How to Design a More Human World with Sara Hendren

S10 E1—When you walk into a room, what does that room tell you about who you are as a human being? What assumptions go into our restaurants and civic buildings and churches and homes and schools? What do they say about who we are and about how we relate to each other? Artist and design researcher Sara Hendren joins Amy Julia Becker to explore how modern spaces—from office buildings to nursing homes—shape what we believe about dignity, dependence, and belonging. Together they uncover how design can either diminish or restore our shared humanity, and why the good life depends on reimagining how we live together.

00:00 Introduction to Design and Humanity
05:24 Understanding the Machine Model and Anti-Human Design
14:32 What Spaces Communicate About Being Human
29:29 Design Choices and Human Dignity
34:49 Innovations in Dementia Care Design
37:26 Art and Dignity for Individuals with Disabilities
41:32 The Metaphysics of Dignity and Human Connection
51:07 Designing for the Good Life: Relationality and Community

MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:

• What Can a Body Do? How We Meet the Built World by Sara Hendren
• Previous podcast conversation: “S3 E15 | Who Belongs? Disability and the Built World with Sara Hendren”
• Comment Magazine essay by Sara Hendren: “Pattern Recognition: Design for humans in unexpected places.”
• Short film: Simple Machine
• Being Mortal by Atul Gawande

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WATCH this conversation on YouTube: Amy Julia Becker on YouTube

SUBSCRIBE to Amy Julia's Substack: amyjuliabecker.substack.com

JOIN the conversation on Instagram: @amyjuliabecker

LISTEN to more episodes: amyjuliabecker.com/shows/

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ABOUT OUR GUEST:

Sara Hendren is an artist, design researcher, writer, and professor at Northeastern University. Her book What Can a Body Do? How We Meet the Built World explores the places where disability shows up in design at all scales: assistive technology, furniture, architecture, urban planning, and more. It was named one of the Best Books of 2020 by NPR and won the 2021 Science in Society Journalism book prize.

Her art and design works have been exhibited on the White House lawn under the Obama presidency, at the Victoria & Albert Museum, the Seoul Museum of Art, the Vitra Museum, and many others, and her work is held in the permanent collections at MoMA and the Cooper Hewitt. She has been an NEH Public Scholar and a fellow at New America, and her commentary and criticism have been published in Harper’s, Art in America, The New York Times, the Washington Post, and elsewhere.

Website: sarahendren.com

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Thanks for listening! 

Transcript

Note: This transcript is autogenerated and does contain errors. Please check the corresponding audio before quoting in print.

Amy Julia Becker (00:05)
When you walk into a room, what does that room tell you about who you are as a human being? What assumptions go into our restaurants and civic buildings and churches and homes and schools? What do they say about who we are and about how we relate to each other? And how can we build moments and spaces that honor our humanity rather than reducing

I'm Amy Julia Becker, and this is Reimagining the Good Life, a podcast about challenging the assumptions about what makes life good, proclaiming the inherent belovedness of every human being, and envisioning a world of belonging where everyone matters. Today, I'm talking with design professor Sarah Hendren about designing spaces that honor our full humanity. I first read Sarah's book, What Can a Body Do? when it came out back in 2020.

And her recent essay for Comment Magazine about the way our physical gathering spaces communicate value and convey what we believe about our humanity reminded me of the profound wisdom and insight she offers as we move through this world. Sarah is an artist, design researcher, writer, professor at Northeastern University, and a mom. And all of those things will inform the way that she is able to help shape our imaginations about the spaces we inhabit.

So here's my conversation with Sarah Hendren.

I'm here with Sarah Hendren. I'm so glad to have you back on the show. Thank you for joining us.

Sara Hendren (01:35)
So good to see you, Amy Julia, and really glad to be back here.

Amy Julia Becker (01:39)
We had a chance to talk a couple of years ago about your book, What Can a Body Do? Which is something I refer to, the book, the idea, the conversations I've had with you, like over and over and over again. And some of those ideas I think will come into our conversation here. But for listeners who were not here and listening however many years ago that was, we'll put that in the show notes, the link to that conversation. And I also thought maybe we would start with you giving a bit of an introduction to

⁓ your work when it comes to an essay you recently wrote in Comment Magazine. We're going to talk about that, but also what can a body do and the idea of kind of ⁓ designing for humanity.

Sara Hendren (02:19)
It's great to be here and I feel so much affinity for your podcast and ideas and so I'm glad to get to talk this through again. Yeah, I'm a design researcher and a professor. teach at Northeastern University in the art and design department and I have a 50 % dual appointment in the School of Architecture. So I teach and I taught for 10 years at Olin College, which is outside of Boston here. So I have taught in the last dozen years, engineers, designers and architects.

So people who make things, I work with them about how to think about the social aspects of the built environment. So I'm not teaching them software programming languages or even at the details of architectural code. It's much more about ways to think about human centered design and work. And my research area is about where disability shows up in design. And it's just a fascinating kind of

series of questions to ask about how in a free democratic society, people whose bodies and minds deviate significantly from the average or norm make their way through the world, so literally through the world, onto the sidewalk, in and out of buildings, which of course includes education, transportation, the workplace. ⁓ How they get into the physical world is how, of course, people of all abilities get into the civic sphere, how they become members of a society.

