Good Life Project - Sara Hendren | A Better-Designed World

Episode Date: November 19, 2020

Sara Hendren was drawn to painting as a kid, studied it in college, then began to build her body of work and career as a fine artist, focusing on painting. Then, a series of experiences sent her in what, from the outside looking in, may have seemed like a very different direction, but from the inside looking out, what a completely organic and aligned expression of her blended passion to see, to create, to design and to be of service.Now an artist, design researcher, writer, and professor at Olin College of Engineering, Sara describes herself as a humanist in tech, focusing on the intersection between disability - or the perception of it - and what she calls the built world, or how the world is designed to either support or dismantle freedom and autonomy based on our bodies and their capabilities. And if you’re thinking “well, this isn’t about me,” you’ll quickly discover how well-intended, yet misguided that assumption is likely to be. It’s about all of us.Sara’s work over the last decade includes collaborative public art and social design that engages the human body, technology, and the politics of disability: things like a lectern for short stature or a ramp for wheelchair dancing. She also co-founded the Accessible Icon Project, co-created a digital archive of low-tech prosthetics, and her work has been exhibited at the Victoria & Albert Museum, the DOX Centre for Contemporary Art, The Vitra Design Museum, the Seoul Museum of Art and other venues and is held in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Cooper Hewitt Museum. Her new book is What Can A Body Do? How We Meet the Built World. (https://tinyurl.com/yy8r8wwc)You can find Sara Hendren at: Website (http://sarahendren.com/)-------------Have you discovered your Sparketype yet? Take the Sparketype Assessment™ now. IT’S FREE (https://sparketype.com/) and takes about 7-minutes to complete. At a minimum, it’ll open your eyes in a big way. It also just might change your life.If you enjoyed the show, please share it with a friend. Thank you to our super cool brand partners. If you like the show, please support them - they help make the podcast possible. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

So Sarah Hendren was drawn to painting as a kid, studied it in college, and then began to build her body of work and career as a fine artist, really focusing on painting. But then a series of experiences sent her in what from the outside looking in may have seemed like a very different direction, but from the inside looking out was a completely organic and aligned expression of her blended passion to see, to create the intersection between disability or the perception of it, and what she calls the built world, or how the world is designed to either support or dismantle freedom and autonomy based on our bodies and our capabilities. And if you're thinking, well, this isn't about me, you will quickly discover how well-intended yet misguided that assumption is likely to be. It is about all of us.

Sarah's work over the last decade includes collaborative public art and social design that engages the human body, technology, and politics of disability. Things like a lectern for short stature or a ramp for wheelchair dancing. She's also co-founded the Accessible Icon Project, co-created a digital archive of low-tech prosthetics, and her work has been exhibited everywhere from Victorian Albert Museum, the Dock Center for Contemporary Art, the Vitra Design Museum, Seoul Museum of Art, and other venues, and is held in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art and Cooper Hewitt Museum. Her new book is What Can a Body Do? How We Meet the Built World.

This was a conversation that took us deep into the intersection between how we look at ourselves, how we move through the world, the assumptions we make, the things we see and don't see, and really awakened me to so much that I think I have not seen and maybe taken for granted. Love this conversation and really excited to share it with you. I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is Good Life Project.

Hey there, hey there. We'll be right back. Y'all need a pilot? Flight risk. The Apple Watch Series X is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you 8 hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum.

Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required. Charge time and actual results will vary. It's interesting. So much of the sort of like the quote recent body of work revolves around design in the context of ability, disability, and we can, we're going to dive into what all those terms are or not. But it seems like the much earlier in life passion for you was painting, was fine art. Yeah, that's right. I mean, that is my natural bent, you know, the representation of ideas in physical stuff, right? which actually has a pretty strong rhyme with engineering when you think about it, but I could never have imagined that. But that was

my starting out, the making of things, you know, the, the, I think really it comes from a sense that a lot of the language that we have, like the bullet point language we have to describe the world is insufficient to how weird and complicated the world is. And even from an early age, I feel like intuitively, I didn't have the words for that need, but that certainly felt true, right? That at some point, our words kind of fall short, or at least our words that are the purely, yeah, just the directives and the outlines of the world, but the symbolic languages and material languages, the way that stuff speaks via color and shape and quality, that has always been a big passion of mine to see ideas in concrete stuff. So in a way, the benefit of middle age is looking

back and seeing the ways that the true self actually in a like roundabout way tends to come back and come back in different ways. But you never could have told me 20, even 10 years ago that I would land in an engineering school. I mean, the language that you use now to give context to your early attractions of painting is really compelling. I wonder if when, back when you really started to become drawn to it, you know, even if you didn't have the language, did you have a sense for the reason that you were drawn to it was because of these things you just expressed? Well, I certainly remember, I remember being in college and taking figure painting classes for

the first time, for example. And I remember having to pay that really close attention to, if you're going to paint the human form, right? And there's no geometric lines in it. If you're going to indicate shadows and contours, you're going to have to actually use purple, for instance, for a shadow in the temple or something, depending on the skin tone, but something very unintuitive, right? I remember learning that. And I remember thinking how counterintuitive that was, and yet how apt and descriptive. And then I remember in college, my perception kind of changing so that I would be sitting on the subway and I'd be looking at people and I would think purple, I would think purple, right? Looking at somebody's, and that is a kind of state of attention that you actually can't, I don't have it right this second, because I'm not doing a lot

of drawing and painting, you have to cultivate it like a muscle. But I remember that being such a kind of pleasure to think like, my vision has altered, you know, my the quality of that attention can be cultivated like a muscle. And I think, you know, Nora Ephron famously said, you know, I want to make work where people look at it and they point to it and they say, it felt like that, you know, it felt like that. And I do think for me, again, I hadn't heard that long ago, but I do think for me that that triangle of exchange, you know, being able to say, oh, look, yes, here, that's how it felt. These things held together, these contradictions of a messy life, that it was both happy and sad at the same time.

