"People with "in many cultures — and certainly in the US — a pervasive, near-obsession

All Technology
is Assistive
Ethics of
Estrangement

Sara Hendren
Sara Hendren disabilities have a
long history of
decisions being
made for them and
with averages and statistical norms about bodies and capacities has become
a naturalized form of describing both individuals and populations. But this
way of measuring people and populations is historically very recent, and
worth reconsidering."
things being done
to them, so they are Invisibility is overrated.
our richest source Tools for Enhancement
"AR gadgetry, games, or other means for Rather than camou age assistive
of knowledge about technology, Hendren asks, "What might a
how to become a visualizing alternate scenarios that enliven
or add operational depth to our hearing aid also do —or do instead—that's
cyborg with wits never been considered?"
intact, and they can experiences in the world" (57).
help researchers Rethink the default bodily experience.
change the Tools for Restoration "Sometimes heightened functionality is about
questions about "machinery that recreates, say, motion or
what technology reconsidering typical adaptations entirely,
sensation where it had been lost" (56). inverting the expected sensory mechanism."
should afford us"
(57).
Tools for Estrangement Consider fine gradations.
"in addition to enhancement and "[Medical technologies] operate with the assumption that a change in
restorative tools, we also create ability is primarily a biological condition, without thought for the
"Instead of posing prosthetics and all forms of body- broader ways the built environment can expand and shift to welcome
'solutions' to architecture that interrogate the multiple kinds of bodies and experiences."
'problems,' assumptions and ideas about the body, its
interrogative and capacities, and disabled-ness itself" (59). Uncouple medical technologies.
estranging tools ask
whether we are "I mean, rather, speculative and practical "What happens when a tool used for therapeutic reasons also points
asking the right technologies that upend all our outward from a diagnostic mode toward something more ambiguous,
questions in the expectations about what 'assistive aids' entering the realm of the poetic?"
rst place; they ask should do, who they are for, and how
Klara Jirkova's "Haptic Tattoo"

whether pure 'use' mysterious and often invisible the whole Design for one.
is enough" (62). economy of human needs really is" (62).
"Narrowing "design question to a single user" "suggests a much wider frame
for thinking about the 'future of work' in all its crucial qualitative sense."

Let the tools you make ask questions.

"Once freed from thinking in terms of creating tools for disability, designers
can create personal objects that disrupt our notions of dependence and
autonomy."

Thinker /Thought
Nathaniel A Rivers, 2017