It's a kind of, for those young makers, it's so much fun to work alongside people with a lot of agency to build. For those young makers, I'm trying to help them think about the history of disability, the kind of, the question of the needful body, what is the place of dependence in our lives? I know this is stuff that you talk about from a number of angles. So that, I do a lot of design work, work that goes out in exhibitions and museums, collaboratively designed artifacts, that kind of thing. I made a short film last year.

But I wrote a book that came out in 2020 called What Can a Body Do? How We Meet the Built World. And it is not about my work ⁓ so much, but a kind of journalistic look at design across scales. in scales of design, I just mean types and sizes of design. So things that you wear on the body, but also products, but also furniture, also buildings, and also urban planning. it kind of goes through there. And I talk a little bit about how I got into this work.

which is something that you and I share. have a 20-year-old eldest of three children who has Down syndrome, and that's how I got into the work and so much of the beating heart of what I do. So that is my broad disposition. How does the human body in its many needful states and ⁓ how does collective assistance get designed for?

Amy Julia Becker (05:05)
And I love your work for all of those things. I'm so glad. ⁓ Yeah, just I was glad I told you this, but to have this comment magazine essay, which again, we will link to as a point of kind of focus so that we could have a conversation. Although all of these things are, I think, so relevant in our lives at all times. But I'm going to start by, you know, this article is also about designing for humans. And there's a place where you write technology and design critics.

often point to a faulty anthropology of personhood that sits at the root of anti-human design. ⁓ And I know you want to kind of interrogate that idea itself, but first I thought maybe we could start with just like, what is anti-human design? For people who are not familiar with kind of design terms, like what is anti-human design? Why would people even be talking about that?

Sara Hendren (05:56)
Yeah, and maybe this is just a moment to say that the theme for this is the spring issue of Comet magazine and their slogan is that they do public theology for the common good. And ⁓ the theme is anti-human. And when I talked to the editor last fall, I had said to her, I didn't know what the theme was going to be for the spring, but I just said to her, I have in mind some kind of essay, some kind of treatise.

on design for birth and death, which is kind of where my research is heading now. Oh, interesting. And so was talking that through with her about why, I mean, I'm teaching a couple of classes on this next year. I have a bioethics fellowship next year that I'm going to be looking at this stuff in. But the bioethicists often look at birth and death together. But designers tend not to. So it's like, what do we learn when we look at the artifacts at the very beginning of life and the very end of life? And I say this to you because I'm trying to kind of turn the rudder of the ship of my research from

Amy Julia Becker (06:29)
Yeah.

Sara Hendren (06:54)
disability topically to disability within this kind of deeper philosophical substrate where the book, Angles of Life, get us to those acute moments of vulnerability, dignity, questions of autonomy around technology at both ends as a way to get disability, you know, just sort of a little more in dialogue with a much longer historical and philosophical tradition rather than just the disability rights movement, which has its many ordinances, but also I think has its limitations. We can get into that if you want to.

So that is a long way of saying, I said to this editor, Design for Birth and Death, and so she wrote me back and said, you know, the spring issue is anti-human, the anti-human. Could you write us a piece on birth, death, and otherwise, or something that's sort of the human? So I set to work trying to do this, and really this was a way of me trying to write myself into maybe a decade of coming research. So it's really me trying to piece it together, honestly. Okay, your question is.

What is the anti-human? You know, I think I say in the article that so many of the familiar buildings in our lives are little more than extruded spreadsheets that I find is a very vivid image. What I mean by that is that when people set out to build a new building now, typically because of the economy we live in and multiple kinds of pressures involved in that from the client side, from the builder side, zoning laws, all kinds of things.

⁓ We get a lot of building projects that are reduced to spreadsheets in the form of how much does something cost and then per square foot and then sort of tabulating from there. What can be built with the cheapest possible materials with the kind of like minimum code met, know, of dimensions. ⁓ Yes, the ADA gives us some guarantees around maybe ramps and elevators, but we tend to think of a building as a kind of machine with, you know, sort of ⁓

working parts that then maybe get a skin of a housing around it as a kind of soulless block set of cells for containing the real part of our lives, which is our human behavior. As though, in other words, anything that shelters us from wind and rain and heat and cold will do the job. As opposed to an idea that the kind of surroundings in our lives do a strong bodied work of signaling to us.

Who can be there? What should our actions be there? There's an architecture theorist named Sarah Williams Goldhagen who talks about how the buildings of our lives are action settings. So they set up our actions by a dozen cues. So if you just think about the way you go into a library or a cathedral or a busy cafe, all the constituent parts

everything from how tall is the building compared to your typical, you know, human height, how many heads high, the kind of equality of echo that's there, the arrangement of tables and whether they are open or closed, you know, for you to sit down or to walk around. All of those are action settings. They're setting up your actions within them. And I would argue anti-human in the extruded spreadsheet like soulless, you know, corporate

office park, the kind of cheapest possible building, the tiny windows or the absence of windows. Think about the average elementary school in our country. You can see there's not a lot of attention to setting up actions that are the kinds that we'd want to see with a robust vision of human life together. And, you know, it's just, I think in a kind of dualism about body and mind or body and real self or something, we sort of say, well,

The real work is this kind of computer work that's going on in our brains and we don't need for our bodies to be getting these signals about how to be. But a more integrated idea of the human would take that seriously. And most cultures and most of human history have taken that seriously. Say, what are the materials? What are the proportions? What are the relationships ⁓ in the pattern of our built environments that

do this queuing of us and this kind of dynamic setting up of our actions. You see sacred architecture all over the world in various kinds of ways. But in hunter gatherer societies, you see, you know, dedicated sacred architecture, example, characteristic ornamentation and, you know, the kind of relationships between walls and roofs and vistas and so on. And, you know, I think we've just accepted

for 100 years in the rich developed countries of the world. ⁓ Yeah, this kind of machine model of the built environment. So I've said a lot there.