That to me felt like the truest thing. And not just to recognize it in myself, but to say, oh, you could have an exchange with an artifact where both maker and audience were having different experiences, but shared in that artifact, that thing you can kick around. Yeah, and I love this concept of attention. You know, one of the things I think is so profound about any sort of art-based training is that, you know, whether it's really young as a kid or in college or masters or just out in the world, is that, you know, pretty much across the board, before you learn to express, you learn to see, you know, and, and there is an explicit focus

and attention and training on learning to stop seeing the representation of what we've been told, you know, like the picture of the cat and actually learning to see what's in front of you. And it is so powerful. And I think when you first experience like that, it's like for the first time you realize, oh, I actually haven't been seeing the world. That's right. I've been seeing the representations of what I was told it should look like. That's right. And of course, the implications for that are profound, right? Because it's like, oh, am I drawing cat-shaped ears and a cat-shaped nose, right? A triangle and these little whiskers

for the abstract idea of cat, you know, to make my drawing. But of course, in the real world, in our interactions, the question is, am I responding to the idea of this person? Or have I paid attention to what it is they're actually saying to me? But it's interesting to me that you're a design nut, because I do think that design also calls for that. And in fact, design calls for a kind of generalist disposition when it comes to attention, right? In other words, not just what I'm supposed to be paying attention to, but all this periphery out here, like my antenna are really, that's what I try to cultivate in my students. And so it's interesting to me because you run this Good Life podcast that is a very

broad, curious, generalist disposition. Is that right? Do you think those share a core? Yeah, I do. And it is very much by design. I take a really broad stroke at humanity. I look, I'm curious about all different aspects of it. And I'm fascinated by people who go narrow and deep and spend their entire lives in going narrow. I think it's incredible. It's also never quite been the way that I'm wired. And I see that the blessing in that so often is that you develop a level of craft and mastery

and insight that takes a very often entire lifetime to allow you to create what nobody else can create. But the downside is so many times the thing that would have allowed you to get to that same place exists in another domain and has for decades. And the fact that you're so siloed is what keeps you from being able to see it. So I'm more curious in the cross-pollination side of things, the cross-talk and the breaking down of silos. I am too. And I would strongly venture actually that people in design, if they're really working across scales, right? If they're asking, if they're able to work in a

way that's asking, what should we build, right? Not how can we optimize and improve on a small feature, but what should we build? It does require that kind of voracious generalist curiosity because otherwise you miss things I mean it's interesting because Howard Gardner talks about creativity and fruitful asynchrony right this thing about I mean this is your domain so you you know all this stuff but when you were talking that's what I thought of that kind of like how would you get that fruitful asynchrony and I will say that I I recognize that at least I wouldn't over claim for my own practice but it is a fruitful asynchrony small f small a for me to be in an engineering school as a trained artist, because I am still

all the time, not just trying to be generalist and curious and open and in between things, but I'm literally saying all the time, tell me again what momentum is. I'm sorry. The sum of torques and the sum of forces is zero. And both, I really don't understand. And I mean, that's partly just gaps in my education. And partly I'm just kind of like, gee whiz, are you kidding me? In search of zero? Like that, what a beautiful idea, right? So I get to learn over again.

But I feel that asynchrony for sure. And it's required being comfortable there. Yeah. But I mean, it's also so necessary for true creativity and innovation. It's the power of the amateur, right? Yeah. It is the person who walks into a room and says, I don't know. And I'm totally open to learning. Yes. I don't know. And I'm completely relaxed about that. I mean, of course, there's that little friction of kind of like, ooh, what's going to happen next? I'm not sure if this thing's going to go off the rails. But that also, for me, feeds me, you know, that sense of like, I want to be in that place where it feels like the learning curve is quite steep.

And the beginner, you know, the getting the do over. I mean, it took me a while in engineering school to be fully transparent about that because I was a little worried that my students would find out, you know, that I don't actually know what discrete math is, for example. Just the other day, they said, Sarah, it's advanced counting. And I thought, great, I still have no idea what that means. But because we could laugh about it, right, that's a kind of comfort in my own, you know, position and their own sense of what it means to learn together. And I value that quite a lot. Yeah, I love that. You just use interesting language also. You posed a question, you know, like when the question was, what should we create? Which is really interesting because

my sense is that when most people go out into the world, especially earlier in their sort of exploration of whether it's art or design or any sort of like making expressive type of thing, the question very often isn't what should I create or what should we create? It's what do I want to create? And there's a really interesting tension there. Yeah, there is. And there's also a question in the room of what can be done,

like the how question instead of the why or the should. And I say that with love because, right, I mean, the world would not operate as it does, if there were not people deeply interested in the how for its own sake, you know, in material science, and in the way that circuitry is built, and in the properties of carbon fiber, you know, like all those how questions, they are really important ones. But it is very easy to get romanced by what, especially, you know, in the digital sense of what can be done, what's coming down the pike as new and therefore axiomatically important, like AI or ML or whatever, and to lose sight of that question. What's a desirable world? And usually that's a plural world in lots of ways. And how would we

know, right? And all the need to be philosophically grounded and in those bigger questions which are the questions of the humanities right that's why design lives in between the pure how of engineering and technology and in the why questions of the arts but you're right that either we center the kind of what do i want to do because it's cool or the how uh because it can because it can be done done. And of course, you know, teaching my students to ask this, what should we build? And what if you start with people and they are a mess and contradictory and right, you know, deluded about their own motivation, some of the time, all that stuff is to invite a kind of a qualitative dive that's really hard to do, right? If you're a

problem solver kind of person, you know? And again, I say that with love because I, you know, I love knowing folks who, for whom the mechanics of the world are so lively and vivid in their heads, you know? And I feel like it's a beautiful role for me to kind of try to step in and go like, okay, but the humanities are asking us the big, big questions. How do we get here in the first place? What's the after scenario that we're trying to see? And what would we ground that in? And that's what the book is really chronicling. It's sort of people asking those big questions and remaking their worlds with stuff.

So not just pondering, but really in the workaday laboratory, reshaping the actual stuff of our lives that we can tinker with and kick around. Yeah, I mean it's interesting also because the on the one hand I love the idea of bringing people into the creation process of the design process as early as humanly possible. You know like what however you you know whatever name you want to use for design thinking human human-centered design, the first step is always empathy. It's problem identification. Forget the question or the solutions.

What are the questions and who are the people? And yet on the other side, there's just little things sitting on the other shoulder with me that is... I don't know if this is properly attributed. I know it's been all over the place. I think it was Henry Ford said, well, if I asked people what they wanted, they would have told me a faster horse. Yes. Right. You know, so there's this. Those things are true. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Yeah. I think, in fact, I'm so glad you brought this up because like for people who are in the weeds, like participatory design, I think is misunderstood in this way. So people think of it either as, well, you know, in the status quo, the non-participatory

sense, like it's some, you know, specialist out in a laboratory or in their studio making their genius product and dropping it in on the world. Okay. So people say, okay, participatory design is meant to be a corrective to that. So what do you do? You start with people, ask them what they want, ask them their needs. Okay. But the pitfall of that is that it's not a customer service transaction. You don't take a lot of surveys, interview a lot of people, and then go obediently build what they tell you, right? That's where the fine art of design works. So when we do participatory design, our human-centered design course at Olin, where I teach, yeah, we do that big kind of ethnographic training 101. What do

