EP 115: Designing the Built World for our Bodies | Sara Hendren
In this episode, we talk about what a body can do and how we meet the built world.
Sara Hendren is an artist, design researcher, writer, professor at Olin College of Engineering, and the creator and host of the Sketch Model podcast. She is the author of What Can A Body Do? How We Meet the Built World, published by Riverhead/Penguin Random House. It was chosen as a Best Book of the Year by NPR and won the Science in Society Journalism book prize.
Sara is a humanist in tech. Her work of 2010-2020 includes collaborative public art, social design, and writing that reframes the human body and technology. Her work has been exhibited on the White House lawn under the Obama administration, at the Victoria & Albert Museum, the DOX Centre for Contemporary Art, The Vitra Design Museum, the Seoul Museum of Art, among other venues, and is held in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Cooper Hewitt Museum. She has been a National Fellow at the New America think tank, and her work has been supported by an NEH Public Scholar grant, residencies at Yaddo and the Carey Institute for Global Good, and an Artist Fellowship from the Massachusetts Cultural Council. At Olin, she was also the Principal Investigator on a four-year initiative to bring more arts experiences to engineering students and faculty, supported by the Mellon Foundation.
Episode mentions and links:
When The World Isn't Designed For Our Bodies via NYT
Restaurants Sara would take you to: Clover Food Lab
Follow Sara: LinkedIn
Episode Reflection
I had the same mind-blowing moment this week hearing our guest, Sara Hendren, talk about time. And specifically the concept of misfitting in time. I had never considered time as a design material in this way and now that I’ve been exposed to it, I can’t stop thinking about it! So many different common scenarios come to mind. It makes me think about situations where we give students more time to take standardized tests. Entering cultures where being “on time” is just not part of the language and how operating within a new time scale feels. I think of moments when I will stop myself from interrupting my elderly patient as they explain something to me at their own natural pace which is different from my own hurried clock. I think of times when my daughter is slowly pacing her way through the words of a new book she is reading aloud for the first time as I listen proudly. And then I think of all the challenges someone misfitting in time must face in a culture where EVERYTHING seems to require running on a minute-by-minute schedule. How might we use time as a design material to adjust time to the needs of the individual? The example Sara gave of the crosswalk was an excellent one to get the creative juices flowing. This type of time-based affordance reminds me of one of my favorite organizations, Art-Reach, and how so much of what they do to make arts accessible to more people is to consider time! I could go on all day about what Sara covers in her “Clock” chapter, but most of all I just want to thank Sara for enlightening me about the concept and opening my lens just a bit more. If you found this episode as enlightening as I did, be sure to grab her book What Can A Body Do? How We Meet the Built World.
Written by Rob Pugliese
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Bon Ku: Welcome to another episode of Design Lab. I'm your host Bon Ku. On this podcast we explore the intersection of design and health. Our guest today is Sara Hendren. She is an artist, design researcher, writer, professor at Olin College of Engineering, and the creator and host of the Sketch Model podcast. She's the author of What Can A Body Do? How We Meet The Built World. It was chosen as best book of the year by NPR and won the Science Society Journalism Book Prize. Sara is a humanist in tech. Her work includes collaborative public art, social design and writing that reframes a human body and technology. Her work has been exhibited on the White House lawn under the Obama administration at the Victoria and Albert Museum. The DLX Center for Contemporary Art, the Vitra Design Museum, the Seoul Museum of Art among other venues.
And is held in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Cooper Hewitt Design Museum. Sarah has been the national fellow at the New America Think Tank and the work has been supported by an NEH Public Scholar Grant. Residency's at Yaddo and the Cary Institute for Global Good and an artist fellowship from the Massachusetts Cultural Council. At Olin, she was the principal investigator on a four year initiative to bring more art experiences to engineering students and faculty. And that was supported by the Mellon Foundation.
You can learn more about Sara by visiting our website designlabpod.com. There you will get the show notes, links to related content. And subscribe to our newsletter. There's a link right there where you can sign up every week, our producer Rob Pugliese will send you links and show notes, right to your email inbox whenever a new episode drops. And reach out to me on Twitter at B O N K U on Instagram at D R B O N K U. We love to hear from you. We love it even more when you give us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify and on Apple Podcasts, leave us a review. We read each one of them.
Now here's my conversation with Sarah Hendren
Interview
Bon Ku: Sarah Hendron, welcome to Design Lab.
