Refactoring design to reframe (dis)ability

somewhat whimsical, these pieces are certainly provocative. This brings me to critical disability studies (CDS), the topic of this issue of Interactions. CDS analyzes disability as a cultural, historical, relative, social, and political phenomenon. Coming from a very different standpoint from Carpentier, CDS nevertheless intends to challenge our thinking about the notion of the normal when it comes to thinking about bodies and minds. Scholars in this area look to social norms whereby particular mental, bodily, and behavioral attributes are considered to be impairments, and where abilities that do not conform to the norm are seen as “dis”abilities. Social conditions surrounding and driving stigmatization and inclusion/exclusion are addressed head on and unpacked, with a view to introducing new, more inclusive perspectives. In our world of HCI and UX, I have been considering how products we design are created, and how we can create the conditions under which our products accommodate more diverse ways of being, where inclusion and equity are central considerations. There are of course a number of approaches to design that have consciously engaged with the question: For whom are we designing? Usable design is perhaps the most specifically focused on a particular set of users (often too little examined and referred to as the user), addressing whether those users can achieve a specified set of tasks in a particular environment. Universal design attempts to expand the concept of usability to all people, inviting designs that need no adaptation for specific ability profiles. Inclusive design, another area of practice, critically engages the notion of benefit and harm— In 2014, Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum had an exhibition focused on “designing for people,” a phrase inspired by Henry Dreyfus, the post–World War II pioneering designer [1]. The exhibition, entitled “Beautiful Users,” featured the work of Thomas Carpentier [2]. An architect by training, Carpentier has several projects focused on designing for bodies that challenge notions of normal or ideal bodies, such as Protagoras’s “man, measure of all things,” Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, or Le Corbusier’s 1948 Modulor Man, which embodies “a range of harmonious measures to suit the human scale, universally applicable to architecture and mechanical things.” Le Corbusier’s normative/normalized body drove many of his own architectural designs—designs that therefore favored some bodies and some physical movements and motions over others. For example, it may be hard for a caregiver with a baby stroller, a visually impaired person walking with a guide, or a person in a wheelchair to turn around in some of his hallways. In favoring certain bodies and motions over others, Le Corbusier’s designs embody systems of power, accommodating those who fit the “norm” and othering those who do not; specifically, the designs prioritize maleness and reinforce normative and restricted notions of able-bodiedness. Carpentier’s work challenges these kinds of restricted bodily “ideals” [3]. He depicts bodies that are extended, augmented, deformed, perfect, transformed, and moving, shapes that are intended to challenge what he calls out as modern society seeking to “rationalize, classify, and standardize goods and services of every kind.” He states: Architecture cannot escape from this agenda: spaces, programs, uses, dimensions, individuals, values, and thinking tend to conform to standards rather than explore the possible. Human bodies, as the basis of the larger system, are also subject to standardization...The body is not standard...This project imagines architectural forms and spaces for extraordinary bodies. In a related project, Carpentier reworks the Bauhaus architect Ernst Neufert’s Architects’ Data, a classic standard of modernism originally published in 1936. The reworking showcases the diversity of human bodies, and the inspiration that architects can get from designing from these “non-normate” [4] bodies. Deviation from the standard in order to accommodate different bodies highlights the ways in which diversity and equity of experience can be designed for. Examples include: Borg Queen, who has only a head and a chest, the rest of her body being an accessory; Arnold, a bodybuilder with prominent shoulders who needs extra-wide door openings at shoulder height; David, a legless dancer who lives at a different altitude and whose home has furniture installations that allow him to move in the same plane as his partner; and Genie, who lives inside a lamp. While