people say and they not say? What do they do and they not do? How are you going to manage these kind of contradictions? But the role of the designer, the creative piece is to synthesize all that and to see, as my husband would say, what's the note behind the note? What's the feedback behind the feedback? You're actually mining. And I say this in the book when I sort of talk about building a lectern for short stature with a woman named Amanda who has dwarfism. Students mine that feedback for insight. And this is what I mean about that generalist thing, the capacity to have your antenna wide open to recognize insight when people are telling you, what are they really telling you, right? My husband's a documentary film editor. So when he's in a production team

of people and people are saying, the pacing is really slow, we're not picking up this concept, he's asking himself, is it really because this is too slow or is it because two beats ago, we didn't firmly establish this story beat and that's what's going to get fixed. So it's that takes that real nimble agility in your mind to be able to see and perceive what people are really telling you and to deal with contradictions. So it is between those things, those two shoulders, right? Of like, what are people really doing, asking for that humility, and also the confidence that I have to make sense of what are very anecdotal, messy kind of human stories. Yeah. And also, I think the confidence and the vision to believe that even after you talk to everybody, you've gotten all the input

that you could possibly get. You're like, you are the baddest qualitative and quantitative research on the planet. You've gathered it all up. You've mined it for insights. And there's that little voice inside your head which says, there's something more that's just in my head. And I need to be like, am I that bold to still lead with that?

Because if I fall on my face, then I've got nothing to defend myself. But if I don't, it could change the world. That's right. That is right. That is right. And we do give our, in this human-centered design class, not in all classes, but in that class, we give them a mandate of look 10 years out because we are trying to give them the practice and the feel of that boldness, precisely as you say, Jonathan,

because we know that, right, most of their engineering work is going to be very constrained in that optimization thing, right? It's like this, the nozzle on this spray can, how can we make it, you know, pump a little bit more fluid from its nozzle, right? Instead of going like, what's the idea of the way that people are going to interact with digital devices, you know, in the future or whatever. And how would you then get to that paradigmatic shift? That's where, again, that quality of attention is so required and the confidence to do so. But of course, every people listening to this will be like, yeah, but Steve Jobs, like what hubris, you know, to say people don't know what they want. It's there was a seed of truth in that, right. And yet, I want to think that there's a lot of good design practice

that does have that confidence, without the necessary, you know, the kind of bravado of that, but you have to, I mean, the iPhone in my field, right, the iPhone actually is out of the box, very accessible in an intuitive way that doesn't have to be explained. It is quite an achievement, you know? So there was something, and yet when it came out, I remember lots of people my age saying, like, why would I ever want a camera on my phone? I cannot imagine a use case for this. Like, what a extravagance, what a gilding the lily, you know? To say nothing of the iPad. I mean, it's just so interesting. No one wants to glorify Apple less than me. They don't need that. Right. But on the other hand, just using a kind of familiar to hand example, design is really complicated and people think they know it when they describe it as participatory or

not. And it's really in the middle. Yeah. No, I so agree. I mean, it's funny when you talk about someone like Steve Jobs, you know, and he's the person that so many we like default back to is this iconic guy who goes there. When you look at people across the spectrum who are the ones who are involved in leading your language's paradigmatic change, literally change the paradigm, there's also survivor's bias in that too. We love telling the stories of the people who were bold and brave and resisted everybody else and they changed the paradigm. And we look at those people and we say they're geniuses. And we look at the other people who did the exact same thing and failed and we call them arrogant.

Yeah, it's true. And what to make of all the readily available, for instance, greener technology that we have available that has not survived just by lack of political will and sheer force of inertia. even at paradigmatic importance and scale from what it means to land in people's lives and the complexity of what it means to, you know, shun your old habit and take up the new one, right? And this is where I think why the kind of Apple example falls apart, because it's also built on a lot of, it's built on kind of human desires and things that aren't necessarily building a better world, but that are going to be successful in a consumer product, right? So we have to think about what do we mean when we say boldness and right, how would we measure those impacts? I mean, it's interesting in the book, I do talk about, I take up David Edgerton, this historian who talks about how we should measure technology in use and across timescales to even assign importance to

those ideas. In other words, we tend to look at moments of innovation or invention and say, right, that was the peak. That's when it landed, you know, space flight and so on. But look at the rickshaw, look at the bicycle, look at the condom, think about those technologies in their use and apply that metric, you know, not just how many units sold, but what that made possible, you know, the kinds of infrastructures that those things held up and so on, the kinds of economies that were built, the affordability and distribution of those things. So there are mental models at hand, but you're right that we tend to, the survivor bias thing is sort of where a lot of the stories get written. Yeah. And we also love to tell those stories. Just from like a human consumption,

you're like, tell me that story. Just kind of not talk about the other one. It's kind of where we're going in the world of media. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X.

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We jumped into the deep end of the pool pretty fast. Yeah, we did. I want to explore this, the bridge that you took because you went to school for fine art. And it sounded like when you got out, you're like, okay, so this is what I'm going to do. And you start building a career and you're out there in the world as an artist and also get really interested in history and start going down that rabbit hole towards, I guess, a PhD. That ends pretty quickly though. And I guess at this time, so much is changing in your life.

You're having kids. You have a son who also is living with Downs. Get exposed to it. And it sounds like it was like this season of reckoning, re-imagination, and really questioning, okay, so what am I really doing? What do I want to be doing? Yeah, that's right. And so those things did happen kind of sequentially. I remember a pivotal moment for me, as much as I loved making paintings, a pivotal moment for me was going to the senior thesis show, a friend is an undergraduate

and all of her paintings were called journal number one, journal number two, journal number three. And I remember having this strong kind of repulsion response and thinking, I can't make, I can't make Sarah's private world. I can't build a life on that. I can't, I can't think that art is all about this self-expression that lands on the wall and is my private universe. That's the strongest memory I have from that season of finishing up. And I think what I didn't know at the time is that I was very hungry to find partly a collaborative practice, but also to find a way that ideas live in things that isn't just dependent on the singular, that modernist idea, right?