Amy Julia Becker (11:47)
Yeah, so in some ways, would you say the contrast in terms of how we understand, like is the machine model of the built environment making a claim about what it means to be human? Like that humans are more like machines than they are like...

Sara Hendren (12:02)
I think that's right. And I think it's not only in the built environment, it's in much of our language. And when I say our, again, I mean, like, rich countries of the world in the 21st century, especially in elite institutions, in knowledge economies, that we appeal to the computer, turns out, you know, since the advent of the computer, we appeal to the computer as a model for ourselves. So we think of the brain as a computer, a wet computer in a

slightly inconvenient bag of water that we sort of haul around. This is the real work. And you can see like in the 19th century, the rhetoric is, ⁓ you know, the body as a steam engine. So it seems like in modernity, at least, we can't resist humans can't resist appealing to the nearest to hand machine as a model for the self. So that's not just because of the built environment, it's in concert with it. There are lots of historical reasons for that.

But if I'm honest, Amy Julia, like a lot of my effort in the classroom and what I write in my research is to try to poke at the machine model of self that a lot of technology critics have been arguing about for a long time, but we just keep needing to hear it because it's just so pervasive that something about modern life, some series of things about modern life ⁓ cues us to think of ourselves as machines and therefore

to think of all our difficulties and our suffering as glitches in machines, and to think with a very mechanistic view about what it means to optimize the self. This is where, as I try to say in the piece, we start to talk about an anthropology of what are people for. And so you'll get philosophers who say like, yes, this is a sad, shrunken anthropology. And maybe just for listeners, like not anthropology in the sense of the intellectual discipline and domain of studying

people and cultures, but an anthropology of the human is a different question from the biology of the human, not what is the human mammal, but what are people ordered for as the good need to flourish as a human. So a lot of times philosophers say, yeah, we have this sad machine-like anthropology. That's what we need to fix. And so the piece was sort of written to say, I'm not sure that that

cart always, that that horse always goes before that cart, know, that an anthropology might come from a lot of places. So maybe if you want to dig into that, we can.

Amy Julia Becker (14:32)
Yeah, I would like to dig into that. Can you give us some, like, tangible examples of the types of spaces you're talking about, both on the machine side and perhaps on the more human or sacred side, and what they communicate about bodies and humans? And then we can go from there. I more questions.

Sara Hendren (14:52)
So, I mean, if you look, just to take a very, to take very contemporary examples, gosh, there so many. If you look at like the way that the average restaurant now has shunted human interaction to ⁓ screen interface for ordering. So, for example, I find this is a long tail hangover from COVID days where you sit down, you've gotten all dressed up, you've taken the

taxi and you've come to meet your friends across town for dinner and my goodness you haven't seen them in so long and you greet them and then you're seated at your table and you're meant to like disappear into your phone with the QR code for the menu. to me is a kind of like a lead balloon over what a restaurant convivial meal is supposed to be about. my goodness I haven't seen you in so long.

the waiter comes, the candle's in the middle, the like, what's going on with the music and whatever, and like, no, we're just gonna dive into this little screen interface. And I note that, I mean, this is at McDonald's even too, it's sort of how few humans can we get into the interaction? And how many screens can we, so there's just this kind of banal, ordinary vacuuming up of what would otherwise be the need to kind of have just rehearse that kind of bodied interaction, how are you today, you know, all of these things.

⁓ that make it into this efficient, very conveyor belt humanoid, know, like just in the background to kind of assist. Like they really, they remodeled my local McDonald's to be just like a bank of screens and this one little, one little register where one person goes to the back and comes back up. So again, it's like, those are the kind of chipping away. You know, there's this kind of, again, if you look at the average suburban office park, you know, just the way that it is, it is car.

car driven, you you have to go out there, you cannot walk from that office park to a park of any kind or to a restaurant. very often urban planners talk about the good of mixed zoning. So having people working near to the places where they live. mean, the average development of the American city, the average American city in the last hundred years has been much more separation. You live in one place, you work in another, so it's sort of cars.

I would call that in aggregate anti-human because it doesn't promote sort of meetings on the street and those ordinary collisions. It also doesn't create the kind of ordinary safety that mixed zoning does create on the city sidewalks. you have Jane Jacobs, who's an urban planner theorist, famously wrote that mixed zoning, like you see in New York City, people live and work in the same kind of proximity to one another, creates safety for women and children on the street because you have the bodega that's open really late right under your-

apartment building where you're going in. you have eyes on the street, she said. So that I would say is a human example. If the office park, the average office park is the anti-human or the appification of the restaurant. ⁓ Another human, very human example. I mean, I would point to, well, there's a couple of cafes in my city in Cambridge, Massachusetts that have recently gone laptop free and they're very strict about it. So there's a coffee house in Harvard Square that

where you can have a phone, but you can't have a laptop. And it's interesting just to think about the difference between those two things, the way a laptop creates this square wall in front of people. If you go in there now, it is full of young people. It's like being at a party in the 90s, if you remember. So it's like the kind of conviviality that's created there actually by a constraint is a really interesting design choice. And I would say that's much more human. So I say to my students, like, if I were looking for a boyfriend, I would go to

this cafe. Like all I'm telling you is like if you want to meet people that doesn't have this kind of laptop, you know, barrier the way that it just sucks our attention. So so if that helps maybe people just to start to orient like what is it that returns us to each other and creates the kind of relational friction that is the stuff of relationships. I mean the stuff of friendship and and ordinary, you know, sharing life. That's the human.

What other kinds of machine logics make efficiency and kind of the automating out our interactions or the separation of work and life, all those kinds of things, I would call those, broadly speaking, ⁓ less human, more anti-human.

Amy Julia Becker (19:29)
Yeah, and it's interesting again, just to think about the way like design can either amplify either side of that, I guess. I was thinking when you were speaking, and I'd like to, so as you mentioned with your book, there's kind of this like individual body all the way out to urban planning. I'm thinking more on the individual side about, I was talking with a group of faculty from ⁓ the school where I live, they're boarding school faculty. So you've got

kids, teenagers who are roommates, and they said the advent of the AirPods, which allow roommates to coexist in the same space without becoming roommates, has been like kind of devastating because you have two kids who are literally living in small boxes together for the whole year. And what that used to mean is either there was such severe conflict that couldn't be resolved, but that was rare, or it was like they had to be human together and like

actually generally become friends across reasons, you know, and now they can just be like, I'm just, I'm never gonna get to know you. that was, anyway, it was just a new example for me, similar to the laptop in the cafe. ⁓

Sara Hendren (20:36)
Yeah.

Big time. I mean, I'm hearing from, I see that some campuses have documented a big drop in the use of communal spaces, right? Because digital life is just so tempting and it's nobody's fault exactly. Right. But I heard from a provost at a big university recently that he started having kind of dinner parties at his house for students to have, you know, kind of big questions. He's a philosopher by training. So he wanted to have kind of big question conversations with students. And he said at the last one, he told me,

that he said casually to them, well, these are the kinds of conversations you all probably have late at night in your dorm rooms, because he's remembering his own college experience. And I thought, yeah, because it's awkward and vulnerable to be saying, what am I doing with my life? Maybe I'm on the wrong path, know, whatever. The way that we all did, people my age, your age, it is interesting to think about. And again, it's nobody's fault what... ⁓

what are the incentives to actually relating? And that's why I'm fascinated by Faro, this cafe in Cambridge, being such a draw for young people because it turns out that the designed rule by prohibiting certain kinds of behavior, you open up other kinds of behavior. And that I think is a central bit of insight that's very unmodern and un-American. know, it's sort of, we sort of think in terms of all choice all the time, but I send my architecture students there and go like, look, if you limit a choice,

you actually free in this other way. Isn't that interesting? And it's design, you know? It's not like you instruct how to be first, you design and then benefit from the mode of being that's there.

Amy Julia Becker (22:19)
Do you have any other examples of, I want to ask you about design that communicates kind of dignity, human dignity in a minute, because those come up in your essay, but I'm also curious about design that kind of invites conversation and community. ⁓ Just to not finish this thread, but you know, kind of draw it all the way out.

Sara Hendren (22:36)
Yeah

Yeah, I mean, ⁓ so the new no laptop or no device cafes, the, I mean, you know, I, I went to a coffee shop in Toronto one time that does not have the prices for the coffee drinks posted. You have to ask about that.

And moreover, had a practice, a kind of common practice of paying for the person behind you. it must have been that a lot of people like me showed up with no local currency when they were visiting. So somebody paid for me and walked out and whatever. But then it created this whole conversation between me and the barista and then me and the person behind me. And he said, well, you can do it. You can pay it back tomorrow kind of thing. It was clear to me that they were making some little moves to just go, let's have a human interaction and not just this kind of

I'm looking away, I'm half checking my phone, I'm automated paying, you know, I'm doing this kind of more of a facilitated, you know, toward each other conversation. ⁓

Amy Julia Becker (23:54)
My kids, this is another boarding school example, but my kids are at boarding school. And one of the things they actually have found, which is really interesting to me, is that having grown up in a household where they can't bring their phones to bed, to their bedrooms, period, they then were put in, you know, at a young age into an environment where they absolutely could have their phone by their bed. And they would have reasons why they should also. Like, I'm going to turn on some noise so that it's white noise, whatever. And they both...

they both in time decided I'm going to plug my phone in across the room before I get into bed so that I have A, a different routine when I'm going to bed. I'm reading a book and B, so that in the morning I have like, it literally gets me out of bed if I want to be on that. And that's again, it's like a small actual like design choice to, you know, move across the room to the phone. But obviously one that most

kids are not making and I'm not blaming them for it. And yet we also know the way that it does affect our brains and our bodies to have our phones right next to us and like disrupting our sleep and you know all of those things.

Sara Hendren (25:01)
I mean, one other thing that comes to mind is in elder housing, in the piece I you know, ⁓ point to an example of dementia care, but there's another just assisted living nursing home in the Netherlands in Daventer, which is not for memory care, it's just for older adults. They went through a remodel of their architectural space ⁓ in the last couple of decades.

because the state laws changed making the minimum footprint for each older adults ⁓ room to be bigger. So they had room, room, room, room, room. They needed to combine two rooms to make one, combine two to make one, combine two make one to meet the law. And what this ended up creating in the remodel is a little bit of extra space at the end of each hallway. So legally they couldn't put an older adult in there, but they had this unused space. So they thought, well, what could we do?

there's a university in town. University students are always looking for cheap housing. So they said to the local university, you can come here and live for free in exchange for like 20 hours ⁓ a week or what would it be? Maybe it's 40 hours a month, but it's a required set of hours of just interacting with the older adults who live here. And when I visited, they were adamant that this is not

program. It's not something they needed to be certified in. They were not like doing service provision. They were very adamant that this is not a kind of, ⁓ yeah, it's not a program. It's a space for friendship, just full stop, right? So they didn't, they were not going to prescribe what was going to be the, you know, the nature of that interaction. But it's like sharing meals and older adults advising young people and kind of tracking the drama of their love lives and whatever it is.