Sara Hendren: Hi Bon. It's really nice to be here. Thanks for having me.
Bon Ku: I watched a talk that you gave in Boston at MIT and I was fascinated about your career journey path cuz you studied art, but now you teach as a professor at an engineering school called Olin. And I'm curious about that path.
How did an artist end up teaching at an engineering school?
Sara Hendren: Yeah, it's still surprising to me to be honest. I mean, even though I'm in my ninth year at Olin College, I mean, and I, I try to tell my story, career path, whenever I can because I think a lot of young people who like to make things who are interested in, everything from art to design, to engineering, have lots of possible pathways to get into their work.
I mean, the very shortest version I can tell you is that I, started out in painting love expressive artifacts, you know, concrete material objects that hold ideas. I was almost an historian. I got have almost a PhD in cultural history. I left that PhD thinking, no, I wanna get back to making things.
That's something, there's something true there about myself. I had the first of my three children, Graham, who has Down Syndrome. He's 17 years old now, but after he was born, that kind of opened up the whole world of disability, but also prosthetics and the material culture of disability. So things like orthotic braces and little glasses and sensory toys and all kinds of stuff.
And again, very long story short, I went back and got an MFA at Harvard GSD in a program called Art Design in the Public Domain. And I spent those two years really tying together. Disability studies, disability politics, and prosthetics, and the engineering of prosthetics in a way that blended art and design and engineering.
What would it mean to, take the artifacts of disability, which are, which tend to be clinical hospital objects, but are also, share in common fashion, wearability, you know, and public design of all kinds. and what would it look like to teach in that way? Like a kind of deeply creative and expressive approach to, and really informed by disability studies, approach to technology and engineering.
And I thought, well, if I'm gonna really do that, I need to be in the laboratory itself. If I really care about young technical makers getting these ideas and the creativity and imagination of disability. It matters the most that I'm talking to people who are really in the technical realm, and so I ended up here at Olin and been doing that ever since.
Bon Ku: Those aren't natural bedfellows, right? Art, design and engineering. You hear design and engineering and for those who are listening who consider themselves artist or creative and are interested in that design and engineering space, I'm curious to know, was that like an obvious path to you?
Was it clear or did you run into hurdles as a as an artist getting into a different, space.
Sara Hendren: Yeah, I mean, plenty of hurdles. And I do think, I mean, it's funny, I was just giving a talk at MIT for undergraduates interested in design, and I said to them just casually at the end. How many of you shut down a part of yourself in high school that like to think about the arts, poetic, music in order to privilege this STEM thing that got you to MIT and a statistically significant number of people raise their hands.
I mean, in other words, we are sending messages to young people, including young people who are really able academic performers that they need to pick a lane, you know? a. lot of that, but it's interesting that they share something too, these domains between, okay, let's call for the sake of argument.
The arts is like, you know, this poll of expressive, autonomous, experimental, artifacts, right? That give us the poetic, the description of what it's like to be a human in the world. All the specificity of that, the subjectivity of that, the multipl. Simplicity of that. And let's say for argument's sake, on the other side, there are mass manufactured utilitarian objects, right?
There are problems to solve, and here is the most efficient, robust, fast, technically novel way to address it. But when you're a young person, if you're somebody who likes to tinker and make things like I did, . A lot of times people will say to you, oh, maybe you should be an artist, young person for lots of reasons.
You know, like, you like to make things, you should be an artist. Or they might, if you present a little differently, say, oh, you like to tinker and build things. Young person take things apart. You must wanna be an engineer. There is a kind of shared commitment, in other words, to artists and engineers in that they really care about the thing.
You can literally kick the tires up, you know, the real material, concrete, expressive. Nature of what's real about the world, you know? In other words, a dissatisfaction with the abstraction of just language and describing things and arguing bullet points and, you know, tip for tat and debate. And they go like, ah, show me.
You know, show me what you mean. But of course, they're, they proceed from different values and they, achieve different ends. But I, for me, it's like, what is disability in the world? Well, disability is complex phenomena. It is partly the mismatch between bodies in the world, the ways that bodies are infinitely variable, the sometimes degenerative nature of diseases or things that we would carry around that do have clinical implications, but it's also a rights tradition in our politics.
