Many of you will have heard about the recent and very public pregnancy, genetic test results, and abortion of a fetus with Down syndrome undertaken by a YouTube influencer and his wife. Jesse Ridgway shared his wife’s first pregnancy and their trajectory through routine screening tests for disabling conditions. They got a 95% likelihood prediction for Down syndrome, and at ~20 weeks gestation, his wife had an abortion. And then Ridgway told everyone about it.

I find very little satisfaction in the commentary that follows an incident like this, but the prose arising in my head is persistent. So herewith a catalog of responses and feelings, mixed:

An odd refreshment in the transparency and candor. The majority of babies with Down syndrome in utero are aborted — upwards of 68% in the United States and much closer to 100% elsewhere, including in the resource-rich welfare states of the world (Iceland, Denmark, others). Part of me welcomes the honesty of this couple. Their statements reflect the revealed preferences of most people in their actions, and some days I prefer this baldly straightforward calculus and speech to the impassioned, righteous rhetoric I see in online comments.

Every semester, in my disability and design class, I teach the basics of selective abortion to undergraduates. Hearing this issue laid out for the first time and conditioned by the politesse of the modern university, nearly all of them express an instinctual moral offense, or at least a deep ambivalence. But once in a while a student will venture forth a more unguarded account: Well, if there’s very little you can control about a child’s future difficulties, but you could control this one aspect ahead of time, why wouldn’t you? Or: look, some people just want to plan for a child who will eventually leave the house. They are saying what most people are thinking as they choose their choices, and I thank those students every time for speaking up. If having a baby is a lifestyle option, a project to earnestly manage, then why not utilize this (painful) culling process? It makes rational sense under a family-making project rubric.

If you don’t accept the optimized project rubric for having children, then you should think all the way through what an alternative rubric might be, and how it might shift the very foundations undergirding family-making, period. But most people short-circuit well before what Kierkegaard called “thinking a thought whole” — taking seriously a line of reasoning all the way through to its implications.1 For most people opining on selective abortion, including many of my counterparts in disability advocacy, it feels better to say publicly: You’re missing the heart of the matter, your judgments are misguided, I would never do what you did. And afterward, in any sustained conversation, most people will shrug and concede that each couple makes “the decision that is right for them.” We manage our collective uncertainty by redounding to the sole good of private choice: the project rubric. But it feels much better to see ourselves occupying the rightly-calibrated rhetorical high ground. On some days, I welcome couples like this just speaking very plainly.

What I can only describe as media horror. This must be partly a generation gap thing, but I was unprepared for the excruciating revulsion I felt in watching this couple receive, read aloud, and respond to the test results ordered by their doctor. I felt revulsion on their behalf, though — for their commitment to a distorted idea of authenticity and their golden-handcuffs commitment to making a living via clicks, all of which seemed to require an exhibitionism in extremis. Call it, maybe, catechized by the camera? They are stunned by the blowback, they’ve said. It seems like the scrim of digitally mediated life creates the conditions for this all-performance-all-the-time, but also for their surprise at the criticism. By now we know the pitfalls of online simulacra that’s nudging our real-time choices. It’s just that these macabre incidents lay it all bare: A life taped, edited, and shared by the influencer class bundles together the strong narrative structures that make a good story — what happened and what happened next, reversals of fortune — with the governing idolatry of self-display, in a tight feedback loop with a bloated, amorphous public that influencers call their “community,” something resembling friends and neighbors.

The intellectual anemia of our thin public bioethics. One of the most memorable lightbulb-switch books I’ve read in recent years is sociologist John Evans’s Playing God? Human Genetic Engineering and the Rationalization of Public Bioethical Debate. Evans traces a history of bioethics in the United States over the 20th century, showing how its professionalization in the 1960s-70s took first-order philosophical questions on health and medicine out of the public sphere and sequestered them into narrow forms of debate about technological means, bypassing substantive deliberation about ends.

Where once scientists and theologians routinely offered lively, existentially weighty frameworks for the public to understand the promises and perils of medical technologies, the formalization of bioethics reduced debate to much more procedural, safeguarding judgments. Contemporary bioethical practice seeks a prudential treatment of how questions, but it often leaves aside most questions about why. Evans says this change can be described as a “thinning” of the entire structure of bioethical discourse. For the matters in our lives that demand the most informed analytical precision and vivid philosophical imagination — demanding, that is, a thick rationality — we have the flimsiest, floppiest of discursive planes.

The Ridgways, in other words, have been abandoned to a paper-thin amalgam of their empiricism2 and their tacit project rubric for navigating the conveyor belt of choices that come with routine maternity care. What they needed was a big-wisdom metaphysical and cultural and clinical conversation as accompaniment, and what they got instead was what’s available: biomarkers and percentages and abstractions, and a spreadsheet calculus for the life of a human being. No wonder the comment sections in their wake feel so empty and unsatisfying.

And then, this:

Twenty years into sharing life with my own first of three babies, one with Down syndrome, I have, yes, a visceral wailing grief at the loss of a human person — one eagerly imagined as a person and then, overnight, un-personed by genetic information. Because it was their first baby, this couple was especially alone, especially ignorant about what they were assenting to or declining. The experiential divide between knowing a baby not yet born — even one kicking and present in your own body — and the one you hold in your arms and care for — it’s a gulf that begs for monumental metaphors. There’s an oceanic distance between the abstraction and its embodiment. Making room for a child isn’t fully thinkable-through with just your skull-shaped cognition. It’s in the habitus of your body. Becoming a parent is like swallowing a solar system: a reordered gravitational pull, a new series of orbits, with magnetism and polarities that sway all of life’s conditions. It is many things, but it is not a project.

Less talk, more come-and-see. Most of my energy goes to reporting on the best arguments-by-design for living outside of optimized projects. In the spring issue of Comment, I have a long piece on what I’d like to see more of in the world: affirmative forms of life that are designed and built and assembled and networked for people in embodied space-time. An architecture studio devoted to modest rural buildings; a village for dementia care; urban hydroponic agriculture. And some wandering meditation on design education, virtue ethics, and Christopher Alexander’s A Pattern Language. You might like it.

Honestly, though—enough chatter! Enough chatter from ponderous academics like me. I write this to remind myself most of all: I’d rather help nurture an irresistibly beautiful and human-constrained future.

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Glad you’re here. At some point you signed up for this newsletter; the unsubscribe button is below. Or maybe share it? I’ve finally hired an editor to help me get some of the several dozen drafted pieces out and into the world, so you can expect to see more here. In 2026 it seems necessary to say: No part of this newsletter, or anything else I write to you, is written with AI. Orson Welles said the enemy of art is the absence of limitations. You will always find me struggling productively against my own.

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In January, I ride through horizontal snow squalls alongside Lake Michigan with A, a perfect stranger, and make a rare easy drop into the deep end of conversation. We have a nonstop exchange for the four hours up to a midwestern ski resort and the four hours back. At the resort, I speak at length with a group of students about the gift economy laid out in Lewis Hyde’s classic book. You think Hyde’s telling you to give your gifts, like “giving back,” I say. But it’s weirder than that. Gifts precede you, mark your life. They invite you to imitate the pattern. This truth is hard for all of us to hear.

In February, my family and I visit one of our godsons at his college in Santa Fe, where students and professors all go by surnames and the bookstore’s technology supplies are almost nil. With great anticipation, we visit a couple of local parks featuring ancient petroglyphs, climbing among the big stones and looking to be awed. But the past is another country. We can’t summon a real appreciation for the marks and squiggles. Within days, Gene Hackman and his wife will be found dead in their Santa Fe home.

In March, in balmy Florida, I visit with another group of students at my friend M’s study center, talking gifts and virtues. The nearby university has been a political football in higher education, but the community I visit has zero interest in the culture wars. It’s all earnest seeking, genuine mentorship. Over a patio lunch together, M, a longtime student of Ivan Illich, says casually: Illich thought that grace is usually marked by a quality of surprise.

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In April, our son G, who’s 19 and has Down syndrome, gets lost after leaving a Chick-fil-A in downtown Boston. He leaves my husband Brian’s side without announcing it, probably to find me in a car nearby, except I’ve had to change my parking place without him knowing. He has left his phone at home. Five, ten minutes go by. We check in with the manager, S, who looks at the security footage, double checks all bathrooms. S, also a mother, sees our rising panic and becomes very, very calm and methodical: We should probably involve the police now. We’ll fan out, find him faster. I agree and walk nearly all the way to the Public Garden, deranged, imagining every terrible thing happening. I silently thank Jane Jacobs and the good citizens of Boston for preserving cities where people live and work in close proximity, inhabiting every sidewalk in dozens. “Eyes on the street,” Jacobs called it. Naturally occurring civic safety. G is probably okay. But my fear is heightened by knowing that he is unafraid. He has the least fear of anyone I know. He won’t register to anyone as lost.

A long fifteen minutes later, Brian calls me. S has found him. Not the cops, but the Chick-fil-A manager-mother who dropped everything and went looking many blocks away, equipped with one photo and a sharp eye. We reunite, take pictures with the officers who assisted us, get free hot food from S and her staff, and I cry in the car all the way home. Later that week I write a long commendation to corporate headquarters. S greets us warmly on subsequent visits.

In July, I swim in the river near K’s house in the woods. We find the stone benches and footholds under the dark edge of the water and talk lightly, candidly about our friendship: Is it sturdy enough? Should we see each other more? In midlife these things aren’t obvious. K keeps Christopher Alexander’s A Pattern Language on a coffee table for the slow DIY house remodeling underway, and I start to thumb through it.

In August, my friend M and I start a spontaneous micro book club conducted entirely on shared voice notes. We send seven- or eight-minute missives on the ideas we’re reading together: saints and martyrs, postwar humanism. My smart phone, mostly a diabolical source of idling distraction, affords weeks of asynchronous exchange by making audio communication seamless and intuitive. Now I do voice notes with my niece who’s a new mother and with a young friend sharing the ups and downs of her dating life.

It’s not a coincidence that my friend J taught me to love the voice note form. She is a concert violinist, philosophy lover, decades my junior, and blind. We trade notes fast and furious about our many shared interests. When it’s good, accessible design always bridges a barrier. In many cases, it opens up whole new vistas for experience. My son G has been teaching me this for two decades: new vistas are available. In case of my untimely death, maybe just put that on my headstone? NEW VISTAS AVAILABLE, EVEN NOW.

In early September, I attend a conference gathering people in academia and industry to discuss AI in higher education. I leave…pessimistic. At a faculty meeting, I am voice-shakingly righteous about the AI-led transactional capitulation of the modern university. It’s heavy handed. Later I regret it. Kind of.

In late September, I remind my architecture students that our seminar classroom conversations must be different from the ones happening in their apartment kitchens and in coffeeshops. It’s a spatial argument: In the casual rooms of our domestic lives, I say, we can shoot the bull. In the classroom, we’re aiming for something more rigorous. You can’t dismiss the reading on the vibes. We’re looking for sound reasoning, good evidence. I make a case for what results from this disciplined, collective thinking practice: liberal education, which is to say liberating education, becoming free. Or freer than before.

A week later we’re discussing Wendell Berry’s “Why I’m Not Going To Buy A Computer,” first published in Harper’s magazine, and we read several withering letters to the editor about the piece published in a subsequent issue. Taking in Berry’s placid, penetrating rebuttals—the way he amiably eviscerates, stands by his convictions—my student T says: this man has the quality of being free. I think: A bright-light intellect is in this room. T’s comment becomes a hinge for the whole term. We get liftoff as a group.

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In early November, our daughter F mentions in passing that when she submits her college applications via web portal, she uses a password that’s based on the one Brian and I first chose for our joint AOL account thirty years ago, just after we got married. This fact breaks me up for a good hour, and I think for the thousandth time about that scene in Boyhood with the mother in the kitchen bidding her son goodbye. She is exasperated and desperate: I just—I thought there would be more.

In late November, one of the priests asks me to pinch-hit as a reader at the noon mass. The first reading is from the prophet Daniel, who’s asked by King Belshazzar to offer counsel in exchange for fine goods. As though for the first time, I speak and hear the force of Daniel’s calm reply before he agrees to offer wisdom, but only for free: You, O King, may keep your gifts. Give them to another.

In early December, many of my architecture students opt for an oral exam final. I’ve given them all a gift copy of A Pattern Language, and they each express surprise at its insight and pragmatism. A couple of them start to grasp the more radical vision of Alexander’s anarchic and humanist project: a bottom-up description of the built environment, elevated to near-universals. We sit and talk, one-to-one, for an hour. The chatbots have been kept at bay. It’s my favorite cohort yet. I finish the term weirdly optimistic.

In mid-December, G asks us to let him walk alone to a local takeout place in the square and back home. There are eyes on the street, but there is also a dizzying array of moving objects and rules: cars and buses and bikes and e-bikes, scooters and e-scooters, one-way and two-way roads. He’s eager and capable. Fear is the bigger enemy. Okay, I say. We’ll try it this weekend.

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Prototyping, you may know, is the early try-and-see process that ushers some new idea into being. It takes whatever materials are ready at hand and makes a three-dimensional “sketch” of what’s being proposed—a way to think through your idea and test its merits before you commit to building the real thing. Prototyping generates the messy tabletop version, the wobbly fledgling creature: a tennis ball and a rubber glove, say, and dowels and staples, maybe some hastily patched duct tape. You have to squint to see what’s being offered, but it’s there. I learned to love prototyping at Olin College of Engineering, where I was a professor between 2014 and 2023. I’m not an engineer, and that may be why I could see prototyping with a beginner’s mind. I never fully grasped the details of engineering mechanics, so I never got caught up in the minutiae of the parts-and-systems. It was always the poetry that got me.

The poetry of prototyping is the vulnerable attempt, the tangible trying. The willingness to venture, knowing it might fail. The investment of commitment to even the most sloppy version of a possible newness. A thing being prototyped is trying to get born, unfolding right there in front of you. And all the conversations around that thing have the quality of willed belief: What if it was half as big? Twice as long? A different shape around its edges? Dozens of questions that are all really just versions of the best and only question in design, at the end of the day: Could it be otherwise?

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One class I team-taught at Olin was called Design Nature, a course all first-year students take that includes one solo and one group design assignment, both inspired by mechanical operations found in living biological systems. The group assignment is to make a play experience for fourth graders based on animal behavior — an interactive game based on, say, the way goat kids leap, or the way honey bees waggle. The students interview parents and teachers of fourth graders, do some developmental research, and then start prototyping. Like that image above — you build something so that you can think with that thing. So you can ask yourself candidly: Is the scale in my head really working in dimensional space? What are its functional qualities, and what are its dramatic qualities? Can you use that open mouth to catch balls? How easily, or how awkwardly, or how efficiently should it operate? What’s this experience supposed to work like, but also: what should it feel like? The prototype will teach you.

And then, near the end of the semester, local fourth graders come to campus and play the fully designed games. Hilarity ensues! Or maybe it doesn’t. Designing something charismatically playful is hard. I mean—have you tried?

It’s a quest to find the right combination of timing, surprise, and absurdity. No amount of mechanical prowess will guarantee you the sensibilities you need to design these qualitative features.

