What Can a Body Do?
How We Meet the Built World
Named a Best Book of the Year by NPR and LitHub
Winner of the 2021 Science in Society Journalism Book Prize
A fascinating and provocative new way of looking at the things we use and the spaces we inhabit, and a call to imagine a better-designed world for us all.
Furniture and tools, kitchens and campuses and city streets—nearly everything human beings make and use is assistive technology, meant to bridge the gap between body and world. Yet unless, or until, a misfit between our own body and the world is acute enough to be understood as disability, we may never stop to consider—or reconsider—the hidden assumptions on which our everyday environment is built.
In a series of vivid stories drawn from the lived…