What Can A Body Do?

Sara Hendren published What Can A Body Do? How We Meet The Built World in August of 2020. She is an artist, design researcher, writer, and a professor of engineering at Olin College of Engineering. Each chapter explores a different ability. In the first chapter her engineering class is challenged by the needs of an Australian professor and world renowned speaker of short statue. The speaker asked the class to build a lectern for her height that would be sturdy enough to hold her computer yet lightweight and portable enough to take on a plane. She was tired of standing on chairs and being made to fit into lecterns built for normal sized people. She wanted one to fit her body. The students were able to meet her needs. The whole idea of this book is to look at people of differing ability and design adaptations built for them instead of building adaptations that bring them closer to a person without disabilities. In another chapter she looks at building design at Gallaudet College. Doors to the building open automatically so conversations don't have to stop as one enters or leaves the building. Sight lines are increased so a person on the second floor can see a friend coming and reach out to them. She travels back to 1972 when some students at Berkeley insisted on curb cuts so they could access buildings at school. The idea of making curb cuts was questioned by one official as necessary because few people in wheelchairs were seen on campus. In 1990 The Americans with Disabilities Act was signed and curb cuts are mandatory and they are used. In another chapter she visited a facility in the Netherlands for people with memory issues. The facility is built like a small city with restaurants and stores and theaters. People from the nearby town also come to use the theater and restaurants and stores. I enjoyed this book because it helped me to view differing abilities in a different and more positive light.