HSOC-385: Disability Design

About 15% of the world's people are disabled. This statistic is more complicated than it seems, because it is determined by various bodily, societal, and cultural perceptions. What is design's role, then, in defining and responding to disability? For decades, disabled people have claimed that the social edifice-from beliefs to design standards-causes disability, not bodies. An important position for designers to consider, this course traces the curvature of such discourses and applies them to creative practice. Students will think, sketch, play, and iterate ways to make the worlds of architecture, objects, interfaces, communications, and more, access-centered. A final assignment channels course learnings into an interdisciplinary design project that extends what disability design means and can do in our current moment.