All the fourth graders get clipboards and forms to fill out about students’ games. Kids won’t flatter your ego. If it’s not fun, you’ll know.

Jennifer Banks helped me see that prototyping takes place inside a grander thing: natality, the ongoing creative force of newness that powers the world. In her book, Banks says most of us are lopsided in turning so much of our attention to the universality of death. We should and do reckon with mortality, mourning the many endings all around us. But we let death obscure the counterpart universality of birth, of natality. Birth “has long hovered in death’s shadow, quietly performing its under-recognized labor,” she writes. She means human birth itself, yes, but also the small-b births that form a pattern of everyday newnesses, the dying and rising that shapes our nights and days and seasons.

Kafka announced to us long ago that the meaning of life is that it stops. True enough. But Banks walks the reader alongside seven intellectuals who took seriously the bookend of starting: new life, fecundity and generativity — and, in my mind, our many distributed practices of creative midwifery that get new ideas off the ground. Hannah Arendt is one of Banks’s chief companions on natality. She thought our creative beginnings are not just universal but necessary, a strong stance against authoritarianism, a rebuke to brute force power. Natality, for Arendt, embodies the amor mundi, an outwardness and expectation of beginnings, of making room for others. She called it “the miracle that saves the world, the realm of human affairs, from its normal ‘natural’ ruin.” And the amor mundi has to start somewhere. Not just the endless talking about what the world should be like. Prototyping is beautifully restless and insistent: Show me how. Let’s start.

Do I make too much of a small thing? Maybe. In my own native practices of artmaking and writing, there are plenty of easy words for things like prototypes: drafts and sketches and studies. But those practices were so long in my habits that I’d stopped seeing them. I was out of place in the lab, bewildered at the white boards covered in equations, the arcane physics jokes, the tangled rainbow of wires extending from a circuit board. The messiness was joyful and familiar, but the tools and detritus were new. Engineering was both muse and stranger. But prototyping I recognized.

In my faith tradition, birth is joined to death across the liturgical year, and it’s seldom without emotion that I can speak aloud the ancient text from Isaiah when its recitation comes around. Prophetic verse offered in the present tense:

See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it?

A newness arriving now, and now, and now — natality as a fundamentally generous and emergent architecture of the world. We look the many faces of death square in the eye. But birth, too, is death’s (and our) companion.

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Last fall my book was the campus read at Stevens Institute of Technology; I joined them for the September convocation. I was also the ‘24-’25 Bickford Visiting Artist at the Cleveland Institute of Art and the Myers Distinguished Visiting Fellow in the Humanities and Civic Engagement at the University of Scranton. An engineering school, an art school, and a Jesuit liberal arts college! It was so gratifying to connect with all three communities over ideas about disability and design.

I’ve got work in upcoming exhibitions at the Victoria & Albert Museum and the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Seoul.

My first short film Simple Machine will be in six festivals and counting this year. We got the Audience Award for short docs at the Independent Film Festival Boston. More to come — reach out if you might like to plan a screening and companion event together. It’s 23 minutes, so it’s easy to attach to a series or talk.

It’s the start of the new year, and I should probably be over on Canvas refining my course sites. I can’t wait to meet my new students! But the American higher ed scene remains pretty fraught, and I’ve been thinking about the big picture this summer. Two of my three children are getting nearer to college, so the questions loom large for me professionally and personally. Maybe for you too? In a series of blog posts on my web site, I’ve tried to think through what feels most important in the decision matrix at our house, and I offer these ideas to others here, in hopes they might be clarifying. Below I’ve excerpted passages from each one, with links throughout.

Part 1 is about how young people need formation. You probably disagree with me on this! Most parents I know are taking their cues from their children’s stated desires, plus their family budget, and going from there. I get it. I really do. But years of teaching have taught me to think again:

Any time I express consternation about [how to choose a university], most people will jump to remind me, with a smug little side-hug, that it’s not me going to college. And what they mean is: as a parent, my job is to array the affordable choices for my children to see clearly, and then to step out of the way while my children choose. Whatever they’re into, I’m meant to support it. That’s the mature psychological way to do this, the thinking goes. Don’t make it about you, they say, knowingly. You’d be micro-managing.

But this is the first of many parenting presuppositions that make up the cultural water we’re swimming in and therefore can’t see. We imagine our children as maybe-slightly-immature but essentially fully-formed selves. Our job is framed as clearing the obstacles only; we’re tasked with whatever passive supports will help our children optimize themselves on their own terms. Whatever the good life is will be self-defined by our kids; who are we, as their parents, to say?

Part 2 is about philosopher Danielle Allen’s “readiness” framing for education: professional readiness, which is important and self-evident, versus participatory readiness, which is a set of civic literacies and practices for democracy. I think Allen’s terms are more specific and useful than the old “skills” vs “how to think” debate in liberal arts education. I’ve written about this here before, and I’ve been teaching this framing to students explicitly for a couple years now. It doesn’t always land easily:

Usually one of [my students] will say politely: Well, this participatory readiness sounds great, but given how much college costs, shouldn’t we be focused on the skills we need for jobs? We gotta pay bills. I see why this is their first-instinct response. But I say to them in return: Given how much it costs, shouldn’t you ask for that four years to give you something in addition to job skills? Some equipment for life ten, twenty years from now?

Even if you reject the idea of formation and think of college choice as a professional readiness proposition, I’d still argue that participatory readiness will make your kid more AI-proof than a narrowly scripted, industry-responsive, skills-led curriculum. It’s a tortoise-and-hare thing: They may learn the software to get them through the next five years, but what about after that? What ambitious projects might draw them, and what resources would they marshal to be ready?

In Part 3, I wrestle with the standard claim that the contemporary humanities contain all the readiness equipment that young people need to deliberate in a democracy. That’s Allen’s ideal — the classroom as civic rehearsal space — but I’ve come to think that buffet-style liberal arts proceduralism isn’t really sufficient for the biggest questions young people need to encounter. At some point they need the “prescriptive” domains of philosophy and theology. They need some truth claims that posit contested visions of the good life, and they need to grapple with them in good company:

My friend Sandra and I took a long road trip last summer, and she told me a story I’d never heard before. We were at Wheaton together, and she was one of the people whose faith, having been shepherded for her in k-12 Christian schools all the way through Wheaton, added up to far more questions than answers. This was troubling to her, finishing on such wobbly ground. Friends encouraged her to write to a much-loved theology professor and ask for advice. She had never taken his classes, but she did so in confidence. In a letter, by mail. You don’t know me, but I’m in trouble. Can you help?

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And in Part 4, I write about the perils of seeing a university campus as one space, rather than as a series of specialized spaces for specialized purposes:

In architecture, we call the aerial view of a blueprint drawing the plan view: seeing the entirety of a structure from above, with a 2D simulacrum of completion, simplified, each container dedicated for its distinct purposes and labeled as such. I think [Wendy] Brown is right that when many of us invoke the word “campus,” a plan view in the mind’s eye does not distinguish at all. Rather, “campus” registers as one big mass of squares and rectangles and rotundas, all equally devoted to the well-intended mixture of belonging and safety and professional preparation and the life of the mind and recreation — and somehow all adding up to “home away from home” — as one lumped-together design and one united effort.

Campuses should take a closer look at their spaces and sharpen the distinctions of those spaces, even literally in the first-year arrival campus tours. As in: “Here is the dorm, where you share life with others and build friendships based on late-night advice, on open-ended loyalty and support in heart-to-hearts.” And “Here is your classroom, which is an arena for ideas scrupulously examined right down to the foundations, where you are invited to change your mind — or just try on changing your mind, provisionally — between the opening and closing of the semester.”

Finally, in part 5, I list some institutions, programs, classes, and study centers that together might exemplify what I’m looking for: a recovered and renewed liberal arts ideal, yes. Four years at a university is one way (not the only way) to accompany young people in seeing their lives with a gift disposition. As I write in that post:

Buried in a footnote in Lewis Hyde’s classic study on gift economies is a stirring question that sums up the adventure I hope holds my two college-bound children — at least some of the time — in their years at university. Earlier in the book, Hyde names the gift economy as operating on eros in its classical sense, a form of unfettered attachment, a “shaping into one”:

In the modern world the rights that adults have in their children…normally pass slowly from parent to child during adolescence and become fully vested in the child when he or she is ready to leave home.

If our lives are gifts to begin with, however, in some sense they are not “ours” even when we become adults. Or perhaps they are, but only until such time as we find a way to bestow them. The belief that life is a gift carries with it the corollary feeling that the gift should not be hoarded. As we mature, and particularly as we come into the isolation of being “on our own,” we begin to feel the desire to give ourselves away — in love, in marriage, to our work, to the gods, to politics, to our children. And adolescence is marked by that restless, erotic, disturbing inquisition: Is this person, this nation, this work, worthy of the life I have to give?

This isn’t that famous Mary Oliver formulation that starts with the autonomous and authoritative self — what will you do with your wild and precious life? In a gift economy, the self is first on the receiving end of abundance — gifts hidden, apparent, emerging, hard-sought. It takes practice and imagination and breaking bread with the dead to help young people see life as a gift. And then it takes more of the same, and more besides, to help them ask with that same spirit of abundance: How can I give my life away?

Thanks for reading. My short documentary Simple Machine is finished and going into festival submissions. Let me know if you’d like a screener link! And more project news to come. Big year ahead. All the best.

Hi there — this is undefended / undefeated, a newsletter from Sara Hendren that you signed up for at some point. Unsubscribe at the bottom of the post. Listeners using screenreaders and others who enjoy audio: there’s an audio player bar just above this paragraph, with a play button on the far right. Do please let me know how compatibility is going.

Grace Jun’s book is out! Fashion, Disability, and Co-Design: A Human-Centered Design Approach is available for purchase and strongly recommended. It’s full of ideas and examples, and it’s rich with images, including lots of frameworks for good design process that will benefit designers and classrooms alike. I was pleased to write the book’s foreword, and I talked with Grace a bit about the book, what she’s learned in more than a decade as co-founder of Open Style Lab, and how young designers can take up high-integrity and beautifully creative projects in everyday gear, whether modest or ambitious, to make the world more flexible.

I asked Grace who the book is for — and about some of common misconceptions a beginner might have about design and disability:

“It’s not just for fashion students,” she said, “but design students in general — from products to architecture, material sciences, engineering, even fabrication. My target was an interdisciplinary audience from undergraduates to professionals, and I want people to see adaptive fashion as creative work — a celebration. But also, I've had students say, ‘I'm making a wearable something-something tool for someone with Parkinson's,’ and my response would be like, ‘Do you know anyone with Parkinson's? Let's start there.’ I realized I needed a step-by-step guide with visuals to help students digest observations and develop questions.”

Just look at these ingenious examples below. Some of them are comprehensive, like this wheelchair-adapted raincoat with a detachable blanket:

And some are the subtlest alterations, like this elastic action pleat in the shoulder seam of a blazer, creating more freedom of movement for a person using a wheelchair or other assistive mobility gear:

There are accessories, too, like this wheelchair-adaptable shoulder bag:

Plenty of readers will catch the infectious energy of reinvention at the heart of these designs, I predict — but many of them wouldn’t know where to start. Grace’s step-by-step approach is comprehensively laid out in the book, including a good discussion of disability-led design practice and the history of adaptive design:

And plenty of ethnography-style frameworks for documenting a person fully situated in their daily contexts. What are they trying to get done? What is the pattern of their days? What aspirations drive them, and what subcultures are they part of? Grace shows how design teams can make sense of complex wishes and needs and then map them in a digestible, actionable way. Like this study for a man with one arm who needed a bespoke bag for his daily commute:

This graphic was the result of student designers getting a comprehensive look at Josh’s typical trip to the grocery store. “Students and younger designers often have a preconceived opinion,” Grace told me, “but design practice asks them to restrain that. When you are making something that is for a bigger group than yourself, for different types of people, you have to learn to remove yourself as much as possible in the observation process.” I’ve seen it a hundred times in my own experiences in and out of the classroom: We all generalize too easily from our assumptions. Cultivating the capacity to ask questions, listen to the answers, attend to what’s happening for someone else, make sense of qualitative and quantitative data, rethink our assumptions, and then ask again — these habits discipline the mind of the designer.

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I asked Grace about how she matched design collaborators with teams of young engineers, fashion designers, and other fabricators. She told me, for example, how the team that worked with Justin, whose image is at the top of this post, got to the final design for his jacket.

“When I met Justin and his mother, Prow, he was a high school student at the time,” Grace said. “There were so many aspects of his life where clothing could really intervene. Justin and Prow approached me very deliberately and with a lot of honesty. I paired them up with a team based on students’ interests that I thought would align among skill sets and possible outcomes. Ruthie Merrill, an OT, Yuchen Zhang, who's a wonderful interdisciplinary designer, and Priyal Parikh, who was a creative technologist but had more of a bent for the technology side — she really wanted to deep dive into the material technology. They 3D scanned his body to see how they could use Rhino in a creative way.”

“After that matchmaking, I observed them for six to eight weeks,” said Grace. “We laid out all of the observations to see all the different samples of both tangible material research and theoretical research. That’s the most exciting part to me: to guide the thinking to match the material exploration and repeat that as many times as needed until the team's confidence was in a certain outcome.”

Open Style Lab is a treasure — I’ve been sending students to that program for years now, and it can be transformative. Grace’s book brings all this magic to living color. As I say in the last bit of my foreword: This book, celebrating Grace Jun’s work and the work of so many other visionary designers, is about the daily act of getting dressed. And getting dressed means getting out the door and into public life.

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Thanks for reading. I’ll be back soon with more project updates, interviews, and ideas. Thanks to Casey Parsons for production and research assistance on this post.

Faro café, in Harvard Square, gets its name from the Spanish word for “lighthouse,” and it’s got a no-laptops policy that is gently, but strictly, enforced.

You can look at your phone. You can use a little gaming tablet. But they’ve outlawed laptops — upright and rectangular cognitive anchors that suck all energy toward themselves. Multiplied across a room, laptops erect an office where a café had been. And Faro is trying to keep the office at bay.

But the office-style café is really great, you say. It is! You can go a few doors down in a couple directions and find some good ones. But Faro has their little manifesto printed and hung on one wall — unobtrusive, easy to miss — and they just want something else happening in the space.

I sent my architecture students to Faro and two other nearby sites this spring — a scavenger hunt to find some of the “limiting virtues” embedded in buildings. I got inspired by David McPherson’s The Virtues of Limits, where he lays out humility, reverence, moderation, contentment, neighborliness, and loyalty as virtues that constrain us in order to set us free.

All these virtues are laudable, surely, but not exactly high on the aspirational list in a culture more enamored of the active virtues, like courage and magnanimity. I wanted students to see where a built space takes away some freedoms — enforcing the moderation and contentment that mitigates all-screens-all-the-time, for example — and thereby opens up other freedoms. A no-laptops policy means you can’t get a certain kind of work done, but it does mean everyone present will be a little more eyes-up-and-talking, or maybe absorbed by a book or notebook. The activities will be at the speed of the body, one to another. Is it nostalgic and precious? Maybe. But it’s not the only café in town to make this move, and I think there’s some signal there. Faro started out with no-laptops only on weekends, and the policy was welcome enough to make it a daily norm. Over at Zuzu’s Petals, it’s no devices of any kind.

