aimee mullins

via the SDS listserv-- Aimee Mullins, who "cheetah" prosthetic limbs have been much photographed, speaking at TED:


"the prosthetic limb doesn't represent the need to replace loss anymore. It can stand as a symbol that the wearer has the power to create whatever they want to create... they can become the architects of their own identities."
I mean, she veers into sci-fi a little bit ("it's about augmentation") and her solution is not really one for everyone (duh). But that she is putting out this really jarring, antithetical image about what prosthetic limbs mean and what the disabled body does with them -- seems really important, and quite beautiful. I also can't help noting how she has worked with artists and designers -- creative worlds where fantasy and sci-fi often lean on pretty flat images of disability-- in a way where she clearly represents herself and sees it as a collaboration.

Also: HOT shoes. wow.

I have been slow to update this blog lately-- oh, the cycle of academic work and procrastination and guilt!

But here is what I've been working on..

The main work I have been doing lately is about the do-it-yourself and small-production technical work for and by people with disabilities during the 1950s-60s. This time period, I find, is interesting for the history of disability-related design because it is a kind of transition time: on the one hand, people with severe physical disabilities (spinal cord injuries, cerebral palsy, polio) were more and more likely to live long and healthy lives with mobility impairments. Medical professionals and policy groups advocated "independent living" as a better choice for recovery and social order, but living in homes and communities was not so easy for folks who used wheelchairs, canes, crutches, respirators, and had manual disabilities. As a result, a variety of gadgets and gizmos appeared to bridge the gap between the ambitions and interests of people with disabilities and the world that was not designed well for them.

A lot of these were published by doctors or other rehabilitation experts as part of an effort to ease the transition from clinic to home, like Howard Rusk and Eugene Taylor's Living With a Disability (Blakiston Co, 1953), which featured low-tech options as make-your-own utensils with secure straps:
(image: black-and-white image shows forks and spoons with metal straps and finger sheaths attached to their handles, scattered on a black ground)

Rusk and Taylor also acknowledged the potential usefulness of new materials and gadgets of the postwar consumer culture, such as children's drink cups (aka sippy-cups) and electric razors.
















(images: two layouts from Rusk and Taylor's book, with black-and-white images laid out around text. Left, three cups: one white plastic cup with a handle, one clear plastic with a white lid and with a hole and a straw, and one with and hand holding a cup with an attached metal handle with a large loop. There is also a clear plastic saucer on the page.

Right, a two-page layout with men shaving with electric razors: one uses a prosthetic hand, while the others hold handles and loops attached to the appliances.)

These kinds of technical fixes for day-to-day independent living also featured heavily in the content of the Toomey J Gazette, a publication "for by and about respiratory polios" that ran from 1958-1969 (before it became the Rehabilitation Gazette). The Toomey J allowed contributors a forum to share very personalized, creative approaches to making their mid-century home life work for wheelchair, respirator, and rocking bed living. The solutions were wide-ranging and sometimes fanciful, like:


(image: an ink drawing of an array of different mouthstick designs, each attributed to its designer. Splayed out in a fan from a central pair of lips, the materials include eye-dropper tips with dowels stuck in them, cigarette holders, even the rubber heel of a child's or doll's shoe to be held in the teeth. From the Toomey J Gazette, Spring 1960.)

Other contributions were more technical, like a Citroen 2 CV that had been cut up to make a flatbed platform for driving in a wheelchair: the car was equipped with two sets of hand controls and a swiveling floor so that the driver could turn around to drive in reverse, rather than having to crane his neck.
(image: three newsprint images of Fred Taberlet and his Citroen, a convertible-top car with an open space for driver and his wheelchair.)

In my dissertation, I write about these adaptations, adjustments, and inventions as part of the broader social context for the disability rights movement: this homespun work is a tacit assertion of the right for people with disabilities to operate and move within mainstream American spaces-- the "right to be in the world" that Jacobus tenBroek declared in a 1966 essay in the California Law Review.

I'll be talking about this research in two upcoming conference talks:

Technocultures and Identity Conference (Mid-America American Studies Association meeting)
Center for Ethnic Studies and the Arts, The University of Iowa
Friday, April 3, 12:30 pm
Panel: Medical Technologies and Identity
Kirkwood Room, 257 IMU
Chair: Michael Krysko (Kansas State)
“Chemical Technology and Emerging Identities: The Role of Technology
and Rhetoric in the Construction of the Hyperactive Child,” Jonathan
Hansen (Iowa)
“Technology and Disability Identity: The Toomey J. Gazette, 1959-1969,”
Bess Williamson (Delaware)

