Disability Culture, Dance, and the Delights of Pleasurable Design

• In Event: Making Disability: Disability Culture, Design, and STS

Abstract

This video presentation emerges from my artivist/academic practice as a dancer and choreographer. In between sequences of movement, I offer a discussion of disability aesthetics and culture as they relate to the nexus of accessibility design thinking. What if accessible design also engaged the question of how to maximize the expression of impairment in addition to navigating functionality as a “solvable problem.” My work emerges from the intertwining of design thinking, lived disability experience and a commitment to intersection disability aesthetics, as articulated by Tobin Siebers and others. It asks not how do we make work accessible but how do we articulate access as an aesthetic drawing on thinkings and ideals ofdi sability culture itself.

Cited:

Tobin Siebers, “Disability Aesthetics,” JCRT 7.2 (Spring/Summer 2006): 63-73 at 64. Also, Tobin Siebers, Disability Aesthetics. Corporalities, Discourses of Disability. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010

Author

• alice sheppard