Of the singular artist who has a, you know, inner weather that then they put out on the canvas and that's kind of the end of that exchange. And so I went to graduate school at UCLA. I mean, I was there for four years, did dissertation research and everything, studying intellectual and cultural history because I had this hunger to go like, well, why do we assume the things we do? And I was like a philosophy minor. And I was just, I really was hungry for what's the legacy and inheritance of ideas. And then I started going to conferences in that PhD and thinking, I don't know that I want to just write papers. Like,

is this all there is? And I had this nagging feeling. And so I would stick around for like the next milestone and got my master's and then got, you know, did my oral defense and all that. And I remember it went to the Netherlands to do my dissertation research with my husband. And I said to him, I feel like I want to be like a journalist and a furniture maker. Like I wish that I could do both ideas, but represented in a popular voice, but then also see the result of my work. And in a weird way, that's exactly what happened. If you squint, right, this book is written in a really journalistic form. And I do a lot of adaptive kind of furniture and tools in my building kind

of process. But along the way, right, it looks really neat now. But in fact, I became a PhD dropout. We did decide that was in my early 30s. We thought, well, let's, you know, we're open to starting a family. My first of my three children, Graham was born with Down syndrome. And that ushered me into a whole world of visual culture, material artifacts, and ideas in stuff, meaning prosthetics, prosthetics and assistive technology. So all the extended gear and appendages that we use to get our bodies through the world and all the ways that his body was in a non-normative way trying to make its passage through the world. And that's where the journalist, furniture maker, the artist, and the ideas person, that's where I'm making sort of this kaleidoscope thing with my hand where all the stuff snaps together, the colors and the shapes

snap together. That's where that moment happened, where my imagination was so captured and the politics were so urgent, you know, and that's a powerful alloy. And long story short, then I went back to get an MFA and landed in engineering school in that middle space of design. But I could not have predicted it at the time. And it took walking away from some things and some security and some scary moments for sure. Yeah. Because you're doing this in the context of your husband's documentary filmmaker, which is an amazing career, but also not known as the most like you don't get a paycheck every day. You're raising a family together. You were on this deep educational path and it's like this profound, radical shift. And you're taking care of a kid who needs a lot. It's interesting that you said that the politics to you are so important. But it's not just the politics. This is personal. That's right. That is right. That is right. It was our life too. Feminists talk about how we talk about children as dependents, and maybe we think of our aging parents as a different kind of dependent. But feminists talk about the

derivative dependence that accrues to a parent, meaning you become dependent upon the state. If you're thinking about your local public schools, you become dependent on the capacity for childcare if you're going to keep your job, it's not just your child who enters the world who has needs. It is the family ecosystem, right? Of care and mutuality. There is a condition of dependence. And that is, of course, the history of the world. That is the natural and the human, but that derivative dependence helped me think through like, wow, yeah, I've got this child who was so loved and wanted and whose story was being written in the physical therapy office and in the doctor's office. People could only kind of see that the genetic mutation and not the wonder of this human person. And I started to think about what it would mean for him to thrive in the future, you know, and to be a misfit, as Rosemary Garland Thompson calls it, to be a misfit in that way is not to be, you know, a broken body, but just to be at odds with the normal functioning of the world.

So what is it that needs to change? Is it, you know, additions to the body or is it the structures of the world itself? I mean, that's the question that was launched in those early years. And so it was very personal, right? Because I am in an ecosystem of care with my son that's for the long term, right? And it took me a while to see that, in fact, that's a human condition. That's a shared node, actually, of experience. It is not the same, right? If counterparts of mine have children who will launch out of the nest and become economic units, and yet we know that over the span of a life, when chronic depression arrives for someone in your close circle, when parents have needs over the long term and need you know real support that dependence and the derivative dependence like i don't mean to be academic with the terms i think they give us something to hold on to that is that care is part of life right and and yet so much of the k-12 education system so much of the way that we structure jobs, the way we talk about mobility and transience in industrial cultures assumes a kind of atomized self, you know, an optimizing individual whose

needs are meant to be, you know, nurtured through so they can become that the best self that they can. We think at the individual unit and less in terms of care. So, right. Those, those were, the politics was really urgent. I started to see like, oh, you know, in those early years with Graham, I would go to, we would go to, you know, events that were organized by families of kids with Down syndrome. And I would look around and think, this is great that we're all talking to each other and sharing resources, but no one, no one's hearing us, right? This world is not organized around these kids. And in fact, I remember in LA, we went to a walk, a kind of awareness walk in the way that lots of awareness walks and runs and things are organized.

It was a Down syndrome awareness walk, but we did it at an off-season racetrack. So we walked around the racetrack and we were not in the public sphere, not at all. No one saw us. We high-fived each other and that matters. But you see what I mean? It was so, I thought, this issue, right, of what it means to be a human and to count and to be fit or not for the ordinary workings of the world, the economically ordered world. This issue is not actually on the stage. People are not actually paying attention to this. And that was a lonely feeling, I will say, right? It went on to seed the most nourishing relationships, professional and personal, some of the most nourishing of my life. And I could not have seen that then, but that was the

way that it snapped together all that training too, and those questions. Yeah. I mean, it seems the way you describe it, there's sort of, there's an established quote disability culture, you know, which is different depending, you know, like it varies all over the place, but fundamentally, you know, there's a defining ethos, which seems like, okay, so we have one of two goals here, isolate our mainstream. And there's not a whole lot in the middle. There's the idea of, but what if we can just exist as we are and bend the world to us? Yeah, that's right. Wow. Yeah. You have really named, I think, what is a productive tension and a useful debate, but is there nonetheless, because yeah, disability is so interesting, right? Because it

is actually, it does arrive in all of our lives. So we do enter the world quite dependent on other people. We do exit our lives often with needs for extended care. And so you could say that disability is nothing more, nothing less than needfulness, right? Personal and political. So that means it organizes all of us, right? So the disability is a human concern. And yet, in disability culture, it would be a kind of act of erasure, people would say, or there would be a kind of resistance to, and understandably so, making this kind of flatness about disability in everyone's lives. Because if you're not a wheelchair user, you are facing the street in a different way than somebody who does use a wheelchair. And so, yes, this isolator mainstream, another way to put it is sort of like, do we talk about the uniqueness of this group and its unique kind of political lobby and its unique

kind of assets and its culture and its, you know, its ways of being. This is in the deaf community. This has been a long time, you know, question, right? Do we organize around deafness as a culture and in sub communities, or do we, how do we ask the world to flex and bend its structures and to say, we're actually, the mainstream is about connection. I mean, this is really deep, you know, the way that this goes. And I think I would, I just want to circle back to something that you said earlier, which is about the role in design of building empathy. And I actually think empathy isn't quite strong enough, a foundational goal for design. I want to say that it's not even, it's not isolator mainstream. It's

this, what's our kind of, what's the thing that actually connects us, which is this needfulness? And can we build then from that sense that I don't try on what it's like to be you in that empathetic way. I say, oh, I'm in a body that has needs. There are different needs from yours, but those politics, those stakes are also mine. So now I'm interested, where are the needs and where are the modes of assistance and how might we design for that world? I think it's interesting. And the point that you made, we also, I think so many people tend to make this distinction between, well, there are those people that are living with a physical or cognitive or emotional disability. And there's us. And that's the way they're going to be for life. And then, and I'm this way, you know, sort of like an

enablers mentality. Right. Rather than like, I think it's a really fascinating reframe to say, okay, so what if there's just a spectrum of needfulness? Yeah. You is also not like, okay, so you need X units of help and I need like 10 X, but it's just like, no, over the course of a given life, it's going to change radically. So rather than saying, oh, let me get involved in helping this problem or this community or this population, the question becomes, okay, so this actually, it is personal. If it's not now, it will be. But there's even sort of like a meta level to that, I think.