But I love this because it's really intentional, but it's also, you know, we have a, I think in a litigious culture like the United States and our kind of obsession about safety and risk, some of which is warranted, there's a way of kind of over credentializing and professionalizing and kind of making rote what should be natural patterns of friendship. But I do love that that design, it was design led in the way that that happened, you know, there's so many opportunities.

Amy Julia Becker (27:23)
That's really cool. I mean, again, I feel like we could riff on that for a while when it comes to common spaces and dorm life and apartment buildings. But I'm also, I heard an example. ⁓ I heard someone speak this week about ⁓ having cafes that have like what's called a chatty table or dining halls in colleges. And they said that students said, well, it's kind of a stigma to go sit at that table because then you're kind of announcing the fact that you don't have anyone to talk to.

And so they actually ended up making it something where if you sat there, your name went into a raffle and you won like a meal with four friends at a local restaurant. And so again, kind of like drew people to admit like, well, I'm not actually alone. I just want to win the prize, like, it's going to continue to build community.

Sara Hendren (28:12)
Some people wouldn't think of that as design. just want to say, right? And if people are hearing that and going like, yeah, we did that at our place, you should just pack away that you're also doing design. That is just an arrangement of elements for an intended end, you know? And that is the kind of ordinary design moves. We would call it technically service design, right? What are the choice points that you make and what happens when you make those choices? But one of my big passions is trying to help people see that they are doing design all the time. And then to maybe just bring some more

to bring the bravery of going like, wait, that's already there, but also what else might we do and who might inspire us, right?

Amy Julia Becker (28:49)
Well, just as you know, again, the way you design a chair can, again, invite either like sitting up straight or relaxing, right? I mean, there are lots, but also whether that chair is placed next to another chair is also a design choice, right? Like, and that's what I think is so interesting about, especially someone with your lens on a space, being able to think through ⁓ all these different permutations of what will happen.

with this furniture in this space or with this furniture in relation to this other ⁓ piece of furniture.

Sara Hendren (29:23)
can find those chairs that are facing one another, but they're one piece. There's all kinds of stuff like that for parks.

Amy Julia Becker (29:29)
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I'm curious to actually talk a little bit about some examples you give in this essay of design that communicates what I would call human dignity and value. ⁓ so I wrote down a couple of examples. Maybe you could give some of them back to us, the Foundling Wheel, the rural Alabama Design Studio, the Dementia Care, and Church Under the Bridge. you can tell us all those. can tell us one or two.

Sara Hendren (29:55)
Yeah, well one of the things, the issue is themed on the anti-human and I am just hardwired and they wanted me to do this, but I am just hardwired to point to the things that I want to see celebrated and replicated. Do know what I mean? I'm an academic, it's very common in academia to go like, I'm going to unmask and expose what's wrong and I think like, can do that, but my big joy isn't going like, look over here at this amazing

Amy Julia Becker (30:22)
Yeah,

celebrate this.

Sara Hendren (30:24)
Or this, you know, so that is what this piece is. right, the foundling wheel, you know, this was such a revelation to me to discover. So if people can imagine the contemporary version of it is the don't abandon your baby box. So right now in most American cities, you'll see like on the side of a fire station, don't abandon your baby. There's a little place you can open up. It's got like a little, it's like a little hutch and it's these days, it's got high tech warming technology and a.

a no questions asked policy, right, that you can drop your baby off at the fire station to just to ward off desperate behavior, know, ⁓ leaving babies abandoned and so on. But people don't probably realize that that has a long lineage in design that goes to, I think, the 12th century. So you can see ⁓ in parts of Italy, maybe other ⁓ European countries, the church actually took on this question that's created by

kind of the early proto cities, which is what do you do with the babies of strangers? Like who's responsible for the babies of strangers? And the church sort of said they were finding ⁓ infants, abandoned infant corpses at the bottom of the Tiber River. so ⁓ you can see still at Santo Spirito Hospital, I think in Italy, this what is essentially a lazy Susan, if you can picture that, like a disc that's built into the thick wall

convent. So with a door on the outside and a on the inside. So a desperate mother can put a baby in that little lazy Susan, shut the door and the wheel will turn and the nuns on the inside will, would take the baby. ⁓ And this to me is extraordinary. And it says so much. So it says a lot about, right, the church saying that dignity is so absolute that it has to belong to strangers and that strangers have a claim on

on our lives as a polity and certainly as a church. So you see in that kind of early, what has become the of the welfare state in the form of the, don't abandon your baby box, but like the church was doing and a lot of 19th century women's kind of social welfare work is also kind of the early prototypical service provision of doing kind of dignified care for ⁓

people who are on the margins, people without kind of close kin and family to do that caregiving. So it's just interesting to me that the structure itself has a way of setting in motion and ethics. And that's, think, where a lot of people think that, design is just downstream of the ideas. And the ideas always come first. So if I say to you that the bad office park is a result of a kind of vision of the human that's more machinic, so

naturally you'll see it embodied in the building. But history also shows us that the opposite is also true, that you have an idea, a new idea that sparks a kind of exchange like that foundling wheel, okay, the baby of a stranger that gets rescued, starts to create itself a new ethics for living so that the holds the idea, the structure holds the argument almost in a way. This to me is what I think a lot of people don't maybe take seriously enough because

we tend to think that culture is always downstream of politics or downstream of ⁓ intellectual history or whatever. But in fact, culture is multi-causal and multi-directional. So that's an example of how that's done. So I wanted to set that as the kind of like ⁓ deepest history example. There's also Door of Hope in Johannesburg, which does has a literal door and a wall for rescuing infants, but they also just do.