Across the street from Faro is St. Paul’s Parish, where you can come exactly as you are, but reverence is always encouraged — including in the weekday noon masses sung by a boys’ choir, complete with Elizabethan collars. (St. Paul’s has one of the only choir schools in the United States!) Sacred spaces aren’t a popular subject in architecture schools except as antiquarian study, I find. I suggested students visit either this great cavernous space in the middle of the bustling university square or the Cambridge Insight Meditation Center nearby, with its beautifully pared-down top floor of a grand old Victorian house. I could also have suggested a visit to the nearby monks’ dwelling at the Society of Saint John the Evangelist, whose exquisite stone chapel often features a sandwich board out front, enticing passersby not with lunch deals or storewide discounts but that rarest (limiting) thing: silence.

And speaking of silence, their last stop was the main branch of the Cambridge Public Library, especially its contemporary addition to the 19th century original.

The library holds a gradation of the limiting virtues: a half-quiet first floor with new books, tables and chairs for afterschool tutoring, and the information desks for everyone — the neighborliness of a public institution’s front door. The second floor features enclosed meeting spaces for groups on a first-come, first-serve basis, plus a really really quiet room for patrons wanting the moderation of all notifications off. The entire third floor is devoted to children — a beautiful raucous energy, with activity rooms, cozy nooks, and floor-to-ceiling windows on every side. A teen room in the old structure holds high-backed wing chairs and booths for semi-sedentary socializing, and a maker space occupies much of the basement. Things you can do and things you can’t, by design.

McPherson writes that the limiting virtues are grounded in the dispositional substrate of an “accepting-appreciating” stance toward the world, as opposed to the “choosing-controlling” stance that is the naturalized, invisible, and totalizing definition of 21st century technocratic freedom. No one wants life without choices, of course. But McPherson writes that the limiting virtue of loyalty — especially “loyalty to the given world” — is one way to cultivate this accepting-appreciating posture and to enjoy the freedom that it brings.

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What’s the opposite of loyalty to the given world? Maybe it’s what Tyler Austin Harper calls “therapeutic libertarianism”:

the belief that self-improvement is the ultimate goal of life, and that no formal or informal constraints — whether imposed by states, faith systems, or other people —should impede each of us from achieving personal growth. This attitude is therapeutic because it is invariably couched in self-help babble. And it is libertarian not only because it makes a cult out of personal freedom, but because it applies market logic to human beings. We are all our own start-ups. We must all adopt a pro-growth mindset for our personhood and deregulate our desires. We must all assess and reassess our own “fulfillment,” a kind of psychological Gross Domestic Product, on a near-constant basis. And like the GDP, our fulfillment must always increase.

Harper, reviewing Molly Roden Winter’s More: A Memoir of an Open Marriage, finds its account of polyamory not a breathless liberation but an anguished slog of misery, led by endless choices. Some philosophers would call this “radical autonomy” — the idea that a choice is automatically good just for having been chosen. Harper is skewering the particular alloy of individualism and therapy-speak among the cosseted classes:

In this way, More is a near-perfect time capsule of the banal pleasure-seeking of wealthy, elite culture in the 2020s, and a neat encapsulation of its flaws. This culture would have us believe that interminable self-improvement projects, navel-gazing, and sexual peccadilloes are the new face of progress. The climate warms, wars rage, and our country lurches toward a perilous election—all problems that require real action, real progress. And somehow “you do you” has become the American ruling class’s three-word bible.

The philosopher Charles Taylor has argued that, since at least the late 20th century, Western societies have been defined by “a generalized culture of ‘authenticity,’ or expressive individualism, in which people are encouraged to find their own way, discover their own fulfillment, ‘do their own thing.’” Taylor describes a phenomenon that’s all too easy to recognize in today’s pop psychology and the maundering of wellness influencers, but his concept doesn’t quite capture the extent to which this relentless quest for self-optimizing authenticity has infused our social and even political sensibilities.

I want architecture students to see that the flexible, modular, all-purpose and all-choices box of a room isn’t always what’s called for. It sounds right — surely your client wants a space that could be anything you need it to be — but unprogrammed space is often tractionless, characterless. A city should contain a whole panoply of richly imagined and specific spaces, containers built with interior features for freedoms and limits alike. McPherson calls us to a life with “enhanced autonomy”— a life with choices that are also informed by our loyalty to the given, unchosen world — what we might just call living with obligations. I’d like to see designers take a renewed look at limits in their partnership for civic goods: rules that constrain and liberate.

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Thanks for reading. I’ve been quiet here because I made a 22-minute documentary film, start to finish, between January and this week — a partnership with my husband and co-producer, Brian Funck, who is a genius. It’ll premiere at the Design for All? show at Museum für Gestaltung Zürich this summer and afterward in an online channel near you, I hope! Stay tuned. I’ve got the short film bug for sure; at least two others, also in dialogue with scientific ideas, are in the hopper.

I’m finishing up my first year at Northeastern and headed to my studio for the long summer soon. Got a new book idea and some painting-sculpture hybrids in the works.

Things I loved the last few months: Seeing Martina Majok’s Cost of Living. Reading the first two Earthsea books with my youngest, who just turned 14. Introducing my students to Penny Lane’s The Voyagers. Discovering Sir John Tavener’s Funeral Canticle. Wendell Berry’s Jayber Crow and Jordan Castro’s The Novelist. A class trip to the Arnold Arboretum to talk with Matthew Battles about the riotous life and history of trees, and reading aloud in class his stunningly beautiful editor’s note for Arnoldia: “Balm for a World of Wounds.”

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How do you describe the design of the stuff all around you, beyond what you like or don’t like, beyond what’s interesting or cool or boring? Next semester I’ll be teaching a class called Writing About the Built World. We’ll examine a mix of academic and journalistic criticism — for architecture, design at all scales, and technology — and we’ll look for analysis of objects and environments in all kinds of unexpected places: podcasts, movies, fiction. We’ll practice finding the most precise language we can for all the stuff that’s around us, the better to both cultivate our own sensibilities and to see the choices designers make as choices — choices that could always be different. I usually offer a word bank to get students going:

And I often start by looking at several projects that have meals and eating as their subject, orchestrated in very different ways, as a lesson in contrast. For example:

The Manhattan restaurant Hearth, in the early days after they opened, had a box on every table like this to invite diners to keep smartphones out of their mealtime. How would we talk about this arrangement of choices? It’s a suggestion, not a policy, and the container is open, not closed. The box is embossed tin and printed with a demure floral, like something from the 1920’s—not an armed safe, and not a bag for the coat check. Is this a subtle, nostalgic nudging? Is it an elegant escape hatch from digital life? Or is it paternalistic? Overly precious, even twee? Finding the words for this designed object-and-experience helps you figure out the assumptions behind the choices and the origins of your reaction. Compare Hearth to something else:

Conflict Kitchen, in Pittsburgh, serves food from regions of the world with which the US is in conflict. So they have programs and lectures and “lunch with an expert” on offer. But notice the design of the actual structure: it’s a trendy modern kiosk, heavy on stylish graphics, and the signage is just their name and the cuisine you can (temporarily) purchase there. So we might say this project leads with approachability — no protest posters or policy recommendations out front, as you see here — and follows with an invitation to more information, more provocation, if you so choose. A design group interested in politics could do otherwise, of course, with some aesthetic and programmatic changes. They could have decided to employ the confrontational, DIY graphic style of the handmade stenciled typeface. They could have printed menus with foreign policy demands on the back. They could have foregrounded the conflict part of the project, but instead they foregrounded the kitchen — the feasting, the conviviality, the enterprise. These are all choices, and it’s worth asking why. Now add another to the mix:

Eenmaal (pronounced “ayn mahl” in Dutch) means “one meal” — a meal for one. Eenmaal was a temporary project designed as an experiment in solo eating as the only option available, as you see in these single-setting black cubes above. The beauty of the project is its indeterminacy: is it a destigmatized way to go out to dinner unaccompanied? Or is it a foreboding commentary on loneliness and atomization? The stark black-and-white aesthetics mimic the austerity of the minimalist art gallery, and the name “one meal” carries a kind of ominousness. But the press coverage was mixed: maybe it’s the dystopian present, or maybe it’s the reinvented future. The ambiguousness is designed—intended as a question, held aloft and unresolved. Now add one more:

In Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and other cities in the United States, Vertical Harvest brings agriculture to urban environments by way of hydroponics: vegetable gardens that grow up, rather than out. They assemble an unusual mix for their social mission, seeking out underutilized spaces in cities, using high-tech systems for cultivation, and employing people with physical and developmental disabilities in what they call a “grow well” model of making both food and jobs. Vertical Harvest is a pragmatic approach to urban agriculture, with an optimistic use of fast technology and slow investment in historically under-employed people. There’s a provocation here, but it’s not like Eenmaal’s enigmatic and haunting vibe. Vertical Harvest is a solutionist recombination of old and new.

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My students in design pick up the skills for a strong sense of agency. Design is inherently forward-looking — it’s driven by proposals, by what-if questions, by the intentional arrangement of parts, people, and interactions in a hundred possible variations. I want them to have more words for the responses they have to others’ work, but also to recognize just how many choices they have as they make things of their own. One reliable A/B test helps distill the matter in class, and that’s Fiona Raby and Anthony Dunne’s comparison list from Speculative Everything:

After showing them the projects like the ones I’ve laid out above, I often ask students to choose a disposition from this A/B scenario. Not as a commitment, but as a temperature-taking exercise. Are they A-trained, but B-curious? And so on. Design does lots of things, and the word bank is a way of opening up new vistas when students are stuck.

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Thanks for reading. I’ve got a reported piece in the December issue of Harper’s, about a radical and imaginative partnership between professional artists and adults with cognitive disabilities at a day center outside Edinburgh. Intelligence, authorship, eugenic histories, and the beautifully inefficient vitality of making art as an encounter between people.

I’d love to know what you think. There’s more to say about all that, and I will, soon. Wishing you a beautiful end to 2023 and plenty of new vistas opening up in the new year.

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I have just spent weeks teaching my graduate students in architecture about disability in the built environment. We’ve looked at adaptive cardboard furniture and architecture for dementia. We visited the Boston Center for Independent Living. We navigated city crosswalks in the company of Julia LaGrand, a violin conservatory student who’s also blind. We read about DeafSpace, about tactile museum tours. I could have spent weeks more on this unit. The inventiveness in design is endless.

We also read and watched films about Ed Roberts and Judy Heumann — two of many American polio survivors in the mid-20th century who came of age in the civil rights era and took up its causes accordingly. Biology is not destiny, they said. Like race or gender, the body’s markings, its capacities and morphology, are not the totalizing definition of a person. Roberts and Heumann refused to be diminished as merely clinical “cases.” The Independent Living Movement was premised on an idea of liberty that meant not “self-sufficiency,” as Heumann famously said. Instead, it meant “self-determination”—becoming the protagonist of one’s own life, not only the object of others’ decision-making.

For people like Roberts and Heumann, freedom would be realized in a broad left coalition for universal human rights: recognizing full personhood for each human being, irrespective of ability. People with all kinds of disabilities have formed those coalitions not based on specific bodily needs, but on a shared wish to de-medicalize human worth. To be recognized as citizens, and not (or not just) patients, with all the actionable guarantees that citizenship entails. The best examples of design for disability perform this broadening task, making more of the world accessible and flexible where it had been rigid and exclusionary. It’s the oldest and still-challenging democratic project—pluralism, capacious and supple, seeking common goods masked by difference.

However! This time I ended the unit with the big looming counter-narrative of disability laid out by sociologist Joseph Davis: “All Pathology, All the Time.” In the same decades of increased inclusion in schools, de-stigmatizing difference, better technology, and adaptive fashion, a paradoxical development has closely followed: not de-medicalization but rampant medicalization, a clamor for ever more labels and distinctions, an expansion of the medical purview over more realms of human variation and activity.

We have grown accustomed to hearing that yet another behavior, emotional state, temperament, or bodily experience — some feature of life not previously regarded as a syndrome or disorder or addiction or risk factor — will henceforth be defined and treated as a medical problem. Those unhappy with their shyness or fear of criticism may be diagnosed with social anxiety disorder. Women not sufficiently interested in sex may be diagnosed with female sexual interest/arousal disorder. Kids who do not pay adequate attention to their studies may be diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. (One fifth of America’s twelve-year-old boys have been.)

Why, in an era of rejecting scripted ideas of “normal,” wouldn’t we see at least as much contraction in medical diagnostics as we do expansion? Davis can only find three or four historical examples of de-medicalization in the last half century. The dominant trend is more: more labels, more professionalized treatment, more medical records making variation into pathology.

Demedicalization … might be thought of as the process of raising the diagnostic thresholds for a condition so that it captures only serious and debilitating clinical cases. By this process, what the psychiatrist Peter Kramer once called “diagnostic bracket creep” would be reversed; cases sometimes referred to as “mild disorders” and “subthreshold syndromes” would be eliminated. The domain of pathology would shrink, and far fewer individuals would be subject to medical management.

But this reversal too appears to hardly ever happen. The solution to the “unreal” ADHD epidemic that [DSM-5 director David] Kupfer noted would have been to change the criteria for the diagnosis so that kids with mild “symptoms” are not diagnosed or treated. But instead the DSM-5 lowered the thresholds even further. The unreal epidemic got worse. More youth qualify for the diagnosis, which is now also skyrocketing among adults.

In the long legacy of civil rights that fought hard to shed labels and bring our shared humanity into the foreground, what explains this parallel phenomenon? I was treading lightly in class, knowing that my own students are most likely affected by the dramatic uptick in anxiety and depression among young people. But I felt like I had to raise it: Why is medicalization now so rampant, and what other social factors compound it? We might name profit motives—big pharma, but also identity-tagged social media algorithms that incentivize and distort classic in-group behaviors. We might point to the demotion of the family in civic life, which encourages nervous parents to outsource expertise. We might point to one of Davis’s own explanations in his book—that a purely materialist description of the entire self means that all inconvenient human variations are indeed physical glitches and therefore framed as problems to be solved. If the self is just chemistry, then everyday suffering—understood to be a non-negotiable feature of every mundane human life by all the world’s major wisdom traditions—is reducible to mechanics, just in need of more precise diagnostics.

Perhaps you might say: these numbers reflect a misplaced structural complaint. At long last, a statistically significant number of people are willing and able to say that the status quo arrangements of schools and workplaces are excessively shaped by capital and its demands for productivity, efficiency, turning the person into a cog. I think this is half-true, perhaps? And also complicated by the empirical facts of young people’s real distress. Objective measures like suicide and self-harm are also up, which doesn’t indicate a lot of success so far in the medicalization boom.