Material Culture Symposium for Emerging Scholars
Winterthur Museum, Wilmington, DE
Saturday, April 25, 3 pm
Panel: The Private Lives of Public Objects
Emily Voss, Cooperstown Graduate Program (Museum Studies)
"Astronauts, Aliens, Rockets, and Ray Guns: Space Toys and American Children 1950-1977"
Bess Williamson, University of Delaware (History of American Civilization)
"Doing It Themselves: Gadgets for and by People with Disabilities, 1945-1970"Drew Sawyer, Columbia University (Art History and Archaeology)
"The Queer Life of Crisco"Commentator: Peter Stallybrass, Professor in the Humanities and Professor of English and of Comparative Literature and Literary Theory, University of Pennsylvania

living like a refugee

Image: Vermont's Shelburne Museum's colonial jail, a small stone building with one small window and wooden stocks in front for public display of criminals. via the Shelburne Museum

I have seen a few blog posts referring to this horrid, embarrassing "Refugee Run" at the Davos summit where one can pretend to be a refugee for a day-- the flyer promises an "attack by rebels, a 'mine field', border corruption, language incapacity, black marketeering and refugee camp survival. Ooh, all in one day!! Extensive comments at Wheelchair Dancer, NYU's Aid Watch.

Why this is offensive is pretty obvious from a glance, right? You can’t simulate the feeling of being in danger, or being persecuted, threatened, humiliated, being lost and homeless, etc. But as a historian and educator schooled in material culture studies, I want to think about this in another way. This exercise reminds me of lots of “living history” and other similar spaces and performances where the bodily and environmental experience of another’s condition aims to bring greater awareness: I think of putting my legs through the stocks at the Shelburne Museum (image above) when I was a kid; standing in the dark entryways and crowded apartments at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum; walking along the cliffs at battlegrounds in Normandy, one of the only times I have felt even a shadow of what it must be like to be in a war; the elevator at the National Holocaust Museum, where the crowd and the silent moving box immediately make you think of a gas chamber or a terrifying train ride.

I have never done it, but I hear of a lot of exercises where people try out wheelchairs for the day—museum professionals, campus planners, etc—so they can get a sense of the physical barriers that people with disabilities face. Since I started studying disability issues in design, I have heard people talk or read people writing about these experiments and how it changed their awareness of their environment. I have steered clear of them, however, because it makes me somewhat uncomfortable. Who am I to act out someone else’s experience? Also, from the standpoint of really understanding what it is like to use a wheelchair, it doesn’t work—because people who use them adjust and customize them and get used to certain movements and tricks. It seems like cooking in Julia Child’s kitchen for one time only (without her present) and thinking that would teach you how to cook like her.

But then—here’s the problem. My brain tells me that we can never really feel what it is like to be in the shoes (or chairs) of others, but the truth is that I remember all of those places I mention above more clearly and viscerally than I do any particular room in, say, the Metropolitan Museum, where I have been hundreds of times and given guided tours. I definitely think they have taught me parts of their respective histories that I couldn’t get from just a book or a lecture. I don’t think any of them made me feel LIKE a ---- (colonial prisoner, immigrant, soldier, holocaust victim), but they have helped me understand sensory and experiential details of lives distant from mine. So, in re: wheelchairs, maybe I should give it a shot sometime after all.

The Davos workshop flops because it claims to let people BE refugees for the day. I do think recreating some of the experiences of refugee life might work (though really—I think there are so many possible versions of this thing called “refugee” that it’s hard to imagine this), but it would have to be done so much more sensitively and humbly—and indeed, maybe this one will be run by such wonderful, brilliant people that it will work after all. It may be that a more modest goal should be the starting-point, like just addressing housing or food issues—focusing on the material aspects instead of aiming to recreate the very state of refugee-hood.

While we try to dream up a better workshop, I leave you with some lyrics from the wonderful band Sierra Leone Refugee All-Stars’ (great documentary about them here):
You left your country to seek refuge in another man’s land
You will be comforted by strange dialects
You will be fed with unusual diets
You got to sleep in a tarpaulin house which is so hot
You will sleep on a tarpaulin mat which is so cold
Living like a refugee is not easy…

Manifest Hope Posters

Image via Manifest Hope: "Yes We Can" Poster by Christopher Tucker. Three vertical US flags with symbols for "the green economy" (CFL light bulb), "workers' unity" (hand gripping a wrench), and "health care reform" (caduceus) in the blue fields.

This is one of fifteen posters chosen for Manifest Hope, a contest for politically-themed posters in time for the inauguration (slideshow of all winners here). These provide an nice snapshot of different strains in poster art-- ranging from the very handmade or painterly to a more glossy advertising style. It strikes me, though, that health care is very difficult to capture in visual language. The poster above is not from the health care section-- those ones are:

'
Obama for All America by Derek Gores. I guess the main representation of "health care" is the Red Cross here; though clearly the persona of the President is central. The focus is the author of the policy.

Potion Bottle-Hope by Marc Petrovic. I find this one a bit unsettling: a sterile glass bottle (which looks like a wine bottle) with four "hope" pills stacked inside. In the Brave New World version of the Obama administration, hope is a pill distributed by the government.
