And I'm curious where this lands with you, which is that, okay, so we're talking about, okay, so maybe it's personal because when I'm in my 70s, I'm going to lose a certain amount of physical function. But it's also personal in an indirect way, I would imagine, because if we're not involved, if the world is not built for all these people in a way that allows us to be in regular interaction with beautiful human beings that simply can't get into a room because it's not built to allow them to get into a room, we're affected now, today. We may not realize it because we can climb the steps, but on a soul level, on a cognitive level, on an emotional level, we are being affected ourselves also. That's right. Yeah, it's true. It's, I mean, meaning, you know, the human bodies, human minds, human emotional

makeups, and including, right, the things that are hard for us and things that are deep assets and gifts, that those things really are present in everyone, right? And I think a lot of times if people are, think about the ways that people talk about disability in terms of high functioning or low functioning, that language, we're so quick to grade where you land on how much help you need or not. Instead of thinking, in fact, there are things that my son Graham, who will always struggle probably with mathematics and that abstraction, there are also things, his life is replete with gifts. At 14, I can tell you a list of people whose career choices have been affected by knowing him, whose daily kind of groundedness also depends on

his kind of the gifts that he offers that are not available from other people. And I think there's this, do we want to just organize a world where help is a part of it instead of running away every second to say, I want to design my own life so that I don't need anyone, right? I only need this maximal independence. Or do we look at, oh, the history of humankind and say, in fact, the connection, the giving and receiving of help, the seeding of power, right? And the use of our influence, like in alternate ways that we could occupy both positions, getting and giving and receiving help. I mean, that that could be a desirable world.

And also that we would be receiving gifts actually from all kinds of people. I mean, my son in non-COVID times goes to a Saturday program that's run by Harvard students because I live here in Cambridge, Mass. And so it's a club that they run. So everybody imagines like, oh, what great, you know, like over the top achievers, Harvard

students, you know, like working with kids with developmental disabilities. I'm quite sure that the giving and receiving of help is running both ways in those encounters. And that's not to like Hallmark card it and sentimentalize it. I just, I'm quite sure that the giving and receiving of help is happening. That what my son Graham shows up to these folks who have been optimized to the K-12 education system to land at a place like Harvard, he is offering them a different kind of social encounter fundamentally. And it's one that's a human encounter, right? It doesn't have to be this kind of like special needs situation. So as you say, right, you can't, that's what's so fascinating to me about the design of the built world. You can't get everybody into the cacophony of the street, right? The city street where you're

going to meet people unlike yourself and you're going to have these serendipitous exchanges with strangers. You can't have that if you can't get down the sidewalk, you know, if you can't, if you don't build enough of an elastic city to have a big double stroller like I've had, you know, and the elevators to make it possible when you're on crutches for six weeks and holding the hand of a young child learning to walk. And that's, I think, a city that we want to live in. It's not, you know, it shouldn't be so surprising, but like, you know, for me, prosthetics and assistive technology, far from being about this kind of special needs category and kind of gee whiz and cool technology. It's just, it's just making assistance visible and unifying, you know, and just calling it the material culture of life. So in the, in the book,

I do say that assistive technology is a funny, you know, redundancy, right? It's a, to, to add assistance to technology as though technology isn't not, it is, it's, it its reason for being is assistance. So that means that assistance is natural and normal to being human. That for me is a different way of thinking about empathetic design, but also about inclusion

and this notion of special needs, like all of that language. I'm not here to police language. I'm interested in the ideas underneath that language. And I'm interested in ways that a more flexible built environment gets us more kinds of human encounters. Yeah. I love that. I mean, what are we really looking for at the end of the day? A richer human experience for everybody. And

that doesn't happen when everything is homogenous, everything is sort of monolithic. When we limit our interaction with people who aren't anything like, well, we're seeing the net effect of that on the world right now. That's right. That's right. When we decide the only people we were interacting with are people just like us who believe what we believe and see the world the way that only we see it and we'll exclude everything else. And we're seeing that on an extreme stage right now, but just on a day-to-day lived experience level, you know, the serendipitous conversations and bumping into each other and interactions. do work that I love and I'm happy in my relationships and I am able to be confident and secure at a reasonable level. And I don't think a lot of people in that imaginary of a richer life imagine that help could be part of that ecosystem, the getting of help for themselves and the constraint of help, of having people in your life who also need help, that help might be

in the constellation of desirable. Do you see what I mean? Not the thing to say, well, in spite of that, I can have a rich life, right? No, it could be that because of that, I also have a rich life. That's what I think is missing from people's mental universe. I so agree. I mean, we live, the ultimate aspiration is self-reliance. Yeah, that's right. You know, the wealthier people get, the further away from other people they move. Okay. So great. I got a promotion. I got a big raise. We're going to get a bigger house with more property, farther away from everybody else. Why? Because that's what you're supposed to do

when we all know that when you're actually close in the community, that is the richest experience of your day-to-day life. That's right. But culturally, the aspiration is you move up and out and it's more and more towards isolation without realizing that's actually what we're doing. And it's all about the more self-reliant you are, the more you win at the game. Yeah, Right. And I think, I mean, just to bring it to home, you know, really closely, I think that some people cannot imagine my two neurotypical kids who have their own very rich, you know, interior lives that they can't imagine that, that their brother Graham will feel like anything but a burden to them in adulthood. They can't imagine the rich friendship that's happening between and among them now. And they can't imagine that my two younger kids who will have a more probably normative

self-actualization career prepared process, that they can't imagine that the richness of their life might be in part because of, not in spite of, you know, knowing this person. Is it going to be easy all the time? No, we talk about that all the time. But I do 10 years of working alongside disabled people who build lives worth living with friction in them and barriers and help have just shown me how to redefine what the good life is. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever,

making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you 8 hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series 10. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone Xs are later required. Charge time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required. Charge time and actual results will vary.

Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun. On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot him, we need him.

Y'all need a pilot. Flight risk. Yeah. I mean, it's really that redefinition is so central to everything that you're doing to this conversation. One of the stories you share is a man who's living with ALS, which I think is really interesting. It ties into what we're talking about in a powerful way. Yeah. So the book is organized according to objects, designed objects that happen at all scales of our lives. So the chapters go limb, chair, room,

street, and then clock and limbs about prosthetics in the worn ordinary sense, like replacement limbs and arms and legs and so on. And chairs about household products and furniture, literally chairs, but also kitchen tools and different stuff. And then in this room chapter that we look at Gallaudet University and deaf space, so architecture for deafness, we look at the history of the civil rights movement at UC Berkeley and a hospital that became a dorm room. And then we land finally with Steve Saling, who lives here outside Boston, near where I am, and 14 years ago got a diagnosis of ALS and was trained as a landscape designer.

