TITLE: Universal Design, Universalized
ABSTRACT: Disability is not about the body, but about how the body meets the world. And so design—the intentional making, unmaking, and remaking of the material realm—can play a central role in the fight against ableism. Not just any design—not the retrofits and definitely not the disability dongles—but universal design, which aims to make an object or a space "both attractive and functional for all people, disabled or not". I argue that this insight about disability and design should be generalized in two ways. First, it extends past disability: how the body meets the world matters for everyone whose body is structurally marked as a deviation, whether by race, gender, or size. Second, it extends past pragmatic action: how the body meets the world also matters for epistemic actions because bodies are how brains meet the world. For example, medical devices that misfit bodies that are deviant in different ways can make us misdiagnose people who are differently oppressed.