Doing Disability Differently

Published in 2014, ‘Doing Disability Differently’ is a ground-breaking book that aims to take a new and innovative view on how disability and architecture might be connected. Rather than putting disability at the end of the design process, centred mainly on compliance, it sees disability – and ability – as creative starting points for the whole design process. It asks the intriguing question: can working from dis/ability actually generate an alternative kind of architectural avant-garde?

To do this, it reports on, and expands from, the work Jos has undertaken with disabled artists as part of The DisOrdinary Architecture Project. The book explores how thinking about dis/ability opens up to critical and creative investigation our everyday social attitudes and practices about people, objects and space.

The book:

• Argues that design can help resist and transform underlying and unnoticed inequalities;

• Introduces architects to the emerging and important field of disability studies and considers what different kinds of design thinking and doing this can enable;

• Asks how designing for everyday life – in all its diversity – can be better embedded within contemporary architecture as a discipline;

• Offers examples of what doing disability differently can mean for architectural theory, education and professional practice,

• Aims to embed into architectural practice, attitudes and approaches that creatively and constructively refuse to perpetuate body 'norms' or the resulting inequalities in access to, and support from, built space.

Ultimately, this book suggests that re-addressing architecture and disability involves nothing less than re-thinking how to design for the everyday occupation of space more generally.

Download the introductory chapter for free here

Purchase ‘Doing Disability Differently’ from the publishers website here