It's also a kind of language and culture. Think about deaf culture and all its many histories. There are hundreds of sign languages spoken all around the world. So we're talking. Human variation, sometimes medical implication, certainly a politics. talking about complex phenomena, and if you're talking about complex phenomena of any kind, you need multiple domains to address and explain and tackle that complexity.
In other words, you can't just treat disability as a merely clinical subject for which healthcare and prosthetics will do all the job. They'll do some of the job, they'll do a lot of the job. It's actually really important, but you also need this expressive realm of kind of like it's like to be a human in the world and, perceive it differently as if somebody who's deaf or somebody who uses a wheelchair, somebody who's blind, you need those stories.
You need narratives, you need expressive artifacts. You also need law and policy, and history's told and all that. So to me it's like, These are, the particular concrete artifact based sides of the same coin, which is to say, huh, what is it like to be a body in the world? Okay. What are some of the hurdles and barriers that we might solve, you know, where asked for in engineering and healthcare?
And then what are some of the most beautiful expressions of what it's like to be alive in ways that we learn from each other? Well, for that, you need the arts. And then design gets to, of course, in the, in the big, the big middle between those things.
Bon Ku: Yeah. There. So much there. I'm writing some notes, you can't see me, but, but I'm doing that. You know as a, doctor, I have a career built on human variation in our bodies, right? We, we define what is normal. Like, for example, the normal ejection fraction of a hearts like 50 to 60% and what's abnormal.
And as a doctor, I do that like all the time. Normal, abnormal, abnormal, normal. You know, your book is just so fascinating. You wrote a book that talks about a lot of these concepts, called, what A Body Can Do, how We Meet the Built World. I know it was published the first year of the Pandemic in 2020.
I highly recommend that we'll put a link, to your book in the show notes. Tell us what your book is about and what inspired you to write it?
Sara Hendren: Yeah. And let me just make the tie there. I mean, as a doctor it is your job to understand, normalcy at scale, right? Population scale. That's useful. It's useful to your patients to know, right of these, hundreds of thousands of people, which kind of conditions present as this risk factor or not.
Like we need stats to tell us something true and important about the world cause it helps us manage our risk and so on. To say nothing of like organizing cities and, epidemiology, all that stuff. The book though, proceeds from a kind of counterpart, form of, exploring disability.
And that is from the view of design, engineering, and technology, some of which is at, scale. So the history of things like curb cuts, so just the you know, the alteration of the, our cities at scale, that's just happened in the last several decades after the Americans with Disabilities Act to give us a change from that hard step down from the sidewalk to the street and give us that curb cut, just that incline plane, a ramp that makes it passable, with the wheelchair.
Bon Ku: so that's like a, a recent phenomenon that wasn't
always there when, when cities were
Sara Hendren: That's right. and from which all your listeners, no matter the state of their body benefit. So anytime they have been pushing a stroller, wheeling their luggage, temporarily using a wheelchair, they are benefiting from a refashioning, an editing really, of the built environment.
That is the legacy of, of disability insight, right? So it's not merely compliance and code and legal structures. It is all those things, that's a story where we're not. We're talking about people who are outside the norm or average, right? In the way that you
framed. and, and those people saying, actually, it's so important that we get through the built environment, people using wheelchairs, that they not be bound to homes, only, but in fact get out into the public sphere, get down the street.
And by the way, this has made a kind of architectural infrastructural legacy from which many people benefit. Same with closed captioning. There are other stories. So I tell what are often called universal design stories as part of the legacy of, of disability as insight. And I think that's something that people will miss a lot of the time.
So if they're coming to you in a medical context, they're thinking, how far outside the norm am I? And what am I to do about this discrepancy right between my body and the norm? And I'm trying to say, that's a real question, right? You're, you wanna take up with your doctor some of the time. It's also the case that if you find yourself outside the norm, you're part of something that's actually really big.
I mean, big, and generative. Big and generative and urgent. And so the whole book is about not just those big universal design stories, but you know, meeting a man with one arm and how does he kind of resolve changing his baby's diaper. You know, when his, when he has born in hand, I mean, he, he doesn't use the prosthetics that were built for him because he actually does the world one-handed and with dextrous feet and toes really quite well.
So he built himself a little $10 mechanism for changing his baby's diaper. But we also drop in on some of the most sophisticated myoelectric arm and hand prosthetics that there are. And what I'm interested in there is not making a hierarchy of like what should people want or not, but just a kind of deep fascination with all the material culture and design for disability that's happening sometimes in laboratory expertise, you know, kind of high novel, high tech, venues.
