IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - Spring 2013 - 9

BOOK REVIEWs
REVIEW

MICHELE FRIEDNER

Design Meets Disability
By Graham Pullin. Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press, 2011, paperbound.
"In accordance with postmodernism's premise that the margins constitute the center,
I probe the peripheral so as to view the whole in a fresh way."

-Garland Thomson [3]

nitially released as a hardcover volume in 2009,
for disabled people. For example, he talks to Tomoko
designer and former medical researcher Graham
Azumi about designing stepstools for little people and
pullin's provocative and engaging book Design
to Crispin Jones about designing watches for visually
Meets Disability aims to entice and excite designdisabled people. Some of these conversations are longer
ers about the possibilities and prospects of designing
than others and include sketches and drawings. Visufor disabled people. pullin argues, however, that good
ally, this book is incredibly striking: there are beautiful
design will not only be utilized by disabled people.
images of products ranging from iphones to designer
With his concept of "resonant design,"
spectacles to artsy fuzzy sweaters. This is
Designing for
defined as "design intended to address the
clearly a book meant to inspire, motivate,
needs of some people with a particular
and impress upon designers the opportudisability can
disability and other people without that
invigorate design nities of designing for disabled people.
disability but perhaps finding themselves
Yet, pullin's choice of word order for
practices and
in similar circumstances," pullin tries to
his title is telling: design meets disability
inject different
skirt the tensions between particularity
and not disability meets design. While
and generality. He argues that designing
ways of thinking pullin begins, on page one, by stating:
for disability can invigorate design prac"This is a book about how the worlds of
into the design
tices and inject different ways of thinking
design and disability could inspire each
community.
into the design community.
other," it is not clear what the "world of
The book is divided into two sections.
disability" is. While there are designers
The first outlines a series of tensions or "meetings"
with names and personalities who loom large, the same
between key issues ostensibly separating the worlds
cannot be said for disabled people who largely remain
of design and disability. pullin believes that such tenabsent from the book's pages. While this is arguably a
sions, such as the tension between fashion and discrebook written for designers and not for disabled people,
tion and the tension between exploring and solving,
I am not convinced that pullin adequately introduces
for example, need to be reconciled in order for sucdesigners to the (diverse and varied) stakes of disabilcessful design for disability to take place.
ity. And this is a book about products and not people,
In the second section of the book, pullin engages
a problem when we consider that the category of disin a series of (imaginary and real) conversations with
ability is created through social relations and processes.
chosen designers about designing a specific product
To be fair, pullin diligently tries to use appropriate language and terminology. He makes a distinction
between "impairment" and "disability," defining the
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MTS.2013.2247727
Date of publication: 14 March 2013
former in terms of function and the latter in terms
Michele Friedner is a National Science Foundation postdoctoral fellow in M.I.T.'s Anthropology program. Her research
analyzes the moral and social practices of sign language-using deaf young adults in Bangalore, India. She is a former
board member of the Society for Disability Studies and on the editorial board of Disability Studies Quarterly. She can
be reached at mfriedne@mit.edu.
IEEE TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETY MAGAZINE

SprING 2013

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