So when he got his diagnosis, of course, like everyone else, he started watching the research for the pharmacology, the cures that might arrive. There's research, of course, all the time. But he also did a kind of anticipatory look ahead to say, okay, my body's mobility is going to change. What is the lived environment, the residential environment where I'd want to be, you know, a decade from now, when my body's movements are slowed to almost total stillness. And that is that is his condition now. And he designed together with software engineers, philanthropy, architects, a residence for himself and two dozen other people. And now they're opening, I think they opened another

dozen or so wing, a residence for folks with ALS and MS, all of whom use wheelchairs. And they did a kind of smart home arrangement before there were smart home technologies on the market. So Steve wears on the bridge of the glasses that he wears, there's a cursor planted on the bridge. It's like a little stud earring and it talks to a wheelchair mounted tablet in front of him and he directs it to do his text to speech and play his thoughts, have conversations, but he also uses it to open all the doors and summon the elevators and turn on his media and HVAC and so on. And the residence itself is a beautiful home-like environment.

And the thing that Steve really challenged me to think about, because ALS really tests our ideas about what the good life is. I mean, it really does. It is so unlike one's mobility, if you can move at all, right? And for him, it is facial movements, a little bit of head movement now. But so Steve would rejoice in a cure tomorrow, a medical cure that would make all this design work go away. But at the same time, he built a life worth living, a life he would say is worth living. And in fact, he would say that technology is the cure

in the absence of that medicine. And so what it means to then design a place where you can thrive in a fundamentally altered body, I mean, what an idea. It really, that idea of what it means to dwell, what it means to be independent and interdependent and acutely dependent in Steve's case. And yet to build a life that's rich. I mean, he's as busy as he's ever been fundraising and meeting people and sharing resources and doing interviews. And I mean, he's just, it's incredible. And you don't have to tell a kind of like inspiration story to take seriously what's on offer there. And in fact, I would rush to say, don't make Steve into an abstraction with like soft piano music swelling in the background. That's so often how disability is represented. But instead to say, what does it mean to dwell

together? And if my body were to change, would I be able to find some resources to make life worth living? Or can I only see Steve as a diminished state of normal, right? We don't have to romanticize it to say, and we don't have to stop seeking cures to still say life worth living comes in all forms and that the building of the shape of our lives can actually make a huge difference and mold and be an envelope around those lives. It's really quite something. Yeah. I mean, central to that, it's such a powerful thing to explore. Well, you know, what is life worth living and who gets to define that?

And of course, you know, in their own terms, in their own way, in their own context. Yeah. And of course, in their own terms, in their own way, in their own context. But the bigger lens part of that conversation also is if one of the things that allows somebody to say, well, yeah, this would be a life worth living is the ability to build a certain amount of help, of assistance, to actually create the environment and the tools that would allow them to say, okay, I can check this box. Part of the question zooms out to, well, let's talk about resources. Let's talk about who's making the decision that says that this one person's willingness to say, this is a life that I say is worth living. And it's going to take a lot of resources and investment that it makes sense to allocate

mindshare and resources and money to develop all of these things. That is where I think we start to circle back to what you were talking about earlier. That's political. Yeah, indeed it is. And it is the pernicious creep of an industrial logic that organizes all of our lives and our worth, is it not? Because the alternative, in other words, the alternative to saying, well, there are lives that are not worth living, there are states of help that become undesirable, a lot of that is shaped by the idea that productivity and in that kind of normative economic mode, taxpaying citizen who can create X amount of monetary value

and purchase property and so on. That is the measure by which we understand our self-concept because of our worth to the state, you know, in that way. And conversely, if a state is the polis, you know, that is the big house for all kinds of people, including the human experience of health, then that's a civic organization around every life, around a different kind of, I mean, this tests, again, the most fundamental ideas about who and what people are, right? What they're for and who they arrive on this planet to be. I mean, it's, you know, and we've seen, again, the inverse of this with the kind of discussion around rationing and COVID, you know, kind of resources and so on. And I'm not here to sort of be ivory tower about it. You know, I watch this play out all the time. And the good that, the only good that most folks can dream about for a child like mine, Graham, is a kind of mostly normal, how good of a job can he have? How high functioning of a job can he have? And it leaves aside, he may want that and I'll lobby for it and

all those things, but it leaves aside the question of what is a human worth? What is a life worth living? And again, Steve living 14 years into a diagnosis now, most people can only imagine that a compassionate death is the sort of right conversation for ALS. And it is really challenging to think about what it means to be a sentient person and to share then resources with other sentient people. And where is the line and what are they worth and how would you know? And lots of people in polite conversation would sort of say like, oh, well, I'm not an economic productive unit. Like I would never employ those scorched earth, you know, kind of metrics to myself.

And yet when it comes right down to it, those are the ones we often rely on. And you see it in older folks who lose their sense of purpose and connection when they stop working, for example, because the worker identity has come to subsume a lot of the others. I mean, what's that? Isn't it the Aristotelian idea of the good life or the human flourishing is the capacity to play several different roles in the course of a day, right? So in other words, how that speaks to us in the 21st century is the capacity to be something other than a worker in a meaningful way in the course of a day. Yeah. I mean, to be fully expressed and have a multifaceted complex life. Yeah.

It's as you were sort of sharing more about Steve's story, I had this flashback, which surprised me when I was a really little kid. I lived in a neighborhood outside of New York City and my best friend's dad was diagnosed with MS. This was a long time ago, where none of the medication, the treatment that are around that can help, it just didn't exist then. And his wife at the time, my friend's mom, was a nurse. And they made this decision that he would stay home and he would sit in a big old Barca lounger in the living room. And that is how he stayed as he lost function progressively. I could have this totally wrong. My recollection is he lived for a few decades. And for much of that time, all he could do was blink in terms of mobility. And I would ask on occasion, or I was told, probably later in life is more

accurate, that he made the choice that no matter what, simply being able to witness his kids grow That was it. Yeah. Wow. Wow. And seeing that witnessing, we talk about qualities of attention, right? But like seeing the witnessing as a full life, I mean, yeah, that's remarkable. And, you know, I must say that so many of the examples in the book are of people who are in less acute circumstances and who have intervened and changed. And it would be interesting to know if that family would have done something differently and they would have welcomed better medicine, right? They would have welcomed a redesigned world. And yet the story that you just told, it's that inner transformation too of saying, okay, who am I without the the doing the normative doing right

what will i look to when and if my body changes and can i see the people in my life with different kinds of needs with new eyes because of those you know that shift it's yeah it's foundational stuff yeah and that's where people get wrong they think that disability is this kind of area studies that only matters if it arrives in this topical way in your life or in like the technological lab of assistive technologies. And disability, what it really pokes at is individualism. You know, that's really the big cultural narrative. And so it really is kind of on offer to everyone.