And some of it is just happening, the ordinary tinkering that people do in their labs and living rooms. And I bet there, and I tell stories of, yeah, wearable prosthetics, but also furniture, kitchen tools and architecture, interior architecture, and exterior urban planning. All of that is just to say to the reader, I bet you can locate yourself in this whole tableau. Like, People that you love, your aunt who struggled with arthritis, and then, you know, worked to build some clever adaptations in her kitchen or, a new diagnosis, for a child that, you know, and the kind of adaptation, the radical adaptation for that whole family, you know, or your aging loved one and all of the managing of not just physical manifestations of aging, but also the qualitative and the emotional.
You know, making peace with assistance and dependence. And some of those, of course, are some of the most human experiences that we can go through. And to me, what's interesting about design is that it's an index of ideas. You can both see the kind of inherited assumptions about how something came to be a world full of steps rather than ramps, for example.
But you can also see in design. The possibilities for refashioning the world. And that's what, you know, the thesis of the book really is that like people with disabilities are not actually only waiting around to be included. I mean, inclusion is really important, but they've been actually out on the forefront of navigating and adapting in the most ingenious ways.
High tech, low tech, small scale, large scale for a long time. And if you find yourself reader among them, and you will over the lifespan. , then you find yourself actually part of something really big. And that's a story that I don't find gets told that often. I mean, I find that the stories about disabilities still are either heartfelt and earnest stories of overcoming certain, despite what's condition or, kind of extraordinary feats of accomplishment or coping.
And look, all of us cope in life, but there's also forms of kinda flourishing connection, making friends with assistance. There are all these kind of invitations on offer and disability and design is kind of a portal and an entry way to see it.
Bon Ku: disability is normal, right? Like how many of us on this planet have a disability,
Sara Hendren: That's right. Yeah I meana billion by last count . Um,
Bon Ku: , one billion? 1 billion, like so like what's that 15% of the entire population of the world.
Sara Hendren: That's right. And what are we talking about? We're talking about, you know, marked forms of personal needfulness, personal and political needfulness, that is, is does the body have frailties, is it inherently social? Is it, in need of assistance at stages of the lifespan? I mean that's one kind of abstract way to distill it.
And of course the answer to those questions would have to be a resounding yes. You know, somebody for every reader here, somebody taught them with very physical supports how to walk and how to speak, and how to feed themselves. And many of us at the end of our lives will have that same kind of experience, and we would do better to spend more of the time in between. Recognizing that assistance is actually in a desirable life, you know, without romanticizing it. But that assistance is actually, there's something just deeply true about it. And so it challenges our, perhaps our myths of autonomy and kind of the control we have over our lives. But if we let it invite us to something, which is again, this big, rich heritage of knowledge and culture, and yes, the built environment.
Then actually think we get closer to flourishing than pretending as though non needfulness is the front we need to wear all the time.
Bon Ku: Can I read a quote from your book?
Sara Hendren: Sure.
Bon Ku: You say, "Ability and disability may be in part about the physical state of the body, but they are also produced by the relative flexibility or rigidity of the built world." for those who may not understand that, who don't have this appreciation for the built world and design, what does that mean?
Sara Hendren: Yeah, what? That's just another way of expressing what is a kind of foundational concept in disability rights, and that is just moving from a purely medical model. And I'd be curious how you think about this one, but.
Purely medical model of disability where you say, okay, well non normativity is a property just of the body, and we measure it by biological and medical means, and we diagnose and we treat and all that.
course, all that is, true. I mean of the way that we proceed as patients if needed, but that's a medical model of the words. Disability is just a property of one person's body. Whereas in a social model, you just widen the lens a little bit. So you say, yes, there is this body with these measurable conditions. But what a body can get done in the world is actually partly dependent on what's available.
So the stairs versus ramps is the most ready to hand example. can someone in a wheelchair get down the street? Well, it depends. It depends on if there is a hard step down or whether there's a ramp, to do that, exiting and entering. can a deaf person understand, what's going on in a tennis match, on a TV, in a restaurant?
Well, it depends. Is there captions and are they enabled? Then that's the difference between that person can read and follow along or that person cannot. Now it's like a kind of think of a Mobius strip model in your mind. What can a body do? That's the question of the book. What can a body do?
