the idea of DeafSpace isn’t so much about the features—what the design looks like—but instead about the qualities of attention that DeafSpace practices as its process of design. The granular, intimate details that make up the patterns of culture and communication happening outside the normative human sensorium are an invitation: to look closely at

It’s the right extension of the drawer pull that meets her body where it is, rather than a cumbersome attempt to restore her body to “normal” function that only succeeds in slowing her down.

When sidewalks and streets are built for some bodies and not for others at the scale of infrastructure, they create what political scientists Clarissa Rile Hayward and Todd Swanstrom call “thick injustice”—inequities within urban structures that are “deep and densely concentrated, as well as opaque and relatively intractable.”

Physicist Carlo Rovelli writes that the nature of time is so hard to characterize that it’s more accurate to call it an event rather than a structure, “more like a kiss than a stone.” All physicists will tell you the same: that time is a slippery thing appearing every day in the guise of the exacting clock, unable to yield its measures for us, “wai

Action settings are not defined by an architectural style; they arise from a combination of our personal experience, our relationships to others who are present, the physical features of the envelope around us, and the patterns of activities that take place there.

The request also came from Amanda’s wishes. It arose from her imagination—from her sense that the shape of the world might, in a small way, be made more flexible.

Crucially, this population was distinguished from the broader population of the disabled. In general, the model of disability, then and now, was one of deficit: the body as subject to “handicaps” that rendered it weak and dependent. But in the case of wounded veterans, the sense was that they, as people—and the economic power they represented in th

Hayward and Swanstrom argue that when injustice is tied up with the physical spaces of cities and the policies that create them, it becomes “difficult to assign responsibility for it—and hence difficult to change.” That’s why the curb cut’s history—a successful “editing” of the built environment that arrived via mandate of federal law—is so impress

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