Making Disability Modern - by Bess Williamson & Elizabeth Guffey (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Making Disability Modern: Design Histories brings together leading scholars from a range of disciplinary and national perspectives to examine how designed objects and spaces contributes to the meanings of ability and disability from the late 18th century to the present day, and in homes, offices, and schools to realms of national and international politics. The contributors reveal the social role of objects - particularly those designed for use by people with disabilities, such as walking sticks, wheelchairs, and prosthetic limbs - and consider the active role that makers, users and designers take to reshape the material environment into a usable world. But it also aims to make clear that definitions of disability-and ability-are often shaped by design.

Review Quotes

Making Disability Modern makes a good reader that maps out the areas of tension, new discourse, and discussion points about design and disability from practical, social, cultural, and technological perspectives.

Technology and Culture

A fascinating collection of critical cultural histories of disability objects, woven together with a narrative of 'the modern' and its connotations in society, industry and design. We need more books like this to connect disability studies and design.

This book makes visible often-obscured aspects of human life, the built environment, and societal factors that materialize through design, disability, and their intersections over history and across continents.

About the Author

Elizabeth Guffey is Professor of Art and Design History at Purchase College, State University of New York, USA, where she also heads the MA in Modern and Contemporary Art. She is the author of Designing Disability: Symbols, Space, and Society (Bloomsbury, 2017), Posters: A Global History (2014), and Retro: The Culture of Revival (2002).

Bess Williamson is Associate Professor of Design History at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she teaches courses on modern and contemporary design in relation to politics and social change. Her book, Accessible America: A History of Disability and Design (2019), describes the role of design in the US Disability Rights cause of the last half of the 20th century.