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To be clear: Human suffering is real. No one should be in the business of grading and adjudicating what’s happening in the interior worlds of others. The question is whether medicine has sequestered for itself, or has been forced to absorb, both biomedical and existential matters. What is the nature of everyday variation and everyday suffering? And what resources might name or mitigate them? What freedom comes from escaping labels, and what freedom comes from grasping for them?

This paradox gets weirder still. There are some big flashy examples of de-medicalization—like that NYT story about folks refusing anti-psychotics in favor of “hearing voices,” and there are critics like Freddie deBoer who reject this kind of de-medicalizing, saying that the problem in the case of serious mental illness is, if anything, under-diagnosis (and the failure of our health care system to properly and thoroughly treat these conditions). There are parents like me, who are aware of how recently the invention of IEPs and accommodations granted our children even the most basic rights to mainstream classrooms—and are therefore a little bewildered at the dramatic rise in disability accommodations claims at the most elite universities in the world. It’s never been less clear what a politics of recognition looks like, much less a true liberation.

Near the end of Robertson Davies’s novel The Manticore, a therapist tells a patient that he has done the good psychological work of figuring out who he is—articulating the family origin story, surfacing his mixed motives. The therapist then charges him with the deeper task: knowing what he is. Disability, as ever, offers a prismatic view of the human person. Its capacities and limitations, its normal curves and the edges of those same curves—they invite us to probe the deepest question of all. What is a human being for?

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Thanks for reading. I’m enjoying Northeastern! And working on a film. An architect, a woodshop, the history of machines, and the art of one-handed tools.

A bunch of other new project updates coming in a month or so. Magazine piece, museum acquisition, new studio! And I’d be happy to hear from you.

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I’ve heard versions of this question for years: What if the design moves we make to expand the access of our idea—our building, our app, our gadget of whatever kind—what if that expansion effort in one way accidentally diminishes access in another way? People are worried that their design isn’t universal—and therefore whether they should try to bring it to life in the first place. But making a more accessible world is a broad and shared horizon, not a checklist, and I want to suggest six verbs, in pairs of three, for giving texture and specificity to the things you might be trying to make. Should you seek to make your idea as barrier-free as possible? Yes, in principle. But a big horizon contains within it lots of posts and perches—lots of places to take up parallel projects that aren’t in an easy hierarchy of better-or-worse. For example:

destigmatize / celebrate

A whole line of research and development goes toward miniaturizing hearing aids—where the design value is to make the tech as diminutive and out of sight as possible. This is a destigmatization project: one to address the subjective reasons older adults are reluctant to take up this vital technology, for example (citing “cognitive anxiety associated with increased help-seeking”).

But there’s also a parallel celebration project happening in design, especially among the “out and proud” subcultures within disability rights activism. This hearing aid jewelry has lots of variations on it—where the design value mimics the logic of fashion and glamour. Think, too, of children’s cochlear implant technology, which very often comes augmented by a small plastic dinosaur or other colorful figurine. The point here is to celebrate (and yes, obliquely, thereby destigmatize) by enhancement and strong visibility.

Which motive between these designers is “correct,” more contemporary, more enlightened? This is a boring question. The much more interesting invitation here is to ask yourself: Who are my design partners? What is our collective theory of efficacy here? And when I set out to pursue my idea, do I have the humility to acknowledge these parallel paths taking place?

mitigate / accommodate

At the De Hogeweyk residence for dementia patients in The Netherlands, the built facilities form the simulacrum of a village: there’s a hair salon, gym, theater, restaurant, pub, grocery store, all operative and all dedicated spaces (as opposed to the bland and featureless “multipurpose room” in many elder care settings). These surroundings have strong placeful-ness in their sensory cues, which reduces the agitation and anxiety among patients there—a reassuring set of signals about where they are in space, which can be just as confusing as the slipperiness of time. Patients at sites like this seem to depend less on medication—which makes this design a mitigation project. It’s architecture, in part, as palliative care.

But contrast that with DeafSpace architecture, like at Gallaudet:

Here the logic is design to accommodate, not cure. DeafSpace is a codified series of spatial principles that help guide a building’s shape around deafness, rather than create the condition of hearing. So: long sight lines, in-the-round meeting spaces, hallways that end in a curve rather than a 90-degree point (the better to see folks coming around the corner), and much more.

automate / accompany

Design can also work as an automation effort—as in the ALS Residence Initiative started by Steve Saling, who has now-advanced ALS. Saling trained as a landscape designer, so when he got his early diagnosis, he both 1) watched the latest in medicine in hopes of a cure and 2) set out to design a sustainable life for himself with as much technologically-enabled independence as possible. With a small metal cursor perched on the nose bridge of his glasses, he can navigate the wheelchair-mounted tablet in front of him to activate text-to-speech, raise and lower the blinds, turn on and off his media, summon the building elevators. It’s the best use of automation, alongside a strong affirmation that life is worth living, even when our bodies change dramatically.

But what about that subtler thing—something both practical and affective, but more modest by far?

Inclusive design can also make new connections among people, often in simple moves. Speaking Exchange connected Brazilian high school students learning English with older adults in assisted living outside Chicago. The result was elegant and straightforward: matching an extant resource (adults with extra time and fluent English) with a best-practices pedagogical need (students looking to learn colloquial, extemporaneous speech). It’s technology for accompaniment, and getting it right is much harder than it looks.

So again: seek the universal? Of course, however close you can get. But assume that the world needs a whole riot of adaptive design at all scales—with sharply articulated motives and methods happening in parallel. Students, I say to you especially: be generous with each other while you seek your verbs and forms and topics. It’s a shared horizon, not a moral hierarchy. Look for all the ways you can both critique and repair. Think estuary, not tent.

Thanks for reading. For more along these lines, take a look at Elizabeth Guffey’s new edited collection called After Universal Design. It’s got a lot of ideas from great thinkers! I have an essay in there about speculative design where it meets disability—with some words from Carl Sagan, tours through the work of Natalie Jeremijenko and Krzysztof Wodiczko, and more.

I review David Gissen’s The Architecture of Disability in the new Landscape Architecture Magazine. It’s online today, here.

I’m teaching Design Tactics and the Human Body this fall at Northeastern. My friend Jarrett Fuller and I have been having an exchange about his “shearing layers” idea of design education.

The Cooper Hewitt’s Give Me A Sign show includes the icon project, if you’re in NYC this month.

The Dallas-based urban design group Better Block says it very plainly: they try to help people improve cities by not over-thinking every decision. They do the substantial physical work to pose a temporary but true-to-scale possible future for a city street, like this one—a plausible new arrangement set up for a weekend or so, in the hopes of helping people see an idea come to life, the better to judge its merits. It’s the commitment of a three-dimensional sketch, with a piano and furniture and semi-mature trees, but with the provisionality of impermanence. An idea brought to tangible life, and yet reversible.

When any group of neighbors wants to discuss their local streetscape, there’s an almost fore-ordained set of dynamics: a group that’s excited about change, a group that’s resistant to change, and a mix of folks in the middle. It’s the predictable way possibilities get tied up in committees for years on end. You need champions of as-yet-unseen futures, and you need the cautious voices raising possible harms. But debating everything in the abstract is often a losing proposition, if only because of the telephone-game of communication: What are we actually talking about? What would this idea look and sound and feel like?

Better Block understands that design gets its life from daring to commit—to place some objects in public space, to fill the void of a blank script—while also cultivating an open-handed process. The best design runs modest pilot projects in order to learn: pilot projects that take up real space and time with objects and policies, but with enough lightweight constituent parts and contained timing to avoid the roughshod mistakes of top-down plans.

Commitment and provisionality are key to design process, but they can also be strong features of a design in its final state—artifacts or environments where questions are part of the deliverable. Like Cas Holman’s Rigamajig:

The Rigamajig is a kit of parts for children to make things: like a Lego-style set of simple machines. Pulleys, hooks, fasteners, and gears, all with the weight and quality of serious machinery, and big enough pieces for small hands to manipulate.

Kids know when a toy is a tepid simulacrum of something in the real world. Rigamajig has authentic heavy mechanics; it also has the pale unfinished wood and legible joinery that signal a world under construction.

Commitment and provisionality: it’s hard to get these two to play together as equally strong values. Most new designers and engineers err on one side or the other. The multi-purpose room in a church basement is left so stark as an envelope—rectangular pattern of walls, windows, some cafeteria tables and cheap folding chairs—that the provisionality of “it could be used for anything” is a recipe for uninspired blandness, ending up in under-use altogether. Or instead: the app with all its features frontloaded in early commitment, only “user tested” in the very end stages, and therefore overdetermining the means to engage.

Speaking of the multi-purpose room: This is the standard space you’ll find in residences for older adults—the big box where you have, say, yoga in the morning and a lecture in the afternoon.

In my book I take the reader to De Hogeweyk, a pioneering center for memory care in Weesp, the Netherlands. They redesigned their space nearly two decades ago, following from a principle of “favorable surroundings.” De Hogeweyk embodies the commitment of place-ful-ness throughout its campus:

It’s a locked facility that opens to a village: plaza and miniature streets, plus spaces that are vividly specific. A barber shop, music room, gym, theater, grocery store.

Strong commitment in design is good for dementia, where challenges in memory about time are frequently attended by confusion about space—where I am now, where I was before, where I’m headed next. Memory care facilities that use architecture well depend much less on anti-anxiety drugs for their patients compared to control cases. It’s architecture as mitigation, even treatment. Strong commitments and specificity instead of the good intentions in “multi use.”

But the highlight of De Hogeweyk is its clever delivery of the provisional, too. The Cafe de Hogeweyk is a semi-private, semi-public restaurant on its campus. You can eat there as a local with no connections to the resident adults. Everyone in the space—staff, residents, caregivers, and the general public—agree to be together in ways that might look unusual socially. Residents may wander in, confused; they may speak in non sequiturs. But the restaurant’s safe and secure conviviality keeps those residents from being fully out of the public eye. Picture the aerial blueprint of this space with dotted lines around its perimeter: humane provisionality for the care of vulnerable elders.

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Thanks for reading.

Short: Thoughts on accounting for suffering, the miracle of birthing, and ideas for remaking an engineering school.

Long: I’ve got some new writing coming out this year—an essay in Elizabeth Guffey’s collection called After Universal Design, a book review in Landscape Architecture magazine, and an essay and project in a kind of festschrift for my mentor from Harvard, Krzysztof Wodiczko—more to come on that, and more besides. I’ll update here as those come out.

In fall 2023, I’m starting a new job at Northeastern University here in Boston! My post will be half in Architecture and half in Art + Design. I’m leaving Olin after nine great years, and I’ll be glad to stay nearby. This summer, meanwhile, I’ll be giving talks at the Institute for Theology and Disability at Baylor, and the Future of Design in Higher Education conference at MIT.

I’m trying out micro.blog, too, if you’re there and want to connect, and I still post a few things on LinkedIn, which is exactly as clunky and boring as a professional social network should be.

Is my only option existential dread? That was the question a student posed to my nonfiction seminar last fall after reading David Foster Wallace’s “Consider the Lobster”—a commissioned essay for Gourmet magazine, in which Wallace turns a travel piece about a summer lobster festival in Maine into a meditation on the ethics of boiling sea creatures alive. My student was asking a question about Wallace’s writing but more about her own thinking: Wallace doesn’t arrive at a “side,” and what was she to do? She was left without a persuasive case to either accept or reject. This was new for her. New for her and a professor’s dream—the chance to elucidate why it matters that we think alongside the writer, tracking the deliberation itself, without resolve. This writer is offering us a faceted view of ideas, I told her: a guide who is turning the jewel of an idea slowly in one hand, examining and narrating as she goes. Writing as accompaniment—and bracing solvent along the way—for the reader’s blinkered parochialism, tribal assumptions, lazy logic.

No topic begs for reading as accompaniment more than the topic of climate change. I find it alarming to hear so many people resign themselves to the abject despair of young people with a kind of intellectual shrug. When you think about what’s going on in the world, the planet—who can blame them, etc. There’s always a knowingness, a self-consciously sage omniscience in this expression. They accept this state of affairs as inevitable, even as evidence of a clear-eyed sobriety among the next generation. But the hyperobject that is climate change requires the very kind of deliberative and slow thinking that my (perceptive, nearly-graduated) engineering students deserve. The kind of thinking-in-writing they don’t seem to know is out there—a fact that is equally alarming—but that they really are hungry for.

Maybe you also spend time with young people in this state of affairs. If so, let me offer a roundup of good writing on climate that might mitigate the creep of nihilism that colors so many conversations about this topic. [And here’s the requisite “to be sure” proviso]: The urgency is real! And each one of these writers knows that. These pieces accept and name the urgency of climate corrosion. But they also go on to address what the environmental artist Natalie Jeremijenko calls the “crisis of agency” in the face of overwhelming data. How would we understand our lot in a more historically situated way? And what do we do on a given Tuesday? Several of these are paywalled, alas—but, as I also tell my students, smart writing needs paying for.

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1. Rebecca Solnit’s “The Habits of Highly Cynical People.” Here Solnit takes on the self-appointed experts in climate conversations whose trump card is always fait-accompli language. As Solnit says, it’s hard for most journalists to characterize the irreducible uncertainty of any particular aspect of the issue: “‘We don’t actually know’ is their least favorite thing to report.” And she takes on the temptations of cynicism as a sinister vice:

Cynicism is first of all a style of presenting oneself, and it takes pride more than anything in not being fooled and not being foolish. But in the forms in which I encounter it, cynicism is frequently both these things. That the attitude that prides itself on world-weary experience is often so naïve says much about the triumph of style over substance, attitude over analysis.

Solnit has been an active part of climate mitigation efforts for a long time, and she’s asking all of us to be as disciplined and specific as we can about the unknowability of our situation. It’s a love letter to people “who love the world more” than their own certainty:

What is the alternative to naïve cynicism? An active response to what arises, a recognition that we often don’t know what is going to happen ahead of time, and an acceptance that whatever takes place will usually be a mixture of blessings and curses. Such an attitude is bolstered by historical memory, by accounts of indirect consequences, unanticipated cataclysms and victories, cumulative effects, and long timelines.

2. Meehan Crist’s “Is it OK to Have a Child?” Crist’s essay in the LRB is a tour de force of structural issues, with the narrowest visceral thread of her own pregnancy and childbirth. She doesn’t shy away from any of the challenges here, and the zoom-out, zoom-in writing rhythm is beautifully high-contrast. Young people dwell on childbearing as a big index of climate seriousness (they earnestly wonder if “the world will even be here in 25 years”), and it’s worth putting this piece in their hands:

‘I watch climate change happen every day on a computer,’ the climate scientist Kate Marvel said recently,

on a fake planet that I can do experiments on. But climate change doesn’t happen on a fake planet; it happens on our planet, in the world that we’ve built. You can’t put Bashar al-Assad in a climate model. You can’t put the legacy of colonialism in a climate model. The drying trend we’ve seen in the Levant region interacts with the world we’ve actually built. Climate change is ... not something you can remove from the complexities of human society.

Those complexities may alter the nature and the extent of catastrophe. All of which means that the consequences of the heating climate are extremely difficult to predict. Pessimism may be warranted; fatalism is not. The future is not written.

3. Ezra Klein’s shorter piece called “Your Kids Are Not Doomed,” tackling the same topic as a meditation on climate despair, reframing the entire matter with lucid and succinct reasoning, and again quoting Kate Marvel:

   To decarbonize society is to embrace a better world, for reasons far beyond climate change. “The immediate benefits of climate mitigation actions are spectacular: better air quality, better health outcomes, reduced inequality,” Marvel wrote to me. “I want these things. I also want reforestation and peat bogs and coastal restoration and rewilding. I’m excited about (but not counting on) awesome new tech like cheap carbon removal and nuclear fusion. I’m more excited about boring but effective tech like heat pumps and transmission lines.”

   This is a vision of more, not less.

   

4. Wen Stephenson’s “Carbon Ironies.” Stephenson is a similarly wise guide, including in this book review from a number of years ago, taking on William Vollman’s Carbon Ideologies. I re-read this every six months or so to remind myself what he says: that “there won’t be any climate justice, or any justice at all, no matter what the global temperature may be, if we lose our democracy”:

   So, yes, Vollmann and other doomists are right that it’s a no-win situation—depending on what you mean by “win.” If you mean “stopping” or “solving” climate change and preserving the world as we’ve known it, then the climate fight was “lost” a long time ago, maybe before it began. And yet science also tells us that, even at this late date, some versions of “losing” could look far worse than others. We can still lose less badly! Not the most inspiring battle cry, perhaps, but when you understand the stakes—human survival—still a cause worth lifting a finger for.

   (I see that Stephenson worries recently that there’s an “optimism problem” in climate circles. I’ll pay attention to this—but Wen, have you spent time with undergrads lately? I’m not yet convinced.)

5. At the most macro and existential level, I recommend Tara Isabella Burton’s book Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World. Burton does a masterful job at synthesizing the proto-religious underpinnings of widely varying socio-cultural phenomena in the last several decades, including far right and far left politics but also forms of “remixed” spirituality in the middle. She doesn’t take on climate politics explicitly, but she lays out a precise and measured assessment of the way social justice language is sometimes imbued with a religious zeal in secular environments like the modern university—one that meets the deep human need for moral structures but can get in the way of deliberative, evolving scientific policy:

   [A]s a religion, social justice works. It works not merely in the sense that a lot of people take it very seriously and react angrily when people misuse its sacred terms … but also in a much more fundamental and potentially constructive way. It has done what so much of anodyne, classical liberalism has failed to do. It has imbued the secular sphere with meaning. It has reenchanted a godless world.

   Like its Marxist antecedents, from which it draws much of its imagery and inspiration, modern social justice culture has managed to create a thoroughly compelling, eschatologically focused account of a meaningful world, in which every human being has a fundamental purpose in a cosmic struggle, all without including, well, God.

Why include this here? I think Burton helps us see something that may explain some of the resistance to careful climate discourse. A dying planet can take on the liturgical power of sublimity: an experience of awe and terror that subs in for any other explanatory transcendence. The tragedy itself can be—reassuring somehow? Or at least the language of we-have-a-short-window has a ritual effect. It’s a strange attractor.

But Burton is no reactionary. The book has a textured and sympathetic view of all social attempts to locate a grounding metaphysics for our lives. So—while we’re taking very seriously, never seriously enough, the structural scale and mystery of an earth that’s in need of strong stewardship—it’s worth asking the question: does the human conundrum beg for the sublime? And if so, where is it to be found?

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Thanks for reading this newsletter, and happy 2023. I’ve got several shorter writing projects in the works, plus newer creative directions that are brewing. I’m starting over, seems like? I look forward to your notes and responses along the way.

If you work somewhere in tech, like me, you may be 1) preoccupied with worries about the technocratic thinking that’s everywhere in our daily lives, and 2) weary of the vague hand-wringing response that’s the dominant rhetorical mode for Big Tech Backlash. For the past several years, I worked with a team of faculty and staff at Olin on a project called Sketch Model. In its first phase, it was a series of programs—residencies, fellowships for students, and investments in STEM-humanities faculty partnerships—that brought a distinct energy for humanities-led ethics to our campus. You can read all about the things we did, and why:

And you can also listen to a bigger-picture look at the issues at the heart of Sketch Model on our podcast:

How is the engineering classroom a key site for understanding the recurring atrophy of ethics in tech? What’s behind the documented de-politicization of young engineers over a typical four year undergraduate degree? And what kinds of practices might support an engineering classroom with a robust and dynamic ethical connection to a complicated world? You can find it on Spotify, Apple podcasts, and other platforms around the web.

Here’s an excerpt from episode 2, from conversations I had with Virginia Tech’s Matthew Wisnioski and RPI’s James Malazita. Lightly edited for written clarity:

Sara Hendren: Take us there, to the turn in the 1960s. What issues are on engineers’ minds in a new way? What's providing a seed of doubt about the promise of technology compared to, for example, the big optimism of the post-war era?

Matthew Wisnioski: So by the end of the 1960s, there are a wide range of broad societal critiques that are coming from lots of different places. Some of them include the rise of the environmental movement. Others include the civil rights movement, living in the shadow at the atomic bomb and the Cold War. And at the center of all of these issues is this new concept called technology. Technology starts to be identified as the driving force between a lot of these societal problems. And then you have engineers who in World War II and beyond tie their very sense of self to this notion: that they are the bringers of progress through technology. So they're looking at this world in the 1960s and saying to themselves: On the one hand, we're putting people on the moon and this is the height of progress. And: now all of a sudden we're being accused of bringing civilization to the brink of collapse. That sounds a little apocalyptic, but there was a lot of writing at the time and thought at the time that put the stakes that high.

And so you might imagine that that prompted a lot of defensiveness on the part of engineers who looked out and said: You say that we're the root of all evil, but we’re the people who brought you your refrigerators and your air conditioners and your cars and your stereo and this kind of material wealth that keeps society going. And yet at the same time, engineers are really close to the inner workings of the military industrial complex, which is a concept that emerges at that time.

So they see what's going on behind the scenes, and they look at these claims of progress that are being made and that are often being made by the same companies that they work for… And they also start to question, okay, maybe it was a good idea to get trained up to work on military and technology during the WWII. But we seem to have never demilitarized. And we seem to be constantly seeking a military conflict and a buildup of weapons systems and the amount of investment between the state and a few large companies just keeps growing. And: is this what I signed up for?

In this same episode, I talk to James Malazita about the kinds of work he does in his Tactical Humanities Lab at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, mixing laboratory-style coursework with critical perspectives from the humanities. We talked about C.P. Snow’s “Two Cultures” essay, and how hard it is to figure out a way around that enduring story.

James Malazita: Rather than just teaching students what they know—so, filling their minds with various facts, various technical expertise—education [also] operates epistemically, in that it shapes how students know and how they imagine different types of knowledges relate to their core expertise. First, whether or not things like social concerns, political concerns, environmental concerns are a part of what it means to be an engineer, or what it means to be a computer scientist in the first place. But then, second, how they imagine their own expertise and their own capacity to speak to and challenge some of these larger social concerns or political concerns of technology. So it's this really interesting, and, frankly, quite effective double bind, where it gives permission for folks who aren't particularly interested in social concerns to displace any criticisms of themselves while also trapping STEM educators and STEM students who are interested in technical concerns into the feeling that they don't have the ability to speak, much less act, upon those concerns.

Sara Hendren: Listeners to this series may be thinking of a well known set of ideas that describes this phenomenon pretty well, and from way back. That's writer and thinker C.P. Snow's lecture from 1959 called “The Two Cultures.” And it decries the big gulf between the intellectual culture of the humanities and that of the sciences. James reminded me that the legacy of this two cultures idea is a long one:

Malazita: C.P. Snow's famous “Two Cultures” paper describes the sciences and the humanities as having fundamentally incommensurable or incompatible worldviews— particularly that the sciences, engineering, and mathematics value truth claims that are empirically grounded and falsifiable, whereas the humanities and history and literature value truth claims that are more interpretive, more subjective, more qualitative. And the interesting thing about this essay is it's difficult to parse apart how much C.P. Snow was analyzing or describing a situation that he observed in the academy, versus how much this essay is actually weaponized to reproduce that situation. As in: STEM scholars and humanities scholars will actually invoke Snow's “Two Cultures” in order to short-circuit any collaboration between the two.

Hendren: And I've heard you say the remedy is not, therefore, to have more humanists in the room, that somehow just the “getting together of folks in the classroom” would magically resolve this. Sometimes I have found myself saying to young engineers—in my case, my students are all engineering majors—sometimes I say, well, my vision of the good for them is actually to know where there's a hard stop on the kinds of expertise that they can marshal in a technological issue. To know at least which domain the expertise they need lies in, and how to call up that person. Like calling up that person when they're in a bind. Even if it's outside of a professional context. If you're in a urban planning discussion, say, with your local community and somebody thinks it's a matter of how many automated crosswalk signals you're going to have or whatever, then you realize: Oh, no, this is actually a question for a human-centered anthropologist to figure out how we use the street.

I keep thinking: It's not that I expect a young engineer to be able to perform all the duties of an anthropologist in that moment. It's actually precisely the humility that I want for them. To say: I know what I don't know, which is that this is an anthropological matter, and I'm going to cede my technological expertise—expertise that people tend to be so deferential to in these moments—cede it to the anthropologist that we gather in the room. That scenario may be one horizon for an engineering education. But how does that scenario, how does that land for you?

Malazita: Yeah, so it's interesting. On the one hand, I totally agree with this. We cannot train engineers and scientists to believe that they have the God's eye perspective on everything. And in fact, David Noble wrote about some of these very early integrations of philosophy into engineering curriculum, in the twenties and thirties, and said, one of the reasons that they failed is because engineers would read Plato's Republic and then say: Well, now I'm done. Now I know what the ideal society looks like, and I will just implement that. So that is not the type of education that I would advocate for in terms of a hybridized STEM education.

And I like the idea or the use of the word humility, acknowledging where expertise begins and ends, who belongs in the room and whose voices need to be represented in various decision-making processes. The concern I have with the humility model—or, all we need is more anthropologists in the room—is how easy it is to offset that type of collaborative decision-making into essentially a checkbox ethics system.

The whole series is one our project web site—with a full-color brochure about our programming—and on Spotify and Apple podcasts and elsewhere. I’d love it if you shared it with folks who might be interested.

Listening: Waiting for my vinyl copy of Dan Phelps’s Modular: Sonic Explorations, via my friend Claire.

Watching: Éric Gravel’s Full Time. We went as a family to a screening at the MFA’s French film festival in late summer. Reader: the MFA is on the sludgy and inconvenient green line. Parking is terrible. The theater is in the bowels of the museum. And it was sold out! Hundreds of people there. The film curator was practically levitating—a full house for this cinematic short story told as a thriller, but utterly small and character-led. Hollywood, I beg you: the people are hungry as ever for story.

Words: I wrote about Rebecca Horn’s Finger Gloves for Art in America’s October print issue, part of a series called “Impairment as Impetus: Five Historic Works Spurred by Disability.” (open access)

Voice: I spoke at the inaugural symposium for MIT’s new Morningside Academy of Design this month, on a panel about design education. My remarks are—surprise!—a defense of the humanities. The panel is Event 3, here.

[Hi there—this is undefended / undefeated, a newsletter that you signed up for at some point. Thanks for reading! Some of you reported that you enjoyed the audio version of my last installment. I enjoyed making it, and/but I found it unsatisfying to only publish the written version in a lightly edited transcript. I want written work to read as such—with precision and economy—and I want audio to shine in its best informal light. So I’ll do what I observe among other Substack writers: publish both versions back to back, so you can consume and share as you like. Unsubscribe at any point; link at the bottom.]

On any given weekday morning in a semester, with a group of very specific students-and-professor who agree to meet and knock around a bunch of ideas together, things are generally not unfolding as dramatically as the sensational news stories would have you believe. I say this from my posts at four different lefty east coast American institutions in the last decade. It’s not that adversarial. And yet—there is a conflation of language with harm that’s afoot, a new idea to grapple with together.* It’s similarly not the case that students are commandeering the classroom with approved or cancelled topics. And yet—there is a kind of easy and expected ritual in the way students see texts, if left unchallenged: texts as hamfisted negotiations of power and little else. It’s not the case that politically conservative views are verboten on campus, but, well—there is an unspoken progressive orthodoxy that’s unexplored at the foundations. It’s a delicate time, and, yes, I’m worried. But above all there is this: a hunger among young people for difficult ideas, for the big reasons why they’re important, and for the skills to hold complexity aloft, unresolved and sometimes unresolvable.

Some of you read my piece about the Zone of Proximal Development, right? Let’s look at this graphic again:

The biggest mistake that teachers make is trying to take students from what they can do to what they can’t do in leapfrog style: hopping from the one to the other with the trust that throwing folks in the deep end will always, by semester’s end, deliver. Sometimes that does work. But—trust me, I’ve learned this the hard way, repeatedly—without the slow-walk structures that bridge from can’t to can, you’ll be losing a lot of people along the way. The ZPD is that space where intentional teaching lies: modeling in behavior and practice, making the how into part of the formal curriculum, assessing process alongside outcome.

And—okay—let’s say this is all basically well and good for domain-based coursework. It’s less obvious how you create a culture of open-handed pluralism and healthy contestation in general: as an ethos, a commitment, even a vibe for running any classroom. How do you map the Zone for an amorphous polarized mood on campus? For the subtle creep of flattened political discussion, intellectual foreclosure, timidity in the face of hard questions?

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When generations shift, when the zeitgeist changes, you can be frustrated that students no longer come with that same green zone of “can,” unaided. You can rant about how they’ve been raised. You can diagnose the cultural norms and where they come from. You can blame students, administrators, Higher Education At Large. You can retrench to your established classroom norms, unexplained. Or you can shift the Zone one orbit back and scaffold to the place where you’re headed. Name and explain what the gathering of the classroom is for, and then walk students through the paces, Socratic-style, to arrive at what it takes to embody that purpose. For me, that purpose is most elegantly expressed in Danielle Allen’s idea of education as participatory readiness, which is a form of civic agency.

I’ll be reading Allen’s piece with students between Week One and Two, and when we convene in Week Two, we’ll talk about “readiness” as a paradigm for our provisional community. What do you need to be ready for? And how would you know you’re ready—ready with a lot of resilience around the edges, ready for ideas and decisions you’ve rehearsed in class, but also ideas and questions that will be new to you in some ten, twenty, thirty years’ time? At my institution, like so many others, we often emphasize what Allen calls “professional readiness”—sometimes as an ROI for the expense of college, but sometimes from an earnest distributive logic for learning. More access to educational goods for the professions, Allen says, is celebrated for its democratizing effect in more fairly distributing cultural and economic capital.

Professional readiness is good, necessary, important! But “political choices determine the rules that shape distributive patterns,” writes Allen, so “it makes sense to focus first on political, not economic, equality. And if we choose political equality as our orienting ideal—empowering all to participate capably in the life of a polity—a different view of education’s purpose, content, and consequence comes into view.”

