What is the future of design for people with disabilities? What kinds of futures have been imagined for people with disabilities in previous generations? Although there are many ways to answer these provocations, this special issue of the Journal of DesignJournal of Design History History addresses them through a broad exploration of the intersections between design and disability, understood as a framework of diverse epistemes, cultures, and politics that contