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

Quetelet’s legacy was to make the average, what started as unremarkable by definition, into a paradoxical ideal. When the average is laden with cultural worth, everything changes: what was common began to be seen as what was “natural,” and what was “natural” came to be seen as right.

When it comes to truly urgent questions, Manzini writes, “radical innovations generate answers that change the questions themselves.”

These residents face some key choices about when their needs for assistance, mediated by either technology or caregiving, exceed their ideas about the kinds of autonomy they need to feel that their lives are worth living. I asked Steve about the relationships with caregivers there. “Most people, myself included, want to do for themselves as long as

the stuff in our everyday lives should (1) exhibit a workhorse pragmatism that’s (2) simultaneously packed with expressive qualities.

Niko’s chair suggests an alternative model: local collaboration on the specific interpretation of a universal idea—chair—relying on low-tech materials that are available almost anywhere.

Each of us has to decide, insofar as we can, whether to let the economic clock dictate our minutes and hours, and how we’ll know if we measure up.

These low-tech adaptations were the evidence of deep attention and human care, to an advanced degree that’s as intimate as care can be. A mixed ecology of life with machines and care is what makes the independence here work.

In the pursuit of utility and significance, design can include making something new, but it can also include unmaking the world as it is, or perhaps remaking it, with parts and systems alike.

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