Book Sips #57 — “What Can A Body Do?” by Sara Hendren
T
he reason why Herman Miller chairs are so famous it’s simply because they are comfortable. What is not that well-known though, is that this is so because they were designed with a very specific user and their problems in mind: old people and backaches. That’s probably one of my favorite approaches to design: look into extreme cases to serve mainstream problems in a way otherwise would be even difficult to imagine. This book is about accessibility, but it’s not just about accessibility: in it, you find what in my opinion should be a framework to design we adopt more often, a way of putting design to really improve people’s life.
Sara Hendren’s ‘What Can a Body Do: How We Meet the Built World’ is delightful. Her experience working with people at the edge of what’s considered an average user together with her subtle perception of people’s singularities makes this book a must-read for all designers. In it, one can find a journalist’s view of ways of working to help people with disabilities and its results, insightful examples of how design changes live, but maybe most importantly, it’s a challenge to the conception that the world is already designed for people, inclusive. Look around and you’ll see we’re far from that. A sip:
“This familiar, comparative idea of normal is so common that perhaps it feels timeless and universal, but it wasn’t until around 1840 that the word was even used to describe human qualities in European languages. (Prior to that time, normal referred to being perpendicular or square, a technical term that would have been used, for example, by a carpenter.).”
👉 Designing for the average person is making all of us disabled
#joshdixit
What Can a Body Do?
by Sara Hendren
Why read?
Our perception of what’s normal is not fitting anymore the big majority of the population because is plainly wrong. We need to reassess our beliefs in that sense and this book is a great starting point.
304 pages, Prentice Hall Press, 2020
Get this book here on Amazon!
