Sublime

So, the point, the deliverable, the practicality of my work is not to offer concrete solutions, or stepped improvement plans. It is to offer an invitation in to a world that does not sit still, and encourage an increase in sensitivity to the complexity in all of its glory and gore.

The group canvassed the entire campus, looking for clues old and new about how deaf people already use architecture in an adaptive way. They organized their findings by a series of categories: (1) sensory reach, (2) space and proximity, (3) mobility and proximity, (4) light and color, and (5) acoustics.

D-Rev and Embrace,

Regardless of the specific physical circumstances, which have a big role in determining which features of life are possible and which are, or will become, intractable, the explicit or implicit debate among families confronting aging is about what can be done independently, by which many nondisabled people mean by themselves.

It’s not the specific materials or techniques that are used that matter, Manzini emphasizes, so much as the collaborative associations that are formed when universal challenges are considered in a local and unusual way: the agency that comes from reformulating a problem.

from an unspoken but persistent fear: that a “smart” arm like Mike’s, with its mechanical cleverness, suggests a comparative inferiority of the human body, and by implication, a fundamental passivity in the human being.

The most effective

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.

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.