reunification or ⁓ foster care, whatever, with babies in the present day. So you can see that lineage everywhere. But then I also was just trying to make a link, like a constellation of going, how do you in spatial terms ⁓ show the value of the human person who is either a stranger to you and not a member of close kin and family, or is not a wealthy client who can then purchase those goods for themselves, or is by any number of ⁓

misfortunes, poverty, addiction, mental illness is on the margins of society. Dementia care, think, is a really, as a beacon example of both, ⁓ you know, kind of ⁓ taking seriously the care of strangers who are older adults who have a condition from which their lives eventually will end, and that is dementia. People, you know, listening will not

be surprised to hear, right? This is a big question for design. And it's a disability kind of design. know, dementia is something for which we'd want to cure, you know, with good medicine and all of that, of course. In the meanwhile, designing a very, know, De Hoguevec is this kind of simulacrum of a village. So it's a very strong, sensory-rich, placeful ⁓ memory care center, which is a nursing home. It's a medical facility locked with two sets of secure doors.

but it opens out onto an open-air plaza with a fountain and greenery. It has a working pub and a grocery store and a theater and a barbershop and a gym and at a restaurant that's both open to the public and used by residents there. It's incredibly clever. And the logic behind that is that dementia comes with confusion about time, but also about where you are in space. So the kind of strong sensory cues of the grocery store separate from the

barbershop separate from the hair salon are meant to do a reassuring work about where you are in space and they rely far less on psychotropic drugs to quell anxiety than they did you 25 years ago when designed. and you can look at at the end of Being Mortal, Atul Gawande's book, there's a story about a nursing home not for memory care but just a nursing home that brought in parakeets and dogs.

Amy Julia Becker (36:34)
Remember this, yes.

Sara Hendren (36:36)
I laugh every time because like he says, there was so much like protest. mean, the staff there was like, this is bananas we are not doing. But this visionary doctor was like, no, I think we really need caregiving of live creatures. And they did a study controlled with a control in the same county, also nursing home care that did not do parakeets, dogs and cats. Parakeets, dogs and cats make the reliance again on

really kind of stunning drugs, big blunt instrument drugs plummet. So this is really interesting, right? It's like design as medicine in a way. yes. I never get over. So architecture for dementia care is a huge burgeoning field that people should know, right? It's just like endless creativity. So that is, let's say, a segue to disability design. I do have an example in there of creative growth, which is a 50-year-old art center in

Oakland, California. I mean, I think I am as you are thinking about adulthood and intellectual disability about the anti-human. mean, the intellectual disability like Down syndrome, the design is not for greater mobility. Not exactly. It's not for greater sensory substitution, blindness or deafness. It's not that exactly. The disability in Down syndrome is the failure to become an economic unit.

I mean, it's the kind of, it's the unoptimizable self and acceptance kind of way. You know this. So that creates a really interesting set of questions for designers. And I am interested in the art studio, the serious art studio that's going on. And when I say serious, I mean to say everybody has seen... ⁓

I want to be careful how I say this, like hand crafts and ⁓ objects that are made by adults with intellectual disabilities for sale as social enterprise. Some of that's really great. Some of it is wrapped in a kind of sentimental paternalism that gives me the ick a little bit. Because it has the whiff of the eternal child ⁓ framing about who makes it and so on. If you go to creative growth in Oakland, you see a very serious

gallery attached to a studio and the gallery has big openings and shows and they go to the big art fairs and they they cultivate a whole clientele and they give half the proceeds to the artist. I mean these are people who are ⁓ investing in the culture sector. They hire professional artists to be facilitators in the workshop. So it's a serious investment in the culture and also serious dignified holistic labor ⁓ for adults with intellectual disabilities.

And I just find that it's kind of, from what I've seen, the kind of gold standard of really seriously, ⁓ yeah, creative, integrated labor. It's not the only kind, but it is a really, really good kind. And any nonprofit that has kept its lights on for 50 years has lessons to teach, it seems to me, surviving that. So I'm just, know, like, maybe people listening to this would think like, those are all very different. ⁓

projects and they are but to me they are in a constellation that is linked by a kind of radical affirmation of the the dignity of others who are either unrelated to us who are on the margins of society or who are unoptimizable ⁓ and and thought of as as unuseful and I don't mean this as a kind of therefore political program. I think ⁓ at all

Again, scales like a small university partnership, a local, you know, city of Oakland kind of investment. All of those can be demonstration kind of exercises by design that affirms the worth of those people as opposed to a kind of bullet point rhetorical manifesto. You should think of people as having dignity. I mean, yes, you should. But design has this way of going like, here's what it looks like.

come and see, know, if you go into that studio and Creative Growth, just the kind of, it's impossible to describe the, the, yeah, the affirmation of life ⁓ there without the kind of, ⁓ without that paternalistic idea of like, look at all these good hearted, able people who are- Right, helping. Goodness of their hearts, It is a kind of sharing of life. Yeah.

