After Universal Design

More about the book

This interdisciplinary book, written by disability scholars, practitioners, activists, and disabled users and makers, pushes beyond ideas of universal design to argue for a new user-initiated design that can enable people with disabilities to participate more fully in their social, professional, creative, and domestic lives. After Universal Design illuminates how design often works in the real world, forcing a rethink of the top-down professionalized practice of universal design which has dominated thinking and practice around design for disability for decades. Contributors explore questions around design and personal agency, hardware, spaces and legislation. They examine the nuances of prosthetics wearing, conventional hearing aid devices designed to suit personal style, and ways to facilitate pain self-reporting. Using critical perspectives on disability, race, and gender, this book challenges prevalent ideas of inclusive design and social justice and explores how we might envisage developing with, not for.