Sara Hendren

A fascinating and provocative new way of looking at the things we use and the spaces we inhabit, and a call to imagine a better-designed world for us all. Furniture and tools, kitchens and campuses and city streets—nearly everything human beings make and use is assistive technology, meant to bridge the gap between body and world. Yet unless, or until, a misfit between our own body and the world is acute enough to be understood as disability, we may never stop to consider—or reconsider—the hidden assumptions on which our everyday environment is built. In a series of vivid stories drawn from the lived experience of disability and the ideas and innovations that have emerged from it—from cyborg arms to customizable cardboard chairs to deaf architecture —Sara Hendren invites us to rethink the things and settings we live with. What might assistance based on the body’s stunning capacity for adaptation—rather than a rigid insistence on “normalcy”—look like? Can we foster interdependent, not just independent, living? How do we creatively engineer public spaces that allow us all to navigate our common terrain? By rendering familiar objects and environments newly strange and wondrous, What Can a Body Do? helps us imagine a future that will better meet the extraordinary range of our collective needs and desires.

How We Meet the Built World

What Can a Body Do?

Karolina

But the habit of statistical thinking, broadly applied, creates a distancing effect, obscuring the specificities that also matter. Social scientists themselves call this the aggregative fallacy-erroneously assuming that what's characteristically true for a group should be inevitably true for any given individual in that group.

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.

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