Amy Julia Becker (41:17)
All right.

Sara Hendren (41:24)
the things that are made there level the playing field. The thing that I tried to invoke in the piece is this idea of alien dignity. That's this theologian, Helmut Thielika. He's trying to say that, and it took me a while to take this in fully, but if I actually think that my own dignity is not of my making,

And I also don't think I granted my son, Graham, his dignity by saying yes to his arrival. I don't think I gave it to him. I think he has it. And I think his dignity is as alien and contingent as mine is. So it's not a sort of thing where I go like, by my enlightened politics, I now give the dignity that I naturally have. I now give it generously to someone who doesn't have it. I just don't think that's the calculus that's going on.

Yeah. think dignity is metaphysical, imputed to us from outside, and that mine is therefore the same as his. To me, that has this like bracing, defamiliarization effect of what dignity really means, as opposed to the small d dignity that I sort of see everywhere. So what is your reaction to any of that? said a lot.

Amy Julia Becker (42:44)
⁓ Well, lots of reactions. I'm thinking especially about ⁓ the design of spaces that essentially, yes, encourage relationships and also, and I guess in some ways that is a part of affirming dignity that is not proven or ⁓ earned but actually bestowed because we start to give it to each other. And that goes back to the nursing home with the college students living.

and the way they've even tried to design that experience, let's call it, rather than a program. But I think about the ways that, yes, our spaces might encourage those relationships that cross social boundaries, whether that's the intergenerational one or ability lines or, and so forth. And again, how these kind of, well, okay, I do have this question.

I often think of like kind of disability, ADA mandated design as feeling pretty sterile. Like if I'm in a ⁓ hotel room that has been made into or was made as an accessible space, sometimes this is not true. Like I have been in newer hotels where I'm like, this is an accessible bathroom that actually feels welcoming to me. But there's so many where it's just like, there's a metal, you know.

rod here and now like the floor is all wet because there you know the shower is just kind of the entire bathroom and yeah anyway I just wanted to get you to comment a little bit about like disability design that is theoretically meant to be like dignifying disabled people and actually in my mind seems to be very anti-human.

Sara Hendren (44:28)
Yes, I I think about this a lot in a slightly different way, although I know what you mean. I mean, part of the invitation, you know, what, anytime you have a code, you know, and we probably need the code because it's legally mandated. Architects are so glad to have a third party to point to. If the client is trying to save money and skimp, they're like, no, look.

Amy Julia Becker (44:48)
Legally, we have to do this, yeah.

Sara Hendren (44:51)
But there's also then the step of like, do architects then widen the threshold just to meet the literal code without thinking as imaginatively as possible about like, well, what would it mean to take this as a constraint and all good design comes from constraints? If you have to do these dimensions and these relationships, how could you make the most kind of beautiful example of that? And I just think in so many ways, still, although this is changing, this has changed even in the last 10 years. In so many ways though,

code invites you to think of it as a checkbox that's rules and regs. And so it must not be a site of generativity and creativity. part of what I do in my role teaching design is to try to just broadcast to people some of the most exciting, genuinely beautiful and generative possibilities that when you start with disability in mind. So what you're describing, I've seen for sure too. Moreover, I've seen more importantly, I've seen bathrooms that my chair using friends, wheelchair using friends. ⁓

will say meets the code to get in, let's say it's 36 inches for the door, but they can't actually turn around in a radius to re-spoil it. So then you're sort of like, oh, geez. If they haven't really met the use case, the of like the walk-through, wheel-through use case. So there's not that kind of stuff. But I would say, Julia, there's also like a larger issue that I really am struggling with, which is to say that even the code.

2 to 20 is the code, two inches for every 20 degrees. It makes the kind of very shallow slope curb cut. So people don't know what a curb cut is, right? It's where the sidewalk meets the street. The ADA required that now, right, you have to have a slope down, a ramp down. And this is extraordinary. mean, it's like infrastructural editing of the built environment. But even that slope is calculated

The physics of it are calculated to presume a wheelchair user who is going down the sidewalk unassisted, so not being pushed by somebody else. So if they're in a manual wheelchair, the effort that it takes that's reasonable, right, is meant to be traversable. And of course, this is how it should be. But it seems to me that, you know, in parts of the world, in many parts of the world that do not have this legal mandate of presuming the unassisted wheelchair.

going through the built environment. What most cultures of the world have is a greater collectivist commitment to helping. I teach students from all over the world, right? And to them, the idea that you would have to have a ramp to surmount the barrier of one step into a restaurant, let's say, is a little bit anathema because they think like, all the wait staff and everybody present, if there were an older adult who couldn't

Amy Julia Becker (47:45)
we need to do is help you.

Sara Hendren (47:46)
You would

be like hardwired as a mode of respect, like as a relational norm. And so there's a part of me that's like, right, the ADA code is probably necessary in a highly individualist culture to kind of correct for the management of disability in the institutionalist era that came up 19th and early 20th centuries. Okay, so the ADA is meant to kind of correct all those things, build ramps where there had only been stairs and so on.

But it's still, think, honestly, in its DNA, it replicates a kind of individualist idea of the good. Or let's say, the design of special education for kids like yours and mine. The entire aim of every IEP, every goal and objective is independent living and independent working. Fine, but like what makes life worth living for everybody? Connected lives. Relationships.

