Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Curbside pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
What Can a Body Do?: How We Meet the Built World

What Can a Body Do?: How We Meet the Built World

Hendren, Sara

Hardcover

Technology & EngineeringGeneral DesignIndustrial Design

Publisher Price: $27.00

ISBN10: 073522000X
ISBN13: 9780735220003
Publisher: Riverhead
Published: Aug 18 2020
Pages: 240
Weight: 0.90
Height: 1.00 Width: 6.20 Depth: 9.40
Language: English
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 experience of disability and the ideas and innovations that have emerged from it--from cyborg arms to customizable cardboard chairs to deaf architecture--Sara Hendren invites us to rethink the things and settings we live with. What might assistance based on the body's stunning capacity for adaptation--rather than a rigid insistence on normalcy--look like? Can we foster interdependent, not just independent, living? How do we creatively engineer public spaces that allow us all to navigate our common terrain? By rendering familiar objects and environments newly strange and wondrous, What Can a Body Do? helps us imagine a future that will better meet the extraordinary range of our collective needs and desires.

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