S02E03 CreateCanvas Sara Hendren

Episode 3 features an in-depth interview with Sara Hendren. Sara is an artist, design researcher, and write who teaches design for disability at Olin College of Engineering. Her work has been exhibited widely and is held in permanent collection of MoMA and the Cooper Hewitt museum; her writing and design work has been featured in The New York Times and Fast Company and on NPR. Hendren has been a fellow at New America and Carey Institute for Global Good. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with her husband and children https://sarahendren.com/about/.
In this episode, Sara discusses how to shift thinking, and teaching, around disability from assistive design to adaptive design. Her book asks the question: “What might assistance based on the body’s stunning capacity for adaptation — rather than a rigid insistence on ‘normalcy’ — look like?” In the classroom, Sara resists the approach of tech-savior-ism and rehab engineering, to instead reframe all technology as adaptive: “take a look at your smartphone, the utensils with which you ate your lunch, the glasses or the contacts that you wear every day, the orthotic shoe on one side that’s helping you with a more comfortable gait — and call that all technology, find yourself in that big plane of existence, which is just an extended body with stuff that has needs.”
The syllabus for the course “Investigating Normal” can be found here - http://aplusa.org/courses/investigating-normal/
The syllabus for the course “Critical Designer/Activist Engineer” can be found here - http://aplusa.org/courses/critical-designer-slash-activist-engineer/
Both courses are part of the Adaptation and Ability Group, a technical and social lab for creative engineering and design on the subjects of disability, which Sara directs. http://aplusa.org/
Read the interview as a transcript, with images and links, on our Medium Publication here - https://medium.com/processing-foundation/createcanvas-season-2-interview-with-sara-hendren-2b51a5adcc44