What Can a Body Do?
How We Meet the Built World
Author
Sara Hendren
Professor
Co Author
Details
- Print length 240 pages
- Publication date August 18, 2020
- Available in Hardcover, Audible Audiobook and Kindle eBook
Through vivid stories and insightful analysis, What Can a Body Do? challenges us to rethink the everyday objects, tools, and spaces we take for granted. Sara Hendren reveals how disability serves as a lens for understanding the hidden assumptions behind design and offers a vision for more creative and inclusive environments. From cyborg arms to customizable furniture and deaf architecture, this book showcases innovations born from lived experiences of disability and calls for a shift toward interdependence and adaptability. Both inspiring and provocative, it reimagines the built world to better reflect the diversity of human needs and capacities.
Named a Best Book of the Year by NPR and LitHub
Winner of the 2021 Science in Society Journalism Book Prize
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.
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It brought me closer to the people who really care for accessibility. The Accessibility Book Club has been an incredible space to share ideas, learn from passionate individuals, and grow as an advocate for inclusive design. I also connected with Manuel, the author of Web Accessibility Cookbook, and had the prestigious opportunity to professionally review his book and learn his inspiring story. As someone deeply inspired by accessible design—especially with my mother being a teacher for students with special needs—this community holds a special place in my heart. 💙
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UXE (front end) Lead
I love the Accessibility Book Club. The participants bring such good questions, and the Club is so thoughtfully organized. Sometimes we talk about care as a value in disability work in ways that can get unarticulated in the context of more technical work. I found Accessibility Book Club to be a great place for smart conversations done with care about access work. I'm incredibly grateful to have had my book read and discussed by this group. Thank you all!
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Associate Professor of Science, Technology, and Society
I joined the Accessibility Book Club because accessibility is something I care deeply about, and I wanted to connect with others who truly 'get it.' It’s a space where I can learn, and be part of a community that shares my passion for making an impact.
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Author Web Accessibility Cookbook
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