What Can A Body Do?

How We Meet the Built World

What Can A Body Do?
Sara Hendren
RRP:
NZ$ 50.00
Our Price:
NZ$ 40.00
Hardback
h228 x 152mm - 304pg
18 Aug 2020 US
International import eta 7-19 days
9780735220003
Out Of Stock
Currently no stock in-store, stock is sourced to your order
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, living rooms 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 it based. In a series of fascinating stories and provocative explorations that draw on her own practice and cutting-edge disability theory, Sara Hendren translates this secret language of design and invites us to reboot it. What might a technology based on adaptation rather than "normalcy" look like? Can architecture foster interdependence as well as independence? How might a city be engineered to help us all 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 world that better meets the extraordinary range of our needs and desires.
Advance praise for What Can a Body Do? "Hendren makes us aware of the many ways we inhabit--and could inhabit--ourselves and the material world, including the difficult question of what ' the good life' really is. Nothing will look the same after reading this. " --Jenny Odell, author of How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy "This book illuminates both the daunting specificity and the inspiring universality of what most fundamentally shapes and challenges the work of design: our own bodies. Hendren forever reimagines the way we engage the built environment. " --Michael Bierut, partner, Pentagram "Hendren' s powerful, imaginative stories open up new mental and physical worlds for all of us, allowing us to renew our relationship to time, technology, and one another. " --Anne-Marie Slaughter, author of Unfinished Business and The Chessboard and the Web "Spare, elegant, and charismatic, this book is a call to carry out our ethical commitment to justice and access; it' s packed with stories and ideas that show us the way. " -Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, author of Extraordinary Bodies"A poetic, pragmatic, and powerful invitation to unmake and remake the world for every body. This book is transformative!" --Ruha Benjamin, author of Race After Technology"Thoughtful and compelling. Hendren makes a very strong case for taking into account humanity in all its irregularities when remaking the world. " --Henry Petroski, author of To Engineer Is Human"In her beautiful and brilliant What Can a Body Do, Sara Hendren helps us begin to imagine and enact a better world for human flourishing. If you are human, you need to read this book. "--Cathy N. Davidson, author of The New Education "An urgent work, told with compassion and authority. There is room for us all in this essential book. " - Joanne McNeil, author of Lurking
Sara Hendren is an artist, design researcher, and writer who teaches design for disability at Olin College of Engineering. Her work has been exhibited at the Victoria and Albert Museum, MOMA, and the Cooper Hewitt, and her writing and design work have been featured in The New York Times, Fast Company, and on NPR, among other places. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts with her husband and children.
Status: Indent title, imported to order
ISBN-13: 9780735220003
Published: 18 Aug 2020
Published In: United States
Imprint: Prentice Hall Press
Publisher: Prentice Hall Press
Format: Hardback
Height: 228mm
Width: 152mm
Pages: 304

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