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

Rather than thinking about disability only as a problem to solve, we might engage our wonder, letting “what if” questions grab and hold our attention for a moment, making us rethink what a body can do. Designed things can bring us that bit of productive uncertainty if we let them. They cast new light on the inherited rigidity of normal in a narrow

Assistance, dependence, vulnerability: these embodied experiences have the dignity of the truly human about them. They create networks of caregiving that sustain us all.

Every weary realist impulse inside us resists it. But possibilities are “what if” questions, the nourishment we get from being jolted awake by seeing the possible world made new, in tiny gestures or in big ones. By placing the otherwise in front of us, posing altered realities in concrete objects, Greene observed, works of art can “evoke an intimat

a term coined and an idea practiced by an industrial designer and artist at MIT named Krzysztof Wodiczko who later became my mentor. Interrogative design—making things not only for solving problems, but to ask questions.

He needs a world with a robust countervailing understanding of personhood and contribution and community in it, human values that are alive and operational outside the logic of the market and its insistent clock. He needs it, and so do the rest of us.

Never mind the noise of popular culture, with its stories of personal “victory” over disability, all the spotlight on individuals who bravely go on “despite” their body’s shortcomings. Crip time is something else entirely. It suggests that the clock may be every bit as much the culprit in the mismatch between a life like Graham’s and the world, not

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

Economic productivity—a life performed in normative, regulated time—is still the unquestioned and overwhelmingly dominant metric for human worth. This means-and-ends matter is a central question for all of us: What future goods should we hope for, for ourselves and the children in our lives, and what are the mechanisms that will foster those goods?

For people with intellectual disabilities, Trent writes, the means of care—segregated or inclusive classrooms, institutions or group home residences—has so often been collapsed to become the unquestioned end in itself, because the larger assumption remains unexamined.