Sara Hendren

What Can a Body Do?

A fascinating and provocative new way of looking at the things we use and the spaces we inhabit, and an invitation to imagine a better-designed world for us all. The built world--furniture and tools, kitchens and campuses and city streets--is constructed on a set of hidden assumptions. The design of a chair, the shape of a doorknob, the steps to a house: nearly everything human beings make and use is assistive technology, meant to bridge the gap between body and world. Yet unless, or until, the misfit between our body and the world is acute enough to be considered "disability," we may never stop to consider--or reconsider--the ideas on which the everyday world is based. In a series of illuminating stories drawn from the lived experience of disability, and the cutting-edge ideas that have emerged from it, Sara Hendren translates this secret language of design and invites us to rethink the everyday things 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 better navigate our common terrain? By rendering familiar objects and environments newly strange and wondrous, What Can a Body Do? helps us to imagine a future that will better meet the extraordinary range of our needs and desires.