It depends. It depends partly on what's the capacities, the literal capacities of the body, and partly what's available in the built world. So every time you think about like, okay, wow, I used to be able to do this with my body. Now, I no longer can, that's a story of diminishment, but part of that is sort of like, what's available to me?
How might I tinker and, test and adapt. So here's another concrete example. Architecture for dementia is a burgeoning field Right now you probably know. and we can think of dementia as purely a biological phenomenon and we would say, okay, well we're gonna look for pharmacology, or we're looking for drugs to treat the synapses of the brain itself, the processes of the body, and a lot of that sort of quelling anxiety, that kind of thing.
All good stuff. And we wanna be looking neuros scientifically at possible cures, all of that. Meanwhile, What are we talking about in terms of what people are able to do when they're living with this condition? And architecture for dementia is about trying to give strong, placeful, vivid, concrete, reassuring signals in the shape of a room and in the shape of a nursing home and care do that same quelling of anxiety.
So, In the book, we go to the Dementia village called Hogeweyk in the Netherlands, it's had a number of imitators. And it's built like a simulacrum of a, of a small village. So everything, all the structures there have strong, what I would say in design is placefulness, meaning there's not one room that's multipurpose, and in the morning you do
gym and in the afternoon there's a lecture. No. When you go to a music room, all the walls have images of instruments and there are, really strong signals that, okay, this is where you are in space. The same with a grocery store, the same with the barbershop, the same with the theater. So there is a village there that is trying to act in part and in concert with treatment.
So we're talking about the environment making things possible that had been impossible when thought of as just a, a bonafide hospital. So, what those kinds of structures find those, those memory care centers that rely more on architecture they do find that compared to a control case, they depend less on psychotropic drugs, on the kind of pharmacological model.
And that seems to me to be a desirable outcome. Right? We don't wanna just quell symptoms. We wanna also allow people a kind of thriving and curiosity and movement, literal movement and conceptual movement through the world if we can. And how extraordinary that it might be architecture that is part of that ecosystem.
So it takes a sensitive kind of team of clinicians and also caregivers and architects to say what are the kind of surroundings that would, buffer and, and nurture and protect, both in a strong security sense, but also in a thriving sense, the condition of life at a certain point.
So the question just get kind of fractal and interesting from there, don't you think as a
Bon Ku: Yeah. Oh no. A a hundred percent. And I'm always wondering should we demand more of design and not, accept the, the status quo? Like, for example, some bad design harms us. I think of, you know, what you were saying, of us being in our chairs all day long and how a simple chair that. Harms us.
I'm a very active person. I, I do stuff that, a man my age probably shouldn't be doing, like skateboarding. And I, mountain bike and I like to do a lot of jumps. I'm an avid surfer, but what causes me actually the most pain, some chronic pain that I deal with is sitting in a chair after all day of sitting on a chair, going to meetings on Zoom, that my hamstring just starts killing me, and I'm thinking, this is so stupid.
Like I literally am involved in these sports second, like physically harm me, but sitting in a chair is actually causing me the most harm on a daily basis.
Sara Hendren: Yeah. But I mean, isn't this like explained by kind of just evolutionarily in this sort of animal movement that like it's not the sitting itself that's the enemy, it's repetitive motion. Right. So what is sitting, who is sitting good for, I mean, sitting is good for making you know, economic citizens in an information economy, right?
I mean, there are other kinds of repetitive labor, right? That in the past, in 19th century factories and so on that same repetition, not sitting down, but that same repetition would've caused chronic injury over time. So we're built to actually do the diversity of movements no matter what our capacity, you know, what our range.
So you're talking about a really wide variety of movements that you're doing. It's not the sitting, it's the repetition. And that should just give us a clue about how our animal bodies are often at odds with you know, macro systems that want efficiency and productivity above, above all else, you know?
So hence we get standing desks and slow treadmills at desks and all these ways to try to intervene. But the insight's really interesting when you think about it. The creatureliness of our body.
Bon Ku: There's so much insight. You even challenged
Bon Ku: this concept of time and how time is actually designed to benefit some humans and not others. In your last chapter, that blew my mind away. I was thinking, what is this? I've never thought about time that way. Can you expand that for us?
Sara Hendren: Yeah. Yes. Thank you for the question. So just for readers to know, the book is organized kind of by scales of design that grow. So everything, the first chapter is called Limb. So it's all about kind of extended body parts and prosthetics. It goes to chair with kind of the, products and furniture in our lives.
