When Sumita and I attended a two-day training  on India’s National Building Code, I never expected it would be such a turning point in my life. I thought we would learn some things about ramps, doorways and accessible toilets. I didn’t realize that it would change the way I think and speak; that it would inspire me to reimagine the built world in general and our own building in particular or that I would abandon the term “accessibility” entirely, realizing at last that it was irrelevant and maybe even insulting.

Now at Latika, we have stopped talking only about accessibility and started talking about universal design and the built world. We’ve stopped talking only about disabled kids and started talking about a world that works for everyone: nursing mothers who want to be out and about yet still give their babies the best start in life, teens who know there is more to life than Instagram and getting in to IIT, professionals longing to contribute to a better world, college students who want to make a difference, elderly folks who aren’t quite ready to sit on the sidelines, all the while recognizing – of course – that some of these children and adults are also disabled. The building we are planning will be the first of its kind in India: genuinely constructed to work for everyone.

Cover of the book: What Can A Body Do? by Sara HendrenThese ideas were in my mind already but reading “What Can A Body Do? How We Meet The Built World” by Sara Hendren sharpened them radically. (Thanks to Austin Kleon for the discovery!) One of the ways she defines disability is as  “a mismatch between a person and her environment,” implying that disability goes at least two ways. Or maybe more. The last chapter of Hendren’s book is titled “Clock” – an image she uses to expand on the quote she begins the chapter with:

Life on crip time.

When the clock is the keeper of our days,

what pace of life is fast enough?

Four clocks of different colors, all giving the time of a different time zoneThe ideas about time she explores are fascinating, but so is ending with an image of a clock, given how she grounds her thinking in the belief that there is actually no such thing as “universal” design. Each one of us tweaks everything – just a little bit – so that it becomes our own (think how many ways people take their coffee!). We are all at the centre of our own clocks and the hands that sweep round those same 24 hours we all receive every single day may crawl or speed by depending on our age, health, interest, creature comforts and state of mind. To say nothing of which time zone we’re living in.

And it’s those little tweaks (an extra ten minutes to climb the stairs; a cushion beneath a knee when sitting crosslegged; a cubicle of one’s own in an open plan classroom; noise canceling headphones to get through a day in a noisy building) and our openness to designing them, creating them, asking for them and accepting them that make the built world work for more and more of us.

I could write ten blog posts about this book and how it’s subtly and profoundly changed the way I think but what it did the most often was to make me smile. I love the optimism of design and its inherent belief in possibilities. I use the word possibilities and not possibility because good design is very specific and the best design invites variations, quirks and enhancements. Like Suzuki Roshi liked to say: You are all perfect just as you are and you could all use a little improvement.

As of three days ago I had bought and gifted all the copies of this book that Amazon had in stock here in India, but when I checked just now it seems they’ve found one more. Go get it, some lucky reader! It won’t be there for long.

 

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