I do hope that the book helps people feel connected to those stories, not again, in an inspiration way and not in a kind of like, oh, I'm so grateful for my life way, but to say, goodness, look at what the body's doing all the time. And look at the way the shapes of the world shift and change in and around it. And I'm just going to be watching, I'm going to be watching differently to see how that happens. And a lot of people would shy away from visiting folks with ALS because they find it too difficult to see. But my dad was a family doctor in Arkansas and he did teach me to be fascinated and to hang in, and to walk toward that interest in people in bodies of all kinds doing their thing. Yeah. Which is so apparent in both the lens you bring to your work

and also the fundamental notion of you sort of like challenging, and it sounds like this is the heartbeat of so much of your teaching too, the notion that, you know, like the job is like, how do we meet the world? But really it's, no, let's not assume anything. You've used examples of on a mass scale, every curb in the country is going to be cut out? Never happened, and yet it did. And then if you extend that out and say, well, what if we really start to expand the way that we're looking at this and just find how we're all intersecting with the built world and try and make it to accommodate anyone and everyone?

What would that feel like if we looked at it that way? Or just that we exercise the agency to make it bend and flex a little bit more. I don't think that there is no bespoke universe coming for any of us, but I think a lot of us accept the way things are and we forget that actually the world is being shaped and reshaped all the time. So I take people on a little tour of just kind of their kitchen, you know, drawers. And if you look at the, you know, the OXO Good Grips kitchen tools, if you have a peeler in your drawer, that's got that grippy rubber handle, and it's got the fins in it that tell you exactly where to put your thumb, it is beautifully redesigned. But that was if you're my age or older, then you remember what it felt like to have an all metal peeler and

the way that it's difficult to get the slip and the friction you need to do to peel a carrot, for example. And that was a late 80s kind of redesign the OXO good grips around the condition of arthritis. So it was difficult for a woman named Betsy Farber to wield that kind of old school peeler. And then, you know, with her entrepreneur husband was asking the world, why can't the status quo be different? That's the magical moment. Why can't it? Why must the status quo be the way it is? And there are so many people who I find are so wedded to this idea that they are the realists about how the real world works. And right, it's regrettable, but it can't be helped. And I'm what I love is that design happens from lots of places and in lots of situations,

ordinary tinkerers in their living rooms and also entrepreneurs who go on to change the phase of kitchen tools. But lots of people, they're all doing the same thing, we should just say. The status quo is not acceptable. I'm going to do something else. That doesn't mean that the world magically will conform to me. But so I tell the story of that OXO Good Grip Peeler, but also the Fisker scissors that are this kind of gentle glide scissors right now,

also designed for the condition of aging. They also make a more ergonomic tool for just doing ordinary sewing. The Cuisinart food processor, when it was redesigned for home use, those paddles that you flip up and down, that's an ergonomic choice that was designed again with disability in mind, as opposed to a fiddly knob that you twist this way and that. The air on chair, you must know those high status kind of ergonomic chairs designed also for the condition of aging. And curb cuts. Yes, curb cuts. Imagine one generation ago of people using wheelchairs saying, we want a legal mandate for every city in the world to cut that corner so that you have a diagonal between the sidewalk and the street and back up again.

And all the pushback that they got saying, what a niche use of the street, we can't possibly do this, you know. But if again, listeners have pushed, you know, a stroller through or a bicycle, a skateboard, wheeled luggage through the built environment, you're participating in those politics, but you're also then, your passage is made possible if you're to use a wheelchair, short-term, long-term, at a different moment from now, or you're accompanying someone who does, that the state of the world in a civic way could be redesigned. So there's products in your everyday life. I mean, it's fascinating. There's products in your everyday life, chairs, kitchen tools, and the rest. And there's also architecture and interiors that are designed, like Steve's residence, like Gallaudet University, Deaf Space Architecture. There's actually a really

interesting little side story in that room chapter about the signing Starbucks in Washington, D.C., which is near Gallaudet. And it is a Starbucks Starbucks in Washington, DC, which is near Gallaudet. And it is a Starbucks like every other Starbucks, which are supposed to be homogenous, right? They're supposed to be recognizable. And it's the subtlest possible service design, we'd call it in my field, service design changes that make all the difference there. So I went in there as a hearing person, all the staff and employees are deaf. And there's like a easy, not even a very high tech way to solve this issue, which is I would write my name down and the order that I want for my tea

on a wipe away tablet and hand it to them, do my payment in the automated credit card way. And then my name appears on a monitor down the coffee bar. And so many people think like, oh, designing a different world. It's so hard. Like we can't possibly, oh, it's so. And you go to the signing Starbucks and it's like, no, it was like a TV monitor and some like a stylus and a tablet. And yet all the power dynamics are changed there. So if you go to the signing Starbucks in DC, you're forced to think, oh my goodness, what else have I taken for granted?

You know, or the dementia village in the Netherlands, in Weesp in the Netherlands, where we go in the street chapter. It's like, if you were to know that you were going to take on another difficult diagnosis, which is Alzheimer's or other dementia, how would you want to live? And that there's a dementia village, this memory care locked facility, nursing home that is built in the shape of the street. There are streets in it and shops and a functioning restaurant and so on. And they did it with state funding, the way that other nursing homes have to obey state funding. But it takes that magical set of people saying, the status quo is not acceptable. And now I'm going to do all of the labor and red tape and stuff that it means doing to

see a new thing made real. And I just never get over that prototyping moment of saying, it's not that the world is going to be redesigned so that it's perfect for everybody. It's not that. It's that people are always in a sort of, people are too rarely. And yet in ways that people have kind of vanished from their perception, are doing this adaptation work and this tinkering work and this reshaping of the world in lots of ways. And I want us to see it. That's that making it visible

impulse. That's what the book is meant to do. Yeah. I mean, it's about acknowledging what got us here and then being unreasonable about saying that's what's going to keep us going forever. That's exactly right. I think that's one of the things fundamentally I love about just the world of design is it fundamentally exalts being unreasonable. And I love that. Yes. And I think it does that.

What you just said, I think, is the dual work, which is to say, look at design. It is an index of ideas that are inherited, right? That got us to where we are, as you say. And it's this site where, you know, actually things are like, if you could see the materials, kind of the seams starting to, to, you know, unbuckle themselves. It is the site where we can intervene and reshape the world. So we both see what has been tacitly understood and assumed. A world full of stairs, right, in big buildings, kind of those noble capital buildings and government buildings assumes that no wheelchair user will have cause to arrive, right? I mean, think about all that that's built on.