Room to the architecture, street to Urban Planning. And then the last chapter is called Clock, which is about this non-tangible dimension of our time. And I was really driven to write that because my son has Down Syndrome. And so what is his misfitting in the world? And I use Rosemary Garland Thompson's idea of disability as Misfitting.
And it's sort of what we were talking about before that is that the misfit question. Isn't entirely putting the onus on the, body of the person with non-normative capacity. There is that misfit, but the other misfit is how, what are the extent qualities of the world? So the misfit runs both ways.
She says it's being a square peg in a round hole. Okay. Rosemarie has very atypical hands and arms. So her misfit is really in thinking about daily tasks, are, that tend to be manual in nature. Well, for somebody with Down syndrome, it's not really about prosthetic parts so much as it is misfitting in time.
I mean, that's what you'd have to say, right? So everything we talk about when we talk about developmental and cognitive disability, we use the language of delay. A generation or two ago, we would've talked about retardation. Now that's sort of out of fashion, but it's a really telling example. We're talking about slowness.
That's what we're talking about. And the stigma associated with being slower than average, right? So not evolutionarily quicker and ahead of the curve. All of that, all those valence is a meaning that we give to slowness versus quickness. And what that means then to be a parent watching your child kind of proceed through.
a typical normative school day, and what is the school day meant to be preparing you for, and the sort of future of the working citizen again, and the ideas of the good life that are built into that. It just helped me to ask different questions, given that Graham's procedure through school is just so non-normative, and it's not even really encapsulated by slowness itself, right?
It's not just everything comes along, but just at a slower pace. There is plenty of that. But it's also just he's a person living with, genetic mutation material on every cell, and he is living life differently. But Down Syndrome has no necessary etiology of disease, right? So in other words, nature honors, it's coming into.
into being. I mean, there are, associated risk factors for certain kinds of physical, challenges, but it's not pathological, not in, not fundamentally. So what does it mean then to be in a kind of variable, you know, body in the world, and how does it then change our ideas about the normative world?
So, I guess, you know, being the parent of any child is a way of seeing dependence up close, as I mentioned before. But being Graham's parent helped me see through a lot of the, you know, sort of mythology of like go, go, go and advancement and uh,quick timelines that a lot of neurotypical kids are kind of shunted through in general.
You know, I had to think, I have two neurotypically developing children and I have one very atypical. And the SumTotal of that experience Bon has been to say, oh, there's an invitation here to share life with people, you know, people, radical individuals, and to see the clock operating differently for my son Graham.
And to give a bigger, more generous clock to the rest of us too, and say, what are we racing toward? we're trying to get , you know, like what, what is that idea of the good life, you know? I mean, what is the biggest predictor of happiness over the lifespan? We know this now, it's relationships.
right? It's relationships. And meanwhile, there is, in the kind of neurotypical world, this just absolute breakneck, worship of speed, speed and competition and so on. So clock, all of that is to say that clock was this way of saying, well, how do you design for a different kind of time? And so I get a little bit into some of that, some really clever things like. In Singapore, you know, if you're an older adult or somebody with a disability, you can get a little, augmentation to your metro card and you can hover it over the, call box at a crosswalk and it will give you an extra 13 seconds in the crosswalk.
Bon Ku: No way. That's so cool.
Sara Hendren: amazing. Then it'll revert to its normative.
So let's say the crosswalk tends to have 23 seconds, if you're a person with disability or an older person, you get 34 seconds or something. Brilliant kind of intervention in the built environment around the clock. So . It's not a new piece of equipment. Exactly. It is, but it's mostly to extend the time.
And there's just a lot of ways in which, I mean, there's a wonderful, the Smithsonian museums have these programs mornings at the museum where every Saturday one of their many sites will open an hour early for people with, very often with, autism spectrum conditions come and visit. The museums without all the really bright lights and loud noises, like sensory stuff that can be kind of, overwhelming to people.
So that was a solution, a design solution that didn't actually change any of the normative features in the hardware or software. It was a time difference. You can come an hour early, you don't have to prove your X or Y condition. You just signed up. It's self-selected it's been hugely popular. But there's partly a meditation on my own.
Raising a child who's misfitting in time, but there's also then the design opportunity where the clock is concerned.
Bon Ku: We talked about universal design before. Curb cuts being an example of that, and you also talked about diffuse design. What is that?