Allen goes on to name and define three practices of participatory readiness that prepare students for the civic agency that she sees at the heart of political equality: 1) disinterested deliberation, 2) fair fighting, and 3) prophetic reframing. Read the whole thing for succinct definitions of each of these modes, and the call for ordinary citizens to recognize and choose among them, shift between or recombine them. The classroom is an ideal setting for practicing each of these, in a mix of capacities that includes “social diagnosis, ethical reasoning, cause-and-effect analysis, and persuasive argumentation.”

So my students and I will talk about readiness, about disinterested deliberation, and about what that kind of skill requires: open-handed inquiry, curiosity, a commitment to disentangling people from their ideas, and so much more. But the scaffolding for the why needs to be, well, iterated, not just cursorily, cryptically re-iterated—because it’s not a generational assumption. Readiness needs championing, and I think students will get it when they think it through in the ZPD.

We’ll also read Wendy Brown’s recent interview in the NYT, with specific attention to the “containers” on college campuses—rooms and settings that make different kinds of engagements possible. This is a very simple but necessary idea: You do, yes, bring your whole self to college, and colleges are more and more set up to honor all those facets of self, in spaces and groups and supports that are far outside the academic alone. But following that very reasoning, the classroom is one container and not designed to be all things to all students at all times:

Campuses are complicated spaces, because they aren’t just one kind of space: There’s the classroom, the dorm, the public space that is the campus. Then there’s what we could call clubs, support centers — identity based or based on social categories or political interests. It’s a terrible mistake to confuse all of these and imagine that the classroom or the public space of the campus is the same as your home.

It’s a design metaphor here: the campus is a series of envelopes, as architects say, that specialize in certain kinds of readiness and not others. For disinterested deliberation to work in the classroom, we have to agree that it’s not primarily a therapeutic space. Or a political club. And so on. I’m betting students will come along for this venture.

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*On language and harm, I recommend Sarah Schulman’s Conflict Is Not Abuse and Michael Roth’s Safe Enough Spaces.

Update: After talking with Howard Gardner and Wendy Fischman about the ideas in their book The Real World of College, I think I’ll add to my Week One list this short blog post by one of Gardner and Fischman’s research interns, an undergrad who course-corrected in her own college trajectory:

[L]earning about “mental models”—how participants view the purpose of college and structure the experience—spurred the most personal reflection. As part of the holistic analysis, I coded each participant according to four distinct approaches: inertial (e.g. “I go to college because that is the next step after high school”), transactional (e.g. “I go to college to get a job or go to graduate school”), exploratory (e.g. “I go to college to try new academic areas, different activities, and meet new people”), or transformational (e.g. “I go to college to grow and develop as a person and learner”). In considering these mental models, I couldn’t help but imagine how I might categorize my own friends and acquaintances. I had “transactional” peers who went to college with a predetermined vision of what courses they would take and what job they would land after graduation. Interestingly, these were people I often envied; they seemed to have had it “all figured out.” On the other hand, I had “exploratory” friends operating on five hours of sleep as they were involved with as many campus activities as they could squeeze in (in addition to their coursework), hoping to try out and try on as many diverse experiences as possible.

What about my own mental models? It has been a journey.

—Runner’s high in these hot days courtesy of Alpinisms, School of Seven Bells. Say it with me: I am under no disguise.

—I read and loved Phil Christman’s How to Be Normal this summer. Planning to use a piece from that in my new nonfiction class this fall! Phil’s newsletter, The Tourist, is also great. Recommended.

—I wrote a long piece for Wired magazine’s Ideas section, about how smart home tech is a new frontier for prosthetics:

[A]ssistance now shows up as a mix of independent housing, animal companionship, smart home technologies, and remote-support videoconferencing. It’s a constellation of high-tech and low-tech in distributed, networked tools, many of which are ready to hand, seamlessly integrated as ubiquitous features of everyday life, which can bridge some of the logistical barriers to employment.

And a constellation of technology is indeed the proper metaphor. There’s no one way to dominate this market—no single system that will outfit a living space or workplace with “universal” features for accessibility. There won’t be a single “curb-cut effect” for this digital world.

—I co-hosted three episodes of The Futures Archive podcast for Design Observer, all on objects in the big theme of “health and safety.” One is about the defibrillator, one on refrigeration, and one on insulin pumps.

If you’re into RSS, you can read a bunch of small excerpts and notes on my blog, but here’s a quick digest:

Roe vs. Wade requires the intellectual virtue of acknowledging a hard problem.

I’m organizing my nonfiction class readings into tour guides, persuaders, portraitists.

Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò on deference politics vs. constructive politics.

I loved reading about Kurt Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem as a west coast skeptic.

Part I of this installment is here.

Part II is here.

Hi there, readers have undefended / undefeated. I wanted to try out Substack's audio feature, and also just see if audio is something that people enjoy. I'll also put this same text in text as a newsletter to you, but I wanted to try speaking to you, and ideally with you, for this coda to the two-part series, Four Words For The Art You Love [parts one and two]. So this year, I put together a couple of meditations on the critic Robert Hughes's beautiful foursome for evaluating art: lucidity, deliberation, probity, and calm. And if you've read those and you saw that, I worked through both how to think about studio arts—things like painting and sculpture—but then also maybe trying to connect them to the more recent practice of social practice art. And so we looked at a couple of works in that vein: Fritz Haeg's Edible Estates, Haircuts for Children and then at the end, one of my favorite pieces of artwork ever, duration artworks and that is Tamms Year Ten, with the coalition facilitated by Laurie Jo Reynolds.

And I got a really interesting question, from the philosopher and scholar, Andrew Beer, who wrote to me and said it was okay to read this question out loud. I wanted to answer it live, and also in text. So Andrew writes:

I knew nothing of social practice art before and now I'm very glad that I do. One question occurs to me: When exactly does a simple social practice become social practice art? I think for example of the vigil at Bald Knob Cross, [that was part of the Tamms Year Ten], which by itself seems to be a social practice. Any kind of communal worship in fact seems to fit that description. Was its being photographed and the photograph’s inclusion in a larger artistic project what made it social practice art?

Is the idea that the social practice becomes the object of art? That the practice becomes the medium of the artist and so the participants in the practice may have a particular practical objective, but the artist who renders the practice as art is concerned chiefly with creating something beautiful?, he asks.

And these are all really good questions. And I realized even after I hit publish on that piece that I had not really answered common questions that come up about social practice art as art.

There are people who are interested in: Okay, I can accept this as something interesting and compelling, but is it art? And does that matter? And on what terms would we count it as such? So, I would offer to you, Andrew, and then other people who may be interested, three ways for thinking about the way that social practice can function as artwork in ways that are interesting.

One is quite simple, the first one, and that is the notion of the frame. So if you think about the way that a frame functions around a painting, it has this very practical, structural job to do, but it puts a literal, draws a line around some vision of the world. So it arrests and it holds, and it supports that vision of the world to try to bring your attention to it, to concentrate your attention on it. And we would say the same, not about just frames for 2d artworks, but the pedestal on which a sculpture sits, or indeed just the white cube space, the big space of the gallery or the museum, that sets apart and bring some calm space around to set apart this work for you to see as framed, framed for your contemplation.

And that is a very classical idea about the standalone artwork. But you can think of the frame in another way: You can think of the frame as drawing that conceptual line, around any such activity, so maybe it's the temporal line of the curtain in a theater space, right? That draws a frame around action, that draws our attention. But in social practice art, the frame is drawn around what maybe otherwise, yes, social practices or everyday life even. And for some people that feels like, well, that's a bit of artifice and I think, yes, that is a bit of artifice, but it does the same function, that is to say, it draws your attention, it enchants and draws your attention to what would otherwise pass you by as just the immersive, discontinuous experience of everyday life, and concentrates your focus on it so that you see it with those new estranged eyes. You see it again in a new light.

So for example, if you look at Tania Bruguera's work called Immigrant Movement International, that work was a two-year durational work of opening a storefront, in Queens in New York, and offering pro bono English language classes and immigration law, services and advice for people in Queens. And it was nothing more and nothing less than that: this storefront that opened as an artwork, it was at the behest of art institutions, it was funded as art and it drew a frame then around, yes, probably similar practices that are happening everywhere. But because it was both a temporary provision, because it was presented and framed as culture, it drew your attention and an audience to it, and a kind of provocation around it, about this practice as such and the future that might hold that same practice, or that might disappear as culture.

And all the questions that are attendant to that: Is this activity one that we want to see in the world? It's being put forth as a proposal in the form of an artwork that then has these implications for its use value in general. Could it go out and continue as a practice in general—by policy?

And that brings me to the second point that Tania Bruguera has famously said: That she doesn't want an art that points at the thing, at the subject, she says. She wants an art that is the thing. This is the second way of looking at it: the notion of utility in art. Can utility be a vernacular in art, can utility be a result of art? Can utility be a subject at all? And I think a lot of times, if people are schooled in a classical notion of the contemplative object, it has to exit use-value and be concerned with expression and metaphor and symbol, but that's precisely what Bruguera is pushing against—to say, I don't always want the sign and the symbol that points you to the thing.

What if the thing itself could be framed and presented as the art? What if utility could take on that mantle of culture? Not as an end in itself, and not as instrumentalizing. Maybe you disagree with me on this—it may be that trafficking in utility gets you to that efficiency and consequences. But I want to say that there is a place for utility as one of the languages of art, and I think that's what social practice does really well.

And then the third thing is a framing that I learned from a curator friend of mine, a man named Rory Hyde, who has been at the Victoria & Albert museum for a long time. The way he thinks about curation is that he plans an exhibition of art or design work, and he thinks in his mind's eye about three kinds of audiences for that work. He uses a kind of water metaphor for this.

He would say: I'm planning for, in an exhibition, people who are going to engage the work as paddlers, and people who are going to engage it as swimmers, and people who will engage it as divers. So you get the metaphor here, right? There are people who are going to come and splash around a bit in a lightweight way, take a look at the art, take a photograph of it, appreciate perhaps the use of color, the surprise of it, and people who are going to swim, they're going to go a little bit deeper, they're going to read the text, they're going to be interested in making connections between and among artworks and then diverse people who are going to purchase the book at the bookstore, people who are going to go online and do a little more deeper research people who are going to let this exhibition send them on a deep dive.

And the interesting thing about this is that you could say: Oh, well, that's self-evident, good planning. But Rory thinks that all three of those modes of engagement are successful. In other words, an exhibition isn't just there to "try to win" by engaging divers only. Only if you really deeply engage—are you the good audience member for a work? No, that works succeed when they’re effective at all three of those levels. So that you can be a paddler and walk away with something that is perhaps a fleeting moment of encounter with the work, but that is still a success mode and if the work is doing its job, it can reach you at that level. And also again, in the mid-level, and of course in the deep level.

And I think this is relevant to social practice art because you can engage at all three of those levels without that the trip all the way to the museum to be the self-selected art lover. You can encounter social practice in other words, on the street and in fact, the street is often the very frame. So, if you go back to thinking about Fritz Haeg and Edible Estates, you could enjoy that coffee table book, you could appreciate the transformation of the front lawn into a gardening space as a paddler and just be interested in the quirky enigma of that. But you could also swim around in and try to do the calculations of: What would it take to motivate a whole neighborhood or a whole community around turning yards into gardens?

And then you could look at the diving person, and you could look at scale: what would the ecological impact be? And how would you move the paradigm from the ornamental lawn to personal property that does something more productive in gardening? But, all of those are success modes and all of those are ways that you can encounter the artwork, again, outside of the professional expertise of the museum and curation. This is not to negate those strong institutions, and what they do for us around art history, it's just that social practice art lends itself to these other ways of engaging, that I do think can just expand one's own enjoyment of culture as culture, and to see the work of culture, doing something more than the contemplation that the beautiful and perhaps qualified notions of the beautiful true, and good might unite themselves in these practices that are more out of the way, but that can nourish your insights and perhaps your actions nonetheless. So, Andrew, I hope that's a satisfying answer, we'll move on to other subjects in upcoming newsletters. Thanks.

In Part I of this post, we looked at four strong words for the art of painting by the critic Robert Hughes—lucidity, deliberation, probity, and calm. Those words are useful for artifacts of studio practice, things like drawings and paintings and sculpture. But what about when the work is conceptual, or temporal, or broadly a mode of performance that’s hard to capture in its formal qualities? I want to extend Hughes’s language for these works, especially what’s often called social practice art, a subgenre that many people find esoteric (“cool idea, but why is this art?”). Works like Haircuts by Children by the art collective Mammalian Diving Reflex.

This project is exactly what it sounds like: a short-term kid-run hair salon, enacted for a few days in cities for art festivals and other cultural productions, but where the haircuts are real, and the kids are really doing the cutting. Which is to say: children wielding sharps near the heads and faces of elders. As an art project! There is deliberation and probity in spades here, no?

Think about this simplest of reversals: young people charged with tasks that combine intimacy and responsibility, a work of caregiving that’s also tied up with vanity and self-presentation. Children at the helm for a brief second, and the question in the air that attends their leadership: Can they—can they do this?

And then the tumble of questions that comes after: If they can, mostly, do this task, would we recognize it if there are other tasks children could do, if our cultural norms would allow it? Do we attend enough to the inner lives of children? To their resourcefulness, their delight in being seen and known—and, perhaps above all, their being trusted? All of this deliberation in the lightest arrangement of elements, and with a big-hearted humor intact. It’s replete with that kind of calm that speaks of resolve. You see this project, even in a few images, and you think: How simple. How strange. Why not? And what if.

Mammalian Diving Reflex says they go “looking for contradictions” to set up in a theatrical, sometimes useful, always absurd way, and that they proceed from principles of “generosity” and “abundance,” which are the strongest forms of probity, after all. Social practices often do this—putting on performances but not in their formal, stage-mounted, ticket-selling sense. Instead, these works often “trigger a temporary condition” like this one, in the bet that most people of all ages will bring their best selves when entrusted with the highly unexpected. MDR call it “social acupuncture,” and they’re not alone: Social practice artworks often provide a small shift in the system of ordinary relations, intended to estrange us from our default categories and charge our perception with new—renewed—questions. (See MDR artist Darren O’Donnell’s book called Haircuts by Children for more.)

Note, too, that there’s no sanctimony literature looming over this project—no winking at the audience about some partisan idea in its meaning. It resists that easy read; there’s no self-congratulation here. The art is not realized in skills-based, studio-produced contemplative objects, but neither is it a “happening” as a message-ridden screed. It’s something else. A social practice artwork like this has light and air and questions about it, deliberative and probing.

The same kind of spirit runs through Fritz Haeg’s Edible Estates:

With the sponsoring of museums and other art institutions, Haeg helps people turn their front lawns—usually dedicated to water-sucking ornamental grass—into fully functioning gardens. As the project’s book cover (below) says, it’s an attack on the arbitrary suburban standard, but more importantly, it’s a convivial proposal for a distributed agriculture in the places where it’s not currently expected. An attack in the form of a party, a punch with a grin:

Why, you ask, is this an art project? Why is it sponsored as such? Why call it a “project” at all?