Or that somebody will be a mother with a young toddler will not be scaling 30 steps, you know, to go to the courthouse or whatever it is. And of course, we know that those are human experiences that belong in the built world. So we can see those buildings and think, aha, I know who was thought to be the city user for that. And we can say design actually belongs to everyone that is a citizenship practice in partnerships that are partly about products and, you know, maybe the market, and certainly about civic planning and the cities that we want and so on. But that we all, it's a site that's unfinished. It's unfinished and unfixed. It's under construction. Yeah. Perpetual beta.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Right. I mean, you look at everything as that. Yeah, you could. Or you could find yourself on the tail end of that of sort of tweaking and massaging the little bits and pieces of like, what does it mean to experience a public park that's really old, like here in Boston? So the beta doesn't have to mean that everything only ever changes. There are enduring institutions and so on. But the reason why I wrote the book to be at multiple scales, so on the body, products, room, street, and then out to clock, which is more about where material design fails, we get more into systems, is just to say, ask yourself, if you see the status quo being unacceptable, ask yourself, what would be the scale to intervene? Is it a better widget? Is it an app? Is it maybe

a building? And those could imply institutions that already exist, but are reused in different kinds of ways. I mean, needless to say, we are asking this right now under COVID-19, you know, architecture critic, friend of mine, Alexandra Lang is writing these like, you know, urgent memos to, you know, on, in design journalism to cities saying, get, get your city outfitted right now for winter activities that bring people outside. In other words, take a look at your status quo and figure out ways to repurpose its structures. It doesn't mean starting over. It means editing what you have. Yeah. I mean, it's so interesting. We're having this conversation in this moment in time

where the question I keep hearing being asked over and over is like, when do we get back to normal? And the only thing that keeps spinning in my head is, A, normal was pretty bad for a lot of people. And B, we have right now, using Glennon Doyle's words, brutiful opportunity in front of us. It is so hard for so many people. And I absolutely acknowledge the pain that so many are moving through in this moment. And alongside that, on a societal level, we have this invitation to not try and get back to the old normal as quickly as possible, but to reimagine what do we want the future to look like? Because nobody would have invited the level of disruption and dismantling that has happened over the last 10 months, but it's here. So rather than trying to remantle it and making up words as I go, you know, like what do we want to step into

and create in its place, you know, that might be of service to more people at a higher level? You know, that's the conversation I'm looking for these days. Now, it's a combination. Here's where, again, where a quality of attention is so paramount. Which stories, which are, what are recovered ways of interacting that we want to recover that have been lost? What are brand new ways that we want to interact that now we don't want to go away? Telehealth, for example. That's been needed for a long time. A lot of just inertia about the way things are that's been in the way of doing that.

We're seeing it now made possible for a lot of people. It's going to, we want to hang on to that and keep it with us. Shared streets are being prototyped in little ways in the way that you should do, piloted and so on. But I'm with you. I think what crisis makes possible and no one would wish it, but it does shift the frames and the ground underneath our feet in ways that we thought had been fixed and permanent. I mean, I just think the force of inertia is so powerful. And now we're seeing we had to be different. Oh, what does that mean about what else might be different and what we hang on to? What do we recover? What do we invent anew? What do we partner and reuse? It takes deep creativity.

Yeah. And I love to thank you for also like certainly reinforcing this idea. That doesn't mean that we're blowing up everything that we can reclaim. There's a lot of good, you know, but in the space that we have here, you know, like the stuff that can be changed. Yeah. Like what is that? You know, I look at disruption as one side of a coin, you know, and you can't have a one-sided coin.

So the other side is possibility. That's right. Like if you look at it and say, okay, whatever level of disruption I'm experiencing right now, there must exist an equal and opposite possibility. Yeah. Then your mind shifts to, well, let me find that. What does that look like? That's right. You know, acknowledging that the disruption is causing pain. Yes. Yes. And if I know this other quality must exist, as long as I feel that, like where, where can, what can we do with that? That's right. I'm fascinated with that. So with you and the related concept that I have learned in 10 years of doing research with disabled people in the realm of design has been to think about human experience and disability as, yeah, a series of closures, things that are closed off. So

non-normative experiences, the loss of a limb, the incapacity to see. So they're closures, real ones spoken about as such. And they're also openings always, always, always. So something like when I look like when my blind friends are listening to their email on their laptop, the way they've adapted to listening to it is so rapid fire. The way they play it like 10X speed or 20X speed, I literally can't understand it.

It sounds to me like gibberish because they're listening so rapidly to that. So in other words, that's the opening thing is that their brain went into hyperdrive so that their capacity to orally process that sound actually went way up, right? So, and it's not just closing a door and opening a window. It's just that, as you say, there just are always, it's the state of the body to be adaptive. It's the state of culture and collectives to also be inventive and adaptive.

And if we only see diminishment, we miss those, you know, what I think Arundhati Roy says, the pandemic is a portal, you know, too, that what is that door? And for me, the wisest resources for this work have been disabled people. And so the folks who appear as subjects in the book,

the folks who've taught me things over the years, it's that closures and openings that I found so nourishing and wise for my own life. Yeah. I love it. This feels like a good place for us to come full circle as well. So sitting here in this container, the Good Life Project, if I offer up the phrase to live a good life, what comes up? Yeah, I was thinking about this. To live a good life, I think a good life requires the pursuit of a right-sized vision of self. So what I mean by that is a lot of times we have either a too small sense of what this unit is, this I in the world. So I can't possibly make that change or I don't matter enough to say my

needs or whatever, or we have an over, you know, oversized sense of self. My needs are the only ones that matter. My actualization, you know, is the kind of singular pursuit. And it seems to me that a good life is this like employing all these tools, wisdom traditions, people in our lives, books, study, practices and habits, institutions, and more to find that right size, you know, that sense that I have agency and I also belong in a much bigger constellation that's bigger than me. Thank you. Thank you so much for listening. And thanks also to our fantastic sponsors who help make this show possible. You can check them out in the links we have included in today's show notes.

And while you're at it, if you've ever asked yourself, what should I do with my life? We have created a really cool online assessment that will help you discover the source code for the work that you're here to do. You can find it at sparkotype.com. That's S-P-A-R-K-E-T-Y-P-E.com. Or just click the link in the show notes.

And of course, if you haven't already done so, be sure to click on the subscribe button in your listening app so you never miss an episode. And then share, share the love. If there's something that you've heard in this episode that you would love to turn into a conversation, share it with people and have that conversation. Because when ideas become conversations that lead to action, that's when real change takes hold. See you next time. We'll be right back. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever.

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