Why will it matter? And where shall we begin? Design professionals, drawing on several fields of expertise, say that design should address a mix of what historian John Heskett summarizes as "utility and significance.
" On the surface, that''s an effectively succinct and even commonsense way of saying that the stuff in our everyday lives should 1) exhibit a workhorse pr.