Over the next decade, the Eameses would go on to refine their wood-molding process to create both sculpture and functional design pieces, most notably, this celebrated chair.Graham Pullin, in his book, Design Meets Disability, cites this story as an example of a seemingly specialized design problem — improving a battlefield medical aid for wounded soldiers — that inspired a whole aesthetic in modernist furnishings. The chairs launched a thousand imitators, and a new ethos of simple, organic lines in household objects.

It’s easy to assume that such innovation would more often happen in reverse: that a generalized design solution would “trickle down” to the narrow confines of adaptive and assistive aids. But, as Pullin points out, this example suggests that disability concerns are in fact an overlooked source of rich aesthetic ideas, with relevance and impact for design far beyond their immediate starting point.More than that, I think this story demonstrates why everyone should pay more attention to matters of disability.You might imagine that “disability studies” is just one more category of identity research that’s been created primarily for political advocacy, interesting only to those directly affected by issues of accessibility, accommodation, or special rights. But “disabled-ness” is another matter altogether. There are at least two big reasons why disability concerns are everyone’s concerns.

First, it’s a false divide to make a we/them: either able-minded, able-bodied, or disabled. After all, how cultures define, think about, and treat those who currently have marked disabilities is how all its future citizens may well be perceived if and when those who are able-bodied become less abled than they are now: by age, degeneration, or some sudden — or gradual — change in physical or mental capacities. All people, over the course of their lives, traffic between times of relative independence and dependence. So the questions cultures ask, the technologies they invent, and how those technologies broadcast a message about their users — weakness and strength, agency and passivity — are critical ones. And they’re not just questions for scientists and policy-makers; they’re aesthetic questions too.

Second, in many cultures — and certainly in the US — a pervasive, near-obsession with averages and statistical norms about bodies and capacities has become a naturalized form of describing both individuals and populations. But this way of measuring people and populations is historically very recent, and worth reconsidering.Disability studies scholar Lennard Davis writes:

“. . . before the nineteenth century in Western culture, the concept of the ‘ideal’ was the regnant paradigm in relation to all bodies, so all bodies were less than ideal. The introduction of the concept of normality, however, created an imperative to be normal, as the eugenics movement proved by enshrining the bell curve (also known as the ‘normal curve’) as the umbrella under whose demanding peak we should all stand. With the introduction of the bell curve came the notion of ‘abnormal’ bodies. And the rest is history.”

It’s the source of all talk about how individuals measure up, relative to others. In case you doubt this obsession, I invite you to witness the conversation among parents of young children: It’s all percentiles, and milestones, and being “ahead of the curve” with respect to each month of a child’s development. Exceptional normal-ness is what they prize above all else, and it’s these measurements that can reassure anxious caregivers, despite little correlation between these measures and a lifetime of wellness, healthy relationships, or sustaining work.Again, Davis reminds us that this is a recent set of cultural ideas, so unquestioned now that these standards have a way of “enforcing normalcy.”

Of course, as Davis writes, “It’s too easy to say, ‘We’re all disabled.’” But a challenge remains: to interrupt cultural assumptions in powerful, creative ways — and to alter wider collective thinking about one’s own individual dependence, independence, and that of others.So how might designers and artists engage these myths about what’s normal, and make more visible, critical, and expansive technologies?

Well — it’s worth saying again: All technology is assistive technology. Honestly — what technology are you using that’s not assistive? Your smartphone? Your eyeglasses? Headphones? And those three examples alone are assisting you in multiple registers: They’re enabling or augmenting a sensory experience, say, or providing navigational information. But they’re also allowing you to decide whether to be available for approach in public, or not; to check out or in on a conversation or meeting in a bunch of subtle ways; to identify, by your choice of brand or look, with one culture group and not another.

Making a persistent, overt distinction about “assistive tech” embodies the second-tier do-gooderism and banality that still dominate design work targeted toward “special needs.” “Assistive technology” implies a separate species of tools designed exclusively for those people with a rather narrow set of diagnostic “impairments” — impairments, in other words, that have been culturally designated as needing special attention, as being particularly, grossly abnormal. But are you sure your phone isn’t a crutch, as it were, for a whole lot of unexamined needs?

Undoing the distinctions between design for disability and design in general yields a couple of benefits: It brings new attention to technologies that are profound in their use and impact on physical and political accessibility. The advanced replacement limbs, all-terrain wheelchairs, and exoskeletons you can find now are evidence of this new attention. It also brings a productive uncertainty and a powerful friction to the task of designing technologies of all kinds. Whether you’re designing for an established need or seeking an application for a technical novelty, you might take more time before confidently assigning it to a user, or to deciding, up front, with confidence, how it will be used. It might be for practical ends, or for play, or for something else you’ve not yet imagined.

Instead of labeling some technologies and not others as assistive, let’s start like this: We’re all getting all kinds of help from the things we make. All kinds of help, all the time, for our many material and social and educational and political needs. Private needs and public ones. No one is exempt. Then the questions get really interesting: What can a body do? What needs are you interested in? Who might use which thing for what? Where might the surprises be? How might a familiar thing morph into something else altogether?
In the name of good friction, then, I want to suggest some possible dispositions for designers and artists taking a look at ability and disability.