Over the last 20 years or so, disabled activists have been campaigning for a shift from the 'medical' to the ‘social model’ of disability:

This means recognising that people who have physical, sensory or intellectual impairments, or mental/emotional distress, are denied opportunities, discriminated against and excluded by the barriers that society creates. It means focusing, not on our impairments – what is wrong with our bodies or our minds – but on what is wrong with the way society is organised. In other words, focusing on the prejudice that we experience, inaccessible physical and communication environments, the failure to put resources into enabling technology, and other socially created barriers.

Jenny Morris (ed) Encounters with Strangers: Feminism and Disability The Women’s Press 1996 p11

It is an awkward truth that it is often not non-disabled people who ‘look after’ the disabled, but disabled and deaf people who find themselves protecting the non-disabled from their own fears and confusions. It is important to take notice of the fact that disabled people have to develop a variety of strategies to cope with 'normal' attitudes, as well as barriers in the physical world. Hearing these perspectives can help us question received wisdom and stereotypes about "what is normal'.

Disabled people have to work continually against destructive forces which see us as powerless, passive and unattractive. It seems that no matter how cheerfully and positively we attempt to go out in the world, we are bound to be confronted by someone whose response to our lack of ordinariness, and difference from the norm leaves us feeling powerless and angry. Trying to understand the complicated feelings which arise out of our everyday encounters with the world is central to the lives of disabled people.

In fact, if you bring any group of disabled people together, before very long we’ll be swopping stories about the annoying, appalling, patronising, insensitive, unhelpful and sometimes just plain funny encounters that we have on an almost daily basis…

Lois Keith “Encounters with Strangers” in Morris (ed) Encounters with Strangers: Feminism and Disability The Women’s Press 1996 p70

As well as listening to the words of disabled and deaf people, we can learn a lot from how disabled artists express their responses to the material world through creative practice - expressions not just in words but through a rich diversity of artistic work.

Issues of control and power have been important concerns in Noëmi Lakmaier’s work, implicitly referencing her own experiences of disempowering environments and circumstances. Her practice is predominantly site specific and installation based, placing strong emphasis on the relationship between objects, people and space. Lakmaier works with familiar everyday objects and materials, including toys books clothing furniture, DIY building materials etc.

Lakamier was recently awarded a residency at Camden Arts Centre (where) she created Experiment in Happiness a giant ball covered in hundreds of shoes. At a live event she attach(ed) herself to the ball and invite(d) viewers to push the ball, taking control away from her.

By using her own body in the artwork, she intensifies the relationship between viewer and object and challenges her fears of relinquishing control.

Review of work as part of exhibition entitled 'Essense' at Brunel University, July - September 2008.

There are at least two ways that we can inform architectural design by attending to the narratives and strategies of disabled people. First, it helps us attend to the many and varied characteristics of different bodies, and therefore to engage with the richness and diversity of human experiences (rather than just placing all the problems 'out there' as an issue for disabled and deaf people alone to deal with.)

When a deaf person signs a hearing person, they touch their mouth. Deafness is here not a 'lack' of hearing, it is about speaking.

Second, it helps us explore our own everyday assumptions about 'what is normal' in the everyday encounters through which diverse individuals intersect with objects and spaces - and which so persistently leave disabled people out.

…language recommends that we conceive of the able-body as something that just comes along ‘naturally’ as people go about their daily existence. People just jump into the shower, run to the store, see what others mean while keeping an eye on the kids, or skipping from office to office and, having run through the day whilst managing to keep their noses clean, hop into bed. All of this glosses the body that comes along while, at the same time, brings it along metaphorically. Speaking of ‘normal bodies’ as movement and metaphor maps them as if they are a natural possession, as if they are not mapped at all.

Tanya Titchkosky in Mairian Corker and Tom Shakespeare (Eds) 2002 p103

The invisibility of this work means that the everyday procedures through which free and independent mobility can occur – taking steps, changing level, negotiating corners, identifying visual and aural cues, manipulating objects, understanding instructions, - are all ‘nothing much’. The problematic accomplishments of physically getting around; of the everyday organisational undertakings, and of social interaction and maintenance is revealed only when it is breached by needing time, being effortful or ‘interfering’ with normal, unimpeded, unnoticed mobility and independence.

So designed space ends up with both deliberate exclusions and (perhaps unintended) differential entitlements. Slowing down and really taking notice of these things offers the possibilities of imagining a re-mapping of our 'normal' social and spatial practices.

Attending to the many diverse narratives and strategies from disabled and deaf people does not, of itself, provide any obvious answers about how to better design the built environment for everyone. We cannot just somehow 'add together' all our different experiences and come to a consensus; there are too many contradictions and conflicts between what we need or want, whether functionally, emotionally, socially or poetically.

For each group described here there will always be an individual who can tell their story in a different way. The labels gathered along the way, like elderly, disabled, single parent, homeless, lesbian or gay, criminal, disturbed child, will all have behind them a personal experience which does not fit the frame of what constitutes that label in the public eye or the public perception of that label. Each story, each experience is valid and incredibly important if we are going to understand what lies behind the label. If each story helps us to change the way we do things then of itself it is invaluable. For too long we have worked to formulas and categories and have failed to hear the story which is born of reality. The more people tell their story the more society will see for themselves where the barriers to living lie. They are so obvious they cannot be missed.

Sandy Slack ‘I am more than my wheels” in Corker and French (ed) Disability Discourse Open University Press 1999 p36-37

Attending to the many voices of disabled and deaf people is much more about developing a critical 'state of mind' which does not make assumptions about 'what disabled people are like' , but instead challenges the stereotypes of both disability and 'normality' so as to open up design to new and creative possibilities.