Sublime

Amanda was enacting a question and teaching us to ask it also: Who is the world designed for?

Disability is too interesting to have to decide between pure practicality and raw beauty. Misfit states beg for art and engineering and design. It was design that allowed me to insist on a world that included ordinary stuff that works, but also stuff that sings. Utility and significance, solutions and questions, held open.

So it’s easy for my students to conceive of their task with engineering at the center, creating tools that they feel sure will solve problems—that will remedy broken or deficient bodies, that may very nearly save people’s lives—that seem, by implication, capable of forestalling death itself.

The tools we use, and the environments in which we move, are built to compensate for our bodily limitations or to refine our capacities:

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.

A body—any body—will take its cues, bend the available resources, and invent its being with the matter around it.

Design calls for all of those things together: trade-offs and opportunities for mixing utility and significance.