The body is never a single physical thing so much as a series of attitudes towards it

Lennard J. Davis Bending Over Backwards: Disability, Dismodernism and other difficult positions New York University Press 2002 p 22

Stories that get told about (rather than by) disabled people all too often frame their lives as tragic or heroic – they can be either passive victims or extraordinary people, but definitely not ‘normal’ in their desires and attitudes. We need to get beyond such simplistic stereotypes; to provide ways of re-thinking the assumed divisions between ‘disabled’ and ‘non-disabled’ people:

I ask my students to design a “normal” human, to construct their own categories and taxonomies and come to some conclusions about what’s normal and what’s not. We have fun with this exercise, obviously. Students often joke that, for example, men should be about six feet tall and women should weigh about 120 pounds, until I remind them that such “norms” conceal as well as reveal culturally desired attributes. (…)

So they designate broad categories that seem promising: physical, mental, emotional, psychological, sometimes behavioral. Most students feel competent to itemize the physical norm, so I ask some- thing such as, what if a person has one eyebrow higher than another or an extra metatarsal bone in one foot? (…) If anything, our attempts at classifications become more hotly disputed—and absurd—as we move on to the mental, emotional, and psychological categories. Well before we get to the behavioral category, someone in class will usually (and mercifully) bemoan the fact that by our standards some, if not all, of the members of his or her family are abnormal. Exactly!

J. C. Wilson Making Disability Visible: How Disability Studies Might Transform the Medical and Science Writing Classroom University of Cincinnati

For a (very) brief history of how recent the idea of 'normality' is see this Science Museum summary

Categorising people as 'disabled' or 'able-bodied', then, is rather more complicated than commonsense allows. Disabilities can come and go, start late in life or be hidden. What one person considers a disability, another might not (mental health issues, cancer, missing a finger on one hand, wearing spectacles?) Understanding that (dis)ability is an ambiguous category also means re-thinking how we engage with disability and architecture. In design, we usually have two immediate ways of responding to disability. We can attempt to define its particular 'special needs' (that is, pin it down as a category with precise requirements that can be met) and/or we can see it as on a continuum with the whole range of experiences of the built environment - as part of more general needs that we all share to some degree (commonly called inclusive design).

However, in fact, thinking (dis)ability as an ambiguous category challenges both of these approaches. This is because both assume that there are clear functional design responses which will work - either for the specific differences of 'special needs' or the assumed consensus that everyone, in the end, is the same. But if (dis)ability is ambiguous, it is also complicated, involves conflict and partiality and - most importantly - is filtered through our cultural and social constructions.

Disability studies matters because it points out the obvious, the common, the things no one notices because most of those “no ones” see themselves as living in the mirage of being normal.

Lennard J. Davis

Until we unravel the underlying assumptions about disability and architecture, we are likely to merely reproduce the unequal social and spatial practices which endlessly throw up barriers to disabled people's equal participation in society.

Artists Aaron Williamson and Katherine Araniello challenge normative perceptions of disabled people. In a series of films the Disabled Avant-Garde they play with the assumed 'absurdity' of such a possibility. The Way Out (with Laurence Harvey, Simon Raven, Juliet Robson and Philip Ryder) imagines a world in which a violent, insurrectionary gang of 'disability terrorists' has brought the world to its knees. Click here to see Tom and Jerry from the Disabled Avant-Garde series.

Part of re-thinking disability as an ambiguous category is to refuse to assume it is a 'lack', to start from an assumption that to be disabled is to be 'less' than normal. For example, non-disabled people tend to see wheelchairs as an additional impediment, something that gets in the way and adds complications to ‘normal’ mobility. But wheelchairs are an enabling device, not a negative metaphor of lack – not “ a symbol of need and dependency” Rather, “people like myself who rely on a wheelchair, for mobility and independence, see it as a piece of liberating equipment.” . Or as Slack writes: “ my wheelchair is my best friend – I wheel it with pride and confidence. It takes me into the world” .For people who use Deaf with a capital D, deafness is not a 'problem' or a disability. Deaf people are a linguistic minority who use sign language. Deaf culture celebrates the values of being deaf, for example, through Deaf Raves and Deaf poetry. Click here to watch Rives Def Jam.

However understanding that disability is not an 'absence of normality' is not about avoiding issues of difference.