Sara Hendren: Yeah. That's Ezio Manzini's term. He's a design researcher, Italian, and he just talks about. clearly it's the kind of a term of art for a common sense idea. Just that there are designers who are officially professionalized in design, who are doing mechanical design and software design and service design and user experience design.
all well and good. And he says, just meanwhile, in parallel, ordinary people are actually doing design that they probably wouldn't recognize as such all the time. And if we, again, widen a kind of aperture or lens. on all the tinkering and making that's happening in the world. The self-organizing of communities, the mutual aid, all kinds of clever exchanges and relationships.
We would see the essential process of design at work, which is taking the kind of extent parts and systems and interactions of the world and saying, oh, here's the status quo. What if we assumed is inevitable? What if we didn't assume that was inevitable and might we rearrange it? So for example, one story I didn't tell in the book.
Just cuz I couldn't find a way to fit it in is of a nursing home in Deventer in the Netherlands, where, a redesign of a nursing home there, came down as a state mandate to create a bigger minimum footprint for the residents, older adults who lived there. So they would combine rooms very often, to meet this minimum requirement.
So they went through and rehabbed this. Older folks retirement center to give this bigger footprint. And what they ended up with, say you combined a bunch of rooms, two into one, two into one, two into one down a row. They found they had a little leftover single space at the end of those hallways and they thought, okay, well we can't legally put an older adult there.
what are we gonna do with this leftover space? And they thought, oh well we have a college in town and I bet there are university students who'll be looking for reasonable housing. And meanwhile we've got this unnatural condition, which is like older folks who aren't seeing enough people outside their generation.
What if we designed a kind of board for an exchange for residential, you know, casual assistance. In other words, university students living together with older adults, and helping out with meals some of the time, doing some social, some hours per month as part of their rent. And it's very celebrated and, hugely successful.
So that's a kind of diffuse design That is where people are saying, , what could this be? What are the extent resources that haven't been recombined in a clever way? What questions are we not asking? What if we imported new questions? What if we responded to those questions with an idea that the world has not yet seen before?
So some of people listening are gonna be like, you mean like clever problem solving? Yes. and yet I think it is useful to have a name on it, the diffuse design, partly because it honors what's going on casually in people's lives, but also because it helps all of us to just kind of keep seeing the weight of inevitability and the, the myth of that, because that, our perception kind of goes to sleep.
We say like, well, it's regrettable, but it can't be helped too bad that nursing homes very often are really depressing places, but they're all we've got, you know, and as in the case for dementia care, we see like the status quo is actually not inevitable.
Okay, so is that the moment where you get the energy for your own kind of self-organized tinkering without having to go back and get a design degree? Or maybe partnering with designers where appropriate, but just seeing more design in more places.
Bon Ku: I wanna ask you a thousand questions about all your projects. There's so many amazing ones. We don't have time for that, but we'll put a link to some of your projects, like the accessible icon project, which is the work of design activism, engineering at home, the sketch model. And I just wanna ask you, maybe could highlight one of these projects.
one is, on a ramp for wheelchair dancing. what is that?
Sara Hendren: Yeah. you know, it took me a while to figure out that I cared a lot, not only about not picking a lane between STEM and the arts, but insisting, you know, that they live together. But doing that partly by writing. So in the book, that's my journalist hat. So thinking through, disability in the written form, but also in collaborative making projects.
So I have been really interested in ramps and which is a simple machine in the world. You know, an incline plane that does this alteration of force across the surface. Really interesting physics going on there and has been critical to, making a world more wheelchair accessible. And in 2016, I think, a wheelchair dancer named Alice Shepherd.
Wrote to me and said, Hey, like I know you're at Oland College where you have all these fabrication, shops, and I'm looking for a ramp, but I don't want it forgetting into a building like Practical Access. I'm looking for a ramp to use on stage as a prop for dancing because. Of course you can make beautiful acceleration and resistance and all kinds of balletic movement with a chair on a stage, right?
and at the same time, a ramp of course stands for all kinds of practical political things. So this is a dream kind of brief we would say in design. so she came to campus and, in a house, in a physics class, we sort of said, okay, well how do we take these same mechanics, the locomotion of using a chair.
The artful kind of goals that Alice has for this performance, and how do we take the same skills that we'd use for engineering a ramp and build a ramp for beauty? You know, like, let it function for these other kind of ends. And to me, again, that that is the most, energizing alloy of utility and poetics. You know, like, so here's a ramp that is, it really matters that that ramp does the load bearing, you know, for all of what else wants to get done.