In the same spirit of kids giving haircuts, this project is deployed as a what if question—it’s meant to suggest a possible future (again, that’s the strong principle of probity) while also defamiliarizing the status quo. This project could, yes, be an earnest initiative from your local gardening advocates, or a top-down project from your region’s city planners. But rolling out an idea like this as a bureaucratic thing—an initiative—automatically invites skepticism, pushback, and limited debate only among people who already care about the issue, whether for or against. As a social practice art project, this work has a wily joyousness about it: a form of culture that is both useful and expressive at once, and one that gets into the public eye as a prototype to think differently about the norms holding up the way things are. Lots of HOAs would get in a snit about some rogue gardener bucking convention. But an artist might galvanize a community with this lucid reframing of the world around you: an invitation to turn extant green space, now a site of useless, endless mowing, into raucous and beautiful front-lawn food.

Sometimes, of course, social practice work is much more high-stakes and overtly political. One of my favorite art works of all time is Tamms Year Ten:

The artist Laurie Jo Reynolds was one of the chief organizers on this five-year project initiated to close Illinois’s “super max” Tamms prison—where an extreme, truly unimaginable style of solitary confinement was carried out for 15 years. Inmates were first brought to Tamms from other prisons as a radical, one-year measure of shock treatment for behavioral concerns. While there, they had almost no interpersonal contact at all: no group activities, no phone calls, meals pushed through the door, and exercise carried out alone. But what had been designed as a temporary measure often turned into long-term solitary. Tamms opened its doors in 1998. By 2008, about a quarter of the 500 men inside had been held there for the entire decade. Tamms Year Ten was a coalition of people who lobbied, cajoled, pressured, protested, collaborated, organized, photographed, wrote letters, and did a hundred other incremental, patient tasks to get Tamms closed down. And in 2013, they succeeded.

There was recognizable art involved, like this photograph above. Photo Requests from Solitary was one effort of the Tamms project, in which an incarcerated person could request a photo of anything, real or imaginary, simple or outlandish, and a volunteer would be matched to set up and take that photograph and send it to the requester. You can read about some of the requests here, like this “Big Cross” image:

BIG CROSS — Willie, 2011. Willie wanted his family and volunteers at Tamms Year Ten to pray for his deliverance from Tamms, so he asked for a photograph of a vigil at Bald Knob Cross, located in southern Illinois. The group traveled to the cross, held a litany of song and prayer and celebrated with a dinner. The next day, they drove family members to visit loved ones at the [Tamms section of minimum security] prison. After 36 years in different prisons, Willie was transferred from Tamms. He was paroled in July 2012.

A photo as a tiny (calm?) gesture of exchange, an acknowledgement of the wishes and needs of a single person, and a gift of imagination. A photography project at one-to-one scale, while simultaneously tackling the giant behemoth of the Illinois state correctional system.

Reynolds calls this—the whole project, with the lobbying, the long meetings, the strategizing, and the photography—she calls it “legislative art,” but not in a self-serious way. It’s the shapeshifting, deliberative nature of the organizing work that’s so shrewd here. It’s an artwork, not a fundraising nonprofit. It’s an artwork, and not easily capture-able by commercial interests or entrenched state politics. It’s an artwork, so it can come to an end. No need to invent reasons to perpetuate its life. It’s not only an artwork, of course, and maybe you could do the exact same thing outside the realm of art and get the same results. Maybe. Does it matter? As an artwork, Tamms Year Ten puts forth a white-hot lucid idea—an idea the late Paul Farmer might have called an “Area of Moral Clarity,” or AMC: that extreme solitary confinement is torture.

Reynolds says they had to believe in the capacity of elected officials to do the right thing—and that in many key cases those lawmakers did, in ways that surprised the organizers. Tamms Year Ten didn’t just one-off protest for the good media coverage, though they did do that. They did the visible things and the invisible things. They built healthy relationships. They stuck together, kept their eyes on the horizon. The moms of those men held in Tamms, former incarcerated advocates, other conscientious volunteers, and artists: lucidity, deliberation, probity, and calm.

Part III (coda!) is here.

[The link is to a speech and panel discussion in which Tamms Year Ten won the Annenberg Prize for Art and Social Change. Reynolds and three collaborators speak about the work at length.]

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Thanks for reading, and for your notes and replies, as always. More newsletters to come about design, bioethics and technology, and teaching.

Some media highlights and news:

—I talked with Ryan McGranaghan on his Origins podcast about healthy relationality online, art in the context of engineering, faith, and more. That was an exceptionally good conversation and a joy.

—I mention Becca Rothfeld’s essay “Sanctimony Literature” above. Seriously, have you read it? Rothfeld is one of the most interesting critics working today. I’ll read anything she writes, along with the words of Lili Loofbourow and Meehan Crist.

—This spring I’ll be co-hosting three episodes of The Futures Archive, a podcast about designed objects from Design Observer. Lee Moreau and I will be talking alongside experts about defibrillators, insulin pumps, and refrigeration in healthcare, a group of topics loosely organized as “health and safety” in design.

—S. G. Belknap’s “Sex and Sensibility” in The Point was one of the most original things I’ve read this year.

—Greta Gerwig’s Little Women has cast its spell on my children, especially my thirteen-year-old daughter, in the same way it case its spell on her mother more than three decades ago. I just marvel, as we all do, that a century-old story can keep reaching so far outside its time. The line that I keep thinking about is the one Alcott gives to Mr. March in a letter from the front: a hope and belief in the work of virtue as a practice, that his daughters “will conquer themselves so beautifully.”

Earnest art students like me in the early 90s—showing up to class a little winded, furrow at the brow, paint stains on the ratty t-shirt—very often, we read Robert Hughes’s Shock of the New as a core textbook in modern art history. It has Hughes’s signature electric style: full of decisive opinion and vivid phrasing. Here he is explaining how you might think about post-war abstract Western painting:

In the Somme valley, the back of language broke. It could no longer carry its former meanings. World War I changed the life of words and images in art, radically and forever. It brought our culture into the age of mass-produced, industrialized death. This, at first, was indescribable.

Cultivating curiosity about the indescribable is one way to take an interest in paintings like Charmion von Wiegand’s Untitled from 1942, above. This painting is not only without representational images, but also left without title directives—because, in form and content, it surpasses or defies all words? So much of life does, after all—surpass and defy.

But ultimately Hughes was ready with words, with the interpretive description to help us get closer to making sense of art with language. He found ways to invoke the shifting sensations of modern life and to connect those changes to the visual culture of the late 19th and early 20th centuries—a modernity that is still so much our own. On life, for example, mediated by machinery like train travel:

[T]he machine meant the conquest of horizontal space. It also meant a sense of that space which few people had experienced before – the succession and superimposition of views, the unfolding of landscape in flickering surfaces as one was carried swiftly past it, and an exaggerated feeling of relative motion (the poplars nearby seeming to move faster than the church spire across the field) due to parallax. The view from the train was not the view from the horse. It compressed more motifs into the same time. Conversely, it left less time in which to dwell on any one thing.

As a young person, I gobbled up Shock of the New and picked up Hughes’s essay collection, Nothing if Not Critical, for more. Hughes wrote a regular column on art at Time magazine for three decades, and to read those pieces, you’d find that he didn’t actually have a happy appetite for the new-and-shocking as such. If anything, he often reads like a class-A crank: impatient with any whiff of identity politics (in its “political correctness”-era form), ready to topple any hint of pretension in his withering prose, likening the phenomenon of the speculators’ art market to rapacious, cynical “strip mining.” I suspect that few art history courses place his words in the classroom now. He showed little interest in women or non-white artists of any decade. Skimming back through the essays, I found more than one baldly anti-Semitic claim. There’s a fighting-words defensiveness that is both useful to think with and sometimes blinkered in its narrowness.

Still—a string of Hughes’s strongest words I read nearly thirty years ago returns regularly to my mind. They’re from his review of a Chardin show in 1979:

To see Chardin’s work en masse in the midst of a period stuffed with every kind of jerky innovation, narcissistic blurting, and trashy ‘relevance’ is to be reminded that lucidity, deliberation, probity, and calm are still the virtues of the art of painting.

Consider how precise and generative at once this quartet is. I’ll offer just a few of the ways to think about Hughes’s list.

Lucidity is more than draftsmanship, and more than clarity. A strong illustration in a magazine ad will deliver what is clear, but a work of art must illuminate, must sparkle with its delivery, whatever that delivery may be. Lucidity may be ornate and refined or rough-hewn and muscular; it’s an inner quality, not merely a style.

Deliberation is challenging to achieve in any art form: the presence of multiple ideas or techniques being contested and considered, juxtaposed right in front of your eyes, but without the mess of pure indecision. When lucidity can join deliberation, achieving both an arrested dynamism and a clean luminous confidence, these two are at their mutually reinforcing best.

The latter two are harder to pin down without being reductive, but just as useful: Probity in its ordinary sense means “upright, with honesty and strong principles.” We’d never want to say that all art must pass a morality test in some simplistic “message.” Probity instead is the presence of a real proposal on offer—a strong engagement, the absence of the cynical gesture or the easy gimmick. Probity has the thickness of dimensional life about it, not sloganeering.

And calm. You have to resist the literal notion of calm—as in tranquil, or easy on the eyes—and think instead of something more like compositional resolution. Artists and critics often speak of a visual artifact as relatively “resolved” or as-yet “unresolved.” They mean this in its formal totality: Does the work deliver itself to the viewer with a kind of finished-ness about it—a repleteness, no matter how chaotic the subject matter or style may be? Even Guernica, see, has the first three plus calm about it. The frozen stillness of violence and grief:

So does Kerry James Marshall’s When Frustration Threatens Desire. Probity in possibility, magic and history, a deliberation between the fanciful and the sinister:

But the really interesting thing about these four words is that—whatever Hughes would say—they productively map onto works outside of painting and sculpture, indeed outside of studio arts altogether. You can bring them to bear on much less popular, more challenging works of conceptual and social practice art. They help you avoid the flattening of nostalgic “standards” for art practice, if you’re inclined to reach for verisimilitude and craft-based skills in evaluating art. But they also help you circumvent the equally flattening effects of collapsing all art to politics. They allow for figurations of the social and political while insisting on expressive multiplicity and poetics.

In Part 2, then, I’ll walk through ways to think about works of post-studio art with these same words in mind. We’ll look at Darren O’Donnell’s Haircuts by Children, pictured at the top of this post, at Felix Gonzalez Torres’s Untitled (Perfect Lovers), at Fritz Haeg’s Edible Estates, at Laurie Jo Reynolds’s decade-long collaborative work called Tamms Year Ten, and more.

Part II is here.

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Thanks for reading. Some media highlights of my last month:

I loved this conversation with Rita Kozangon, Rachel Wahl, and Joseph Davis on liberalism, childhood, and Agnes Callard’s essay on “acceptance parenting.”

Benjamin Lipscomb’s The Women Are Up to Something: How Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley, and Iris Murdoch Revolutionized Ethics was just the right book at just the right time. I’m hungry now for the entire virtue ethics tradition, so send me some recs!

I thought Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Lost Daughter was perfection. Not because “bad mommy” stories are rare. There’s plenty of ambivalence-lit out there. But the quality of this film—its patience, its insistence on a genuinely rounded set of characters in the smallest moments, its absolute even-handedness about women’s ambition and mother’s love, achieved that simple-profound thing: it was, as they say, beautifully observed.

Know Your Enemy’s episode on the early career of Joan Didion at National Review and beyond was so good. Sam Adler-Bell, Matt Sitman, and Sam Tanenhaus as a threesome made that conversation so attentive and so lively.

Folks interested in disability arts, design, and politics should head over to Kevin Gotkin’s Crip News—a great resource for CFPs and other opportunities!

[Image of NYC nightlife via this article over at CityLab: “So You Want to Be A ‘Night Mayor’”]

This summer I wrote an essay for the New York Times about using the clock—the hours and minutes of the day—as a design tool. It’s not a new idea; see an article about the phenomenon of the “night mayor” in cities around the world, for example. But it’s one that got renewed attention in the makeshift and quick-change artistry that had to happen under COVID: streets with designated uses that changed between day and night, shopping hours dedicated to older adults or people with compromised immunity, and, in my own neighborhood, an expansion of a time-based “park”: a long-loved street that closes to cars on Sundays in the warmer months of the year. For the last two years, we got double that amount of “park” space, Saturday and Sunday, just by erecting and dismantling barrier gates at several intersections, morning and evening, letting the streets blossom with walkers and wheelers of all kinds. It’s time that transforms the status quo into something else, without the commitment (and potential harm) of a permanent intervention.

In the piece, I mention one example of using time for making institutions more accessible: the Morning at the Museum program that runs at all of the Smithsonian’s 14 sites in Washington, DC. It’s not the only place where disability occasions a creative reinvention by means of the clock. I might have written about how movie theaters and playhouses all over the U.S. designate some of their performances as “sensory-friendly,” wherein volume and lights are dimmed from their ordinary settings. Or the “Green Man +” program in Singapore, in which an augmented metro card for seniors and people with disabilities will extend an ordinary crosswalk’s countdown time by a dozen or more seconds, after which it reverts to its standard allotment. And the whole idea for the essay arose from a conversation I had last winter with some directors at a community dance space. They were struggling with two kinds of access needs: a group of deaf dancers who wanted to use pulsing lights on the walls to track the rhythm of music, and other performers with epilepsy who couldn’t be around those lights when they were in use. We talked it over and arrived at the clock as their friend: Designate some nights for the lights, and some nights without. Sounds obvious, I suppose, in the abstract. But when people think design—and perhaps especially when they think of accessible design, it’s easy to get stuck on hardware, software, ramps and elevators and curb cuts. We look to what’s known and tangible, and we think less often about the the invisible tool of time to bend and flex the structures of the world.

Folks who know disability studies will know that this whole discussion begs for the naming of crip time. I have a whole chapter in my book called Clock about this very idea, and it’s a powerful one: how industrialized, economic time serves to shape our bodies to its exacting ends, and how disability—the needful, nonconforming body—militates against that rigidity.

But I didn’t include crip time in the NYT piece because I’ve thought hard about Lev Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development:

[Image via]

You can go deep into Vygotsky’s psychological theories of education, or you can, like me, productively cherry-pick this idea for its useful reminder: The learner, whether student or reader, can come with you from their current zone, what they already know, to the next developmental place. But if you try to jump them further than that place—beyond the Zone of Proximal Development, too fast or too carelessly—you’re likely to lose them. Not because folks aren’t sophisticated or smart or even willing. It’s just a simple fact of cognitive load and scaffolding: To introduce a novel or surprising idea, you have to build the conceptual bridge from what’s provisionally shared to the new and unexpected.

I think about this all the time. Who are my readers, and what assumptions might already be in their minds, and what’s the next possible leap we could make together? I didn’t think the audience for an article about time and design in a pandemic could travel all the way with me to crip time. It’s there in the disability literature for folks who want to go deeper but couldn’t be seamlessly reached in my piece.

