the shape of the pocket

subtlety, insight, and beauty drive a whole world of adaptive fashion

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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.

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.