And by the way, doing all kinds of load bearing and important access in the world, but it's also, it's meant to make this just kind of extraordinarily beautiful. Lyrical movement that's possible in a chair that's actually not possible by the walking body. And that does a really profound thing, right? So in a pedagogical context, it tells young engineers that like, oh, making beauty also counts.
Like you could use your skills for this end, but for everybody watching Alice dancing in a wheelchair, people who are ambulatory walking folks have to back away a little bit from the kind of inherited wisdom that wheelchair use is a diminished form of walking. And that is, that is the tragedy story that a lot of us carry around.
And instead to think like, oh, wait, if there are dance moves that are only available if you're using a chair, then that has to destabilize a little bit in a good way. My sense of control and the good life that's attached to my walking, you know, and all the ways that I've taught, talked about people as being wheelchair bound.
Well, you look at Alice, you wouldn't call that boundedness. Well then now you have to think a little bit differently about the other people that you see on the street using wheelchair and the alternate form of mobility that's happening there. So to me, that is what art does best. It scrambles your categories.
It defamiliarizes the familiar, it estranges you from what you had presumed before. you know, you're seeing with new eyes and you are thinking then differently about the world now that's an art outcome. So it's like, how do you measure rejiggering the, the synapses in people's brains, you know, like that, that's something that people who make culture have to decide they're okay with.
You know, like I can't control how you see and perceive Alice, but I sure can delight in the, kind of, the beautiful, productive uncertainty of that. So I both really care that the load bearing on the ramp is really resolved and obeys the laws of physics. I also really care that something indeterminate and beautiful and unscripted and joyful is made at the end.
Bon Ku: Sarah, if we were to come visit you for a meal, where would you take us out to eat?
Sara Hendren: Yes. I love this question. I mean, so speaking of like interrupting the status quo. I would take you to, one of the Clover Food Labs here in Boston,
Bon Ku: Oh yeah. I love them. Yeah.
Sara Hendren: as a, truck, a food truck. People may know outside the MIT campus by MIT grads and had a very, even in the food truck, a very like clinical white laboratory modernist, you know, kind of take on the, on what they're doing.
And what they're doing is, plant-based and locally grown fast food. And it is fast food. So it is breakfast, lunch, and dinner. They have french fries, you know, like all day long. It's quick and fast casual, but it is seasonal, so you can go there and get, very inventive sandwiches, dependent on like beautifully fried up carrots and turnips and beets and roasted broccoli and all kinds of things, but made for local, local places.
So since the food truck days, they have opened brick and mortar stores. So it's functioning as, A mini franchise of delicious food as fast food, vegetarian and local as a kind of indicator of the future. And again, really interesting because all of their interior architecture speaks of the future.
They don't do that like, very often the aesthetics of, environmentally sound, stuff is like, it's sort of back to the land. It's very like, Green and kind of like neo hippyish, where they go like, let's, kind of recover an old way of life. And Clover is saying no, that this is the future.
That's what they're saying, right? They've got these very again, white modernist spaces that speak much more of a laboratory and they call themselves Clover Food Lab to try to say, no, this isn't a, an old way of life that we're trying, that we're nostalgic for. We're saying this is actually, this is our way, to a more sustainable way of life.
And it comes with french fries. You know what I mean? like, they're not sort of saying like, and you have to. , like, literally, you know, sort of like grimly eat your spinach. Although the spinach, they make us delicious, but you know what I'm saying? They're also like, we make soda and we do breakfast sandwiches and we, we fry things up.
Like it's not all virtue food. It's like fast food in a sustainable way, and I'm just, I want them to win. I just think it's a really interesting model.
Bon Ku: One of my favorite places to eat up in Boston. Yeah. Well, thank you so much, Sarah, for coming on the show. Everyone read her book, What Can A Body Do, How We Meet The Built World? And we'll put links to all your amazing websites, on the show notes.
Thanks, Sarah.
Sara Hendren: Thank you so much, Juan Grace. Talk to you.
Bon Ku: you can learn more about Sarah's work by going to our show notes and visiting her website. S a R a H E N D R E N. Com. Design Lab is produced by Rob Pugliese editing by Fernando Queiroz. Our theme music was created by Emmanuel Houston or a cover design by Eden Lew.
See you next week.