It’s not as if all reading is teaching in a unidirectional, condescending way, from writer to reader—far from it. Every writer is writing precisely to think through and try to understand some set of ideas better, for her own sake as well as the reader. But the Zone should still be in one’s mind, no matter your narrative medium. And too often writers get tied up in an inside-baseball version of their topic, because the tacit reader in their mind’s eye is their peers: the people they speak to in professional development contexts, or the other books in their field, or their various social circles. But the scaffolding for a wider audience requires a much more rigorous attention to the Zone of PD—if, that is, you want to reach the reader who’s not already with you. If your audience is that of peer experts, then your Zone will be adapted accordingly! But if, like me, you want to introduce your interests to folks outside that set of already-convinced readers, then a disciplined attention to the Zone, and the cuts to your prose it will likely require, might be useful.

I often think of this kind of writing in a framework the labor activist Jane McAlevey describes: knowing the difference between organizing and mobilizing. Mobilizing, McAlevey says, is the kind of catalyzing work that activists do when a group of people agree with one another about some problem at hand. Mobilizers serve to get those folks off the couch and into action, together, toward some cause they already believe in. But organizers, she says, are people who work to find common cause among people who don’t already agree. (Folks on the left, she says, regularly confuse and conflate these two things, much to their peril, and I agree.)

In McAlevey’s case, that might be organizing among hundreds of hospital staff, say, for better working conditions. To do that well, she says, you don’t start with action plans and resentment and in-group speak. You start with conversations that surface people’s core values and real wishes, and you build from there. Not everyone can do it, McAlevey says. Some folks are so sure they’re righteous and correct that they can’t be bothered with the patient work of building common cause. It’s the most humanizing, belief-led work there is: starting with foundational premises, and building, in the Zone of Proximal Development, to some shared idea of a desirable world.

Now, naturally: The world needs both mobilizing and organizing. In labor unions and in ideas-based persuasive writing. But getting clear about which is which—and which you’re suited and aiming for, and the possibilities and limitations of each—is some substantive fraction of the practice.

When I think about the most patient organizing in action, I think about Dorothy, who’s profiled in this short New Yorker documentary. She went one-on-one to the neighbors in her rural Alabama county to spread the word about vaccines in its early days. Most of the footage is Dorothy calling, visiting, inquiring, cajoling, reminding. Each conversation is building common cause. “I don’t give up on people,” she says.

Thanks for reading. Wishing you all a peaceful-enough end to 2021, and a truly brighter 2022. Much more to come here.

I’ll be Lecturer in Architecture at Harvard GSD this spring while still on sabbatical from Olin: one class on disability and design.

My talk on critique and repair at the MIT Media Lab is up on YouTube now. I loved speaking with Zach Lieberman about art and technology, the unsatisfying language of STEAM, and building a healthy and thriving lab culture.

And: my book received an Honors designation in the Massachusetts Book Awards, in the Nonfiction category, alongside Nicholas Basbanes’s Cross of Snow and the winner, How to Make A Slave and other Essays, by Jerald Walker. I’m told there will be a ceremony at the MA state house—you know, someday! It’s a thrill nonetheless.

[image of the MIT Media Lab via B. Stern.]

I should say that I’m an invested outsider at the Lab, so my view is limited. I’ve given a handful of talks there over the last several years; I’ve sat on two thesis committees; I attend conferences and maintain relationships with students and researchers there. Most relevant, perhaps, is that every year I write recommendations for former engineering students of mine who want to go there for graduate work. I did so again in late 2019, approached by two extremely talented women who decided to throw their hats in the ring, hoping for the best despite the fresh stink of the news.

And the thing is: I get it. I actually understood why they went ahead and applied. The Media Lab provides an exploratory and ambitious research latitude that, at its best, is hard to find elsewhere. So—with that good will in mind, I’ll offer some thoughts about shaping the Lab’s future. Specifically, I want to offer some thoughts on how to sharpen up the vague affirmation of “equity, inclusion, and collaboration” that appeared in the director’s job listing. That vagueness is everywhere these days—organizations that understand the need to do better, structurally and culturally, but can’t find the language to talk about how that works beyond recruitment/HR matters. So, in no particular order:

— Build an undivided house for critique and repair, and generate a shared vocabulary for recognizing and honoring each.

The Media Lab professes to be working in an anti-disciplinary way; it aspires to mix the autonomous experimentation of the arts with a paradigmatic mandate to launch not just new technologies, but new fields of technological research. Judging from the informal surveys that I take when I speak there, the students who actually get in have very little or no training in the arts or humanities. I’ve learned to recognize the mostly straightforward and narrow claim for doing “art” that’s common at the Lab and among tech folks generally: They mean to indicate the non-useful, beautiful, or elegant results from their technical work, and they want to encourage some wacky or whimsical side projects on the path to technical feasibility.

But critique and repair are ideas that really do mix the languages of artworks with engineering. Each could be quite robust at the lab, and getting clearer about them would assist the Lab’s community in articulating its commitments to socio-political concerns. How?

Let’s call “repair” mode, in the technical sense, the best-case version of new technologies (or technical research fields) that come into the world for the net benefit of humankind in the form of solutions. This alone is a whole universe of debate, of course, but let’s say that the repair horizon is more or less the status quo of much engineering education—possible solutions for challenging problems. There’s an abundance of need for this work, and when it goes well, the world gets important technologies.

“Critique,” in the technical sense, has been a matter of concern at the Lab, but from where I stand, not nearly enough defined or robustly supported. Leah Buechley, Sputniko!, Ethan Zuckerman, and others ran groups doing technological repair work. They each also supported parallel lines of study in the mode of critique: They made political inequities plain and visible to the public. They utilized technologies to dignify marginalized modes of craft. They allowed questions to be posed in artifacts, and they let them live as questions, without resolve. This is critique! Technological critique is the articulation of urgent socio-political questions made real in things. Things-to-think-with, which is not just for the gallery viewer. They’re public technologies and boundary objects, with open-ended narratives attached.

It would be easy to find this a “sides” matter—as though you’re either someone who’s optimistic about technology for its own sake (repair), or you’re someone who’s on the right side of history, thinking and acting in the pursuit of justice (critique). But the possibility is eminently available to build an undivided house–one where critique and repair are seen as complementary (if sometimes contentious) modes of research, and where the opportunity to mix and build a big body of work that contains both is convivially welcome. An undivided house requires a deeply pragmatic commitment to the values of each mode—and a willingness to generously suspend early judgment while research is in its early stages. Each needs to be explicitly named, used as a vocabulary from students’ first days, and richly informed in its nuances. Moreover: mitigating the division between critique and repair and building strong literacy would require most of all that the Lab’s leadership take up an explicitly relational theory of change, which I’ll get into further below.

— Remix the metrics of impact.

As I understand it, the Lab’s standard for the kind of impact that warrants the launch of a research group is roughly that its queries and outputs have the potential to affect a billion people. (That’s b-for-billion.) Numerical scale, at the Lab and everywhere else in tech, is king: the sole way to understand its importance and the sole lever it would point to that changes the world for the better.

But an expanded view of impact, articulated alongside critique and repair as a vocabulary, would make the Lab’s work much more dimensional in its wishes to uphold equity and inclusion. There’s Howard Gardner’s idea of “fruitful asynchrony” in creativity research, for example: the Lab could explicitly recruit and train the kind of researchers and projects that look for and amplify tensions in disciplinary training, cultivating insider-outsider approaches to standard tech domains. There’s David Edgerton’s “technology in use” metric, which seeks to identify the more modest technologies that, measured over time, make significant impact in people’s lives. There’s Ezio Manzini’s idea of “diffuse design”—networked practices for making things that achieve what he calls “cosmopolitan localism.” Yes, of course, the work of some Lab groups takes up these and adjacent metrics. But the way you build an ideals-led community is to identify the value in each way of looking at technology’s work and importance in the world—including the limits of what technology itself can do. An open, capacious definition for “impact” makes a richer house for practice.

— Reconfigure the Director’s Fellows program as Humanists in Residence.

I think there were seeds of a good idea in the Director’s Fellows program, started by Ito in 2013. Plenty of interesting people there. But I can imagine a stronger version of this model that forms a (paid!) cohort of thinkers-in-residence. These would be humanists, ethicists, artists and others working intellectually adjacent to tech. I’d say half should be permanent hires, and half a rotating set of two-year fellowships. But the key thing would be this: You’d have to take a radical people-over-projects approach, because the most important traits you’d be looking for, by far, are personal ones. Instead of hiring folks based on their CVs or purely professional status, you’d have to actively seek out the folks who are known for and easily demonstrate a kind of translational, pragmatic, meliorist approach to thinking about technology, with a strong commitment to mentoring young people.

And no, it wouldn’t be either 1) scholars hurling critical theory terms like weapons or 2) paying thinkers to act as yes-men to technical pursuits. There would be vigorous debate! But the humanists who would thrive at the lab would need to first and foremost be community-builders. You’d probably need to pay them to 1) pursue their own independent writing and projects, and 2) convene internal and external events, coach teams, and generally be “available in response” to the community in ways that aren’t covered by Student Life staff. They’d be in-house intellectuals with a relational model of change, namely the below:

— Adopt an explicitly relational model of change.

Look, I’m a realist, too. I’ve spent enough time among tech researchers at prestigious institutions to know that healthy relationality is—how to put it?—rare, to say the least. But if you actually want a transformative community, with hard questions addressed early in their arrival—if you want to train students to thrive in ways that really do launch entire new paradigms of research—you need a community that actively builds trust, intellectual and interpersonal. And you get that when you staff it with people who model a commitment to relationships: to building the good will and genuine connection that are among the best defenses against the rot of secrecy and compromised ethics.

A relational model of change is one powerful, essential way that you enact, in living color, a structural model of change in your own locality. The research shows you can’t rely on the abstractions of bias training, and it won’t be enough to rely on the old informal cultural norms where various people step in to do the nurturing and community-building work, by choice or by obligation. Structural equality, of course, is a many-layered thing; it has to be addressed in admissions, in evaluations, and so much more. But the relational model is so often assumed, and so little built. A relational model of change is worth articulating as a model—a vision, a policy, an agreement, a formative series of behaviors for your community.

I want my students to have a Media Lab worth going to, so I’m going to keep talking in the most optimistic tones I can muster. I’d love to hear from you, in comments or by reply, if you’re pondering them in different ways.

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In this sabbatical year I’ve got a halftime fellowship back at New America, where I’m a fellow in Education Policy. I’m researching and writing longform journalism about the future of work, broadly conceived, for adults with cognitive and developmental disabilities. Please get in touch if you know of creative and compelling things happening in this space, around the world—social enterprise, day center programming, hybrid college programs, and much more.

And the discussion continues over at New_Public about the smaller-scale social networks in our lives, including the rising popularity of Discord communities. If you’re following ideas for human-sized digital gathering spaces, you might be interested in New_Public’s whole enterprise.

Till next time—

Sara

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[At some point you signed up for this newsletter, undefended / undefeated, by Sara Hendren. Do please share it as you like. And it’s easy to unsubscribe below as you need.]

I joined up with New_Public—an effort to build better digital public spaces—as a contributing editor to their magazine, and I wrote a piece on looking for a human-scale alternative to Instagram for their inaugural issue. Its theme is decentralization. I encourage you to follow along if, like me, you’re tired of folks just complaining about the systems-level ills of the social internet. New_Public will be making and thinking, convening and prototyping their way to more dimensional forms of civic digital life. I’m glad to be part of it.

My piece is a modest personal essay about how I started using Notabli (shown in the photo above) for sharing images with a small set of family and friends in lieu of Instagram—how its designed less-ness is a form of calm technology:

Notabli offers a sturdy few interactive possibilities. In the app itself, there are likes, comments, and easy archiving, but zero of the glitter and charisma that make an app its own never-ending destination. There’s no third-party data harvesting, which is reassuring to parents, yes—but there are also no advertisements, no interactivity around comments, no direct messages, no ephemeral features like Stories, no tricked-out graphics. It’s a very slow, very placid feed. And the app isn’t even a necessity: You can sign up for a digest of images (or videos, or sound recordings) sent by email at regular intervals. (My parents, in their 70s and without a shred of interest in Facebook or Instagram or really even digital life in general, love the email bit: an uncomplicated and uncluttered delivery of digital media straight to their door.)

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I acknowledge in the piece that there are lots of ways to design some less into your social media. You can de-metricate and privatize your interactions; there’s also Freedom and similar apps for limiting your usage. But instead of mere containment when it comes to big tech, I like to point folks to good alternatives that are hiding in plain sight—in this case, a human-scale app that’s obscured by its domesticated marketing to parents.

In the end, though, I’m not so much trying to make a principled argument in that essay. I’m making a kind of resigned concession to a McLuhan 101 reality: The medium really is the message. And I’m old enough to be pretty sober about human behavior—including my own human behavior—in the face of magnetic shiny objects, and therefore to take seriously the matter of individual agency in contending with them. These tools are designed to affect behavior, and not just in the so-called “content” they deliver! So few people want to take seriously the idea that the very architecture of the tool really does shape our experience. Our experience, not just other people’s. With a longer word count, I would have explored a cognitive fallacy especially prevalent among smartypants types: the tacit assumption that an abstract understanding of some technological process—medium-as-message, say, or the vicissitudes of algorithmic attention, or intermittent rewards for refreshing the feed—will automatically confer immunity to that process. To put it simply: “I can name that effect, so it doesn’t affect me” syndrome.*

The older I get, the more ardently I seek a right-sized model of self in my mind’s eye: not too big and not too small. Yes, big problems with capital aren’t addressable by ethics at an individual scale. We shouldn’t render our sense of self too big, making it responsible for systemic rot. And yet: Our choices help us form an inner life that’s variously deepened or flattened by everyday habit. And our choices do form a lifetime; they also form nodes in our networks as social contagion, for good or ill. In my haste to recognize systems-level operations, I don’t want to render the self too small, discounting the dignity of making conscious choices. Choices about our many freedoms, and the role of limits, in turn, to set free.

Anyway, let me know what you think.

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In other news: My book won a Science in Society Journalism award! I’m just thrilled. The judges said that “few books are capable of making you see the world in a fundamentally new way, and this is one of them,” which is the best compliment I could hope for.

Next month will bring the first in-person event of any kind around the book(!), but that recognition is a dream, because I had in mind a popular science reader during the writing process. I even drew up this schematic below and pinned it to a bulletin board above my desk. It was a way of organizing my approach to the material: design as an unexpected side door to the surprising work of wonder, seeing our familiar surroundings with new eyes. And then, through rhetorical stitchery, trying to move the reader along to see the urgency of access and its many human questions: What is a good and happy life, with and without assistance? Where is robust independence worth seeking, and where does interdependence make us whole?

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You can see that I had in mind the writer Oliver Sacks, a humanitarian master at the “wonder” piece, alongside Atul Gawande’s workaday writing for the sake of urgency. Both are popular science writers whose work has nourished mine, so the recognition by the National Association of Science Writers is particularly welcome.

Thanks for reading. Much more to come!

* Does a name for this fallacy exist? I asked my colleague in psychology, Jonathan Adler, about it and he asked his community, but so far no smoking gun. Maybe it’s a sub-genre of one of Kahneman’s cognitive biases? If you know, please do say.