CaduceUS by Ian Simmons. I guess the caduceus is the default symbol for care-- overlaid with the red and blue of partisan politics, it makes its message clear. I do like the simple clarity of the image. If I go a bit further, I could say that if the first image puts health care in the hands of the Prez, this one puts it in medical professionals'.















Health Care Equals Justice by Esperanza Macias. It's the most metaphoric in some ways (statue of liberty in a life raft on a sea of diseases) and yet the most literal: Universal Health care "rescues" America from a whole load of diseases.
















U.S. Health Care Just Ill by Sharee Davis. Sometimes words work better than images. I like the directness of this-- it really conveys a feeling of crisis, as well as frustration of something so basic not being available.

















It does seem like someone is missing.. the patient/citizen? But overall, a rich group of different graphic strategies. Do you have a favorite political issue graphic/poster? I like this one, which I don't think was ever an official ADAPT poster:

from Microcosm Publishing

inaugural inaccessibility

Sounds like there is not very good planning/accommodations for people with disabilities at the inauguration:
ABC affliliate: Disabled Citizens Say Inauguration Events Too Difficult to Attend
Stephen Kuusisto comments:
As the above article suggests, people at the Obama inauguration committee say that they've done all they can do to make the proceedings accesible. I believe them though not because I think they've turned earth and sky upside down but because the relative "built in" inaccessibility of our nation's second rate public transportation system and our inability to build disability into the first tier of event planning are commonplace matters that all pwds can relate to. "Oh," someone says after the first plans for moving crowds and setting up seats, "Oh, yeah there will be disabled people, we better figure out what to do about them." By then its too late.

It seems like an extra disappointment because the DC Metro is one of the more accessible systems in America (maybe the world?). I also think this sets some really bad principles out for high-stress, emergency type situations like the WTC attacks and Katrina, where we have all seen that people with disabilities end up in way more danger than others. If you plan an event and just say "people with disabilities, we suggest you do not attend," you are not really confronting the real issues about what it is like to hold large, public events. Not to mention the symbolism of more or less disinviting disabled or older folks to what the new administration is claiming to be "the most open and accessible Inauguration in American history" (from a letter I received from Obama-Biden since I volunteered for their campaign). I really think we need to examine how logistical complications become an easy go-to for exclusion or prejudice in "homeland security" contexts.

Arrogance will getcha

Image: Fiskars Rotary Cutter and Softtouch Scissors, designed by a team led by Jim Boda and Doug Birkholz, now of Inspire Design (image via Inspire).

I just had a nice chat with Jim Boda, who was head of R&D at Fiskars' US division in the early 90s when they developed Softtouch Scissors. Originally called the "Golden Series," the scissors were developed with the goal of making cutting easier for older users and people with manual disabilities. A spring in the scissors helps them open automatically, saving the effort and eventual discomfort of opening after each cut, while the innovative offset handles and straight bottom edge let you rest them on the table during use. Focus group feedback indicated that they would be useful and appealing to a broad range of users, and the new name reflected this comfort and ease. I see these every time I go to the fabric shop, as all the fabric measure/cutters use them.

Jim commented that, when it comes to designing tools/products, "one of the things that you really want to do is separate yourself—a lot of things can be intuitive, but in watching other people use products I find they really use them differently. We could design intuitively, based on own experiences, but when we get it wrong it's usually because of arrogance. Especially when it comes to the human body... we are all made up of different parts and use them in different ways." Thanks, Jim. He also mentioned that the US division was the first to really bring product innovation to the company-- with total market dominance in Finland, the home company didn't really understand the need-- and that US R&D helped the Finnish and British divisions set up their own design/R&D teams in the 90s. Interesting trans-Atlantic business story.

Depression Design?

Image: Fireside Chair No. 1, 1943: sturdy wooden chair with cushioned back/seat from the Utility Programme. From Making the Modern World.

Does recession make for better design?
The Herald Trib says it might:
"But the main reason why design could benefit from this recession is because it always thrives on change, and every area of our lives is currently in flux. The economic crisis will not only transform finance and business, but the way we think and behave. Then there's the environmental crisis, and the realization that most of the institutions and systems that regulated our lives in the 20th century need to be reconfigured for the 21st century."

The article focuses on the design of information and organizations to improve transparency; but also suggests the possibility of design contributing to new business models, e.g. the car/bike sharing schemes that are popping up throughout Europe and the US.

It strikes me that for a long time the argument has been that things like environmental benefits in design have to be made desirable and marketable based on a boom-time logic-- an argument backed up in recent years with things like megamansions w/ solar panels, movie stars in Priuses and "sustainable" materials in high-end fashion and interiors. I wonder what a bust-time alternative would be like-- something like Utility furniture, where government partnered with designers to produce affordable, well-designed furnishings for post-war British households. Design is more than a luxury...