Perhaps, rather than trying to pin people down to particular body categories and then 'meeting their needs' through design, we should instead be exploring instead the relational spaces between the different participants in the design process.

What does this mean? Well, first, it suggests that we are also part of the picture; not just designing for others, but coming to each encounter with our own assumptions and approaches. Second, it involves critical looking at the specificity of each context and type of engagement - at the forms of negotiation and translation that take place in that situation. Finally, it means unravelling the often taken for granted everyday social and spatial practices which frame what is assumed to matter and what not.

Most immediately, we need to listen to disabled and deaf people's many narratives of their experiences of the built environment. But at the same time, we need to re-think how 'users' are generally defined in architectural design, and who such 'users' actually represent.

How, then, can we start from disability and difference as a way of critically and creatively engaging with everyday, unnoticed social and spatial practices? In ethnomethodology, such ordinary acts and encounters are seen as “problematic accomplishments”(Ryave and Schenkein:1974).

They suggest that we all undertake a considerable amount of detailed – but usually invisible - work in order to maintain the commonplace world where people know what ‘anyone’ knows and does. Doing ‘nothing much’ is a socially achieved activity, but it is not 'the same' for everyone. Harvey Sacks' in his paper 'On doing being ordinary', for example, opens up the kind of work ordinariness involves:

So one part of the job [doing being ordinary] is that you have to know what anybody/everybody is doing: doing ordinarily. Further, you have to have that available to do. There are people who do not have that available to do, and who specifically cannot be ordinary.

Disabled people are often not perceived as ‘anyone’ – not because of any particular impairment, but because they do not fit the unspoken conventions of what constitutes doing ‘being ordinary’. Starting from disability, then, offers a way to challenge assumptions about 'what is normal' in different situations and settings.

The design of space also assumes an ‘anyone’, although who this ‘anyone’ is will vary from context to context. The particular ‘anyone’ may be explicitly articulated by the designer or just assumed. It may be contested, or ignored or absent-mindedly transformed through actions by the client, contractor or planner. That ‘anyone’ will be translated (unevenly) both into (predicted) patterns of social and spatial practices and into representations of those practices. Designed spaces based on one sort of ‘anyone’ can also be disrupted through unexpected patterns of engagement. At the same time buildings can mark out who is not anyone by allocating them specific locations or presumed actions, or by simply designing on the basis that everyone will be doing ‘being ordinary’, without noticing those who specifically cannot be ordinary in this particular space. So the problematic accomplishments of doing being ordinary are related to material space, but this is not a simple or transparently obvious relationship.

There is a tactic that one well known theorist in this area, Garfinkel, calls breaching. He argues that the underlying practices in commonplace situations are best made visible through their disruption, through ‘making trouble’ (1967, 37-8).

Procedurally it is my preference to start with familiar scenes and ask what can be done to make trouble. The operations that one would have to perform in order to multiply the senseless features of perceived environments, to produce and sustain bewilderment, consternation and confusion; to produce the socially constructed affects of anxiety, shame, guilt and indignation and to produce disorganised interaction should tell us something about how the structures of everyday activities are ordinarily and routinely produced and maintained.

Garfinkel developed a series of breaching experiments where he asked students to deliberately perform in unexpected ways, and monitored the results. For disabled people, such acts of breaching are not necessarily a choice. This is not merely a matter of the impact of specific impairments, but because disability is persistently located as out of the ordinary. Simply doing being ordinary is often not available to disabled people, particularly where they find themselves encountering others. In ethnomethodological terms, they are seen as less than full societal members. Lois Keith reveals what this means when she writes about the impact of becoming disabled and the immediate effect it produced in:

the difference between how I wanted to see myself, as a now visibly different but still competent and private person, and how others saw me and would continue to see me.

Breaching experiments for architectural design then could work with disabled and Deaf people to explore how they are breached 'by' the space of social assumptions and physical barriers; but also how they creatively 'breach' space in challenging those assumptions and barriers. For non-disabled people it suggests take notice of how they do 'being ordinary', and how to use breaching as a way of opening up alternative spaces and creative practices.

Ben Cove studied architecture and then moved into fine art practice. As part of the Practical Mechanics installation at Cell Project Space in 2006, he built a giant pantograph and used it to scale up architectural drawings - introducing an inevitable imperfection and inaccuracy.