Amy Julia Becker (48:34)
Totally.

Sara Hendren (48:42)
So you think like, okay, wow, there's all this like legal regime going toward how self-sufficient Graham can be. Of course we want it, but it is also at every IEP meeting, I sit there ambivalent about what are we celebrating? Like what is the horizon of his adulthood and what are the goods in it? Some days it feels like it has very little to do with the kinds of goals and objectives that organize his.

what we call disability rights. Again, it's a both and, but it's interesting just how bedrock the individualist ideal really is.

Amy Julia Becker (49:21)
Yeah, and I really appreciate that point. ⁓ I think a lot about it in terms of the vocabulary because I feel really uncomfortable about using the language of autonomy, even self-determination and so much that is about the self and the individual and the independence. I I've probably said this to you before, but like I do not live independently. I never have. It's just not a true thing. That's right. mean, honestly.

Sara Hendren (49:50)
Right.

Amy Julia Becker (49:51)
Even

people who live alone in a house are not living independently. So it's like, what do we actually mean when we say that? And yet, how can I dignify Penny in desires to learn and grow, which often does mean that she's learning to do something for herself that she wasn't able to do before. But I think it's fascinating, to your point, to think about how the world, at least in the United States and the code of the ADA, designs for individualism.

rather than, and even I wrote down that you said like, would be a mode of respect to help someone into a building, not a burden, a, not even not a patronizing gesture or not, not a power move. Like there are all these other ways people might think of it. I just really appreciate you bringing that up.

Sara Hendren (50:38)
I have witnessed this as a kind of clash. mean, I was traveling with a wheelchair using friend to a part of the world where this was the norm, which is to say almost everywhere except the United States. That is to say helping, right, in the case of disability. And we went into a restaurant where the front door had no steps. So she got in, but then the seating area where we were going to go to had some steps. And again, the wait staff rushed over and were sort of like preparing to lift her up. And she was very offended. She was like, ⁓ no, no, no, no, no, no, we're not doing this. Yeah.

And I thought, this is such a microcosm of what we're wrestling with here. And I suppose I have to say, I mean, as a person who teaches design, sometimes my students come to me and think that the horizon of progress is just more ADA style 360 wraparound provisions by means of design that create barrier-free, as we say, designed environments, let's say physical, but also digital.

and that the only future is just more design that creates that kind of independence, flexible world. And I think, okay, but again, the good life is entangled life where each of us gets to trade being receiver and giver, receiver and giver, like changing those subject positions. And so like, what good are we pursuing?

You know, like I, more and more I teach them like, well, there are limits to design too. Like you should work to make the most flexible and creative sets of tools that you can, but you student, no matter your capacities, should really be asking, what does it mean to be in the needful state? And how richly can my life be ⁓ viewed as someone, again, no matter my capacity, as both helper and helped, giver and receiver.

all the time, that is the good life. So it's a little bit of a conundrum for design professionals.

Amy Julia Becker (52:37)
Well, it's funny, I was gonna ask you and I'm not anymore, cause you just answered it, like what does design have to do with the vision of the good life? Like that was my final question I had written down and I love kind of that we landed there anyway. And that idea of like being entangled with each other is actually the good life. And I think you have given us some, it is a conundrum, but you've also given us some real ⁓ ways to shape our imagination towards that in this conversation and in the work you're doing. So thank you.

Sara Hendren (53:04)
that. You bet. I mean, it might be it might be useful just to use Andy Crouch's framing, which is the difference between making instruments that augment and enhance our humanness and have a theory of what the human is, but the relationality at the core, let's say. And I have seen hundreds of instruments, including, you know, what people think of as diabolical devices like iPads, but I have seen them be instruments like in the case of ALS, I have seen that

portal with the drag and drop swiping interface be an instrument for connecting. But he contrasts instruments with devices and doesn't just mean literal devices. But any that actually sucks our attention away from humanness and has a substitutionary kind of work. So it is useful maybe to think about disability forces us to be.

very specific about what's an instrument for augmenting the human and what's a kind of device for diminishing the human. And that's sort of a nice, I don't know, just sort of litmus test for where... Hmm, beautiful.

Amy Julia Becker (54:11)
Well, Sarah, thank you again for your time, for your work. We'll make sure to point people in ⁓ your direction, both in terms of written word and other conversations. Thank And hopefully we'll get to do this again.

Sara Hendren (54:22)
Yeah, pleasure. Thank you. So good to talk to you.

Amy Julia Becker (54:29)
Thanks as always for listening to this episode of Reimagining the Good Life. It's great to be back. We have a fabulous season in store for you with some upcoming interviews with author Tish Harrison Warren. That conversation's about persevering through midlife. Then I'm talking with Yale professor Chris Cipriano about politics, language, and disability, and there is more good stuff in store. So you can make a big difference in making sure that other people know about this show.

If you want to make sure you know about it, make sure you're following. But you can also rate or review the show. You can share it with other people. All of those things will help other people know that this exists and get these conversations out there in the world. If you have questions or suggestions, just tap the send us a text link at the end of the show notes or email me at amyjuliabeckerwriter at gmail.com.

As we come to a close, I want to thank Jake Hansen for editing the podcast and Amber Beery, my podcast producer, for doing everything else to make sure it happens. I could not do this without them. And finally, thank you for being here. I hope this conversation helps you to challenge assumptions, proclaim belovedness, and envision a world of belonging where everyone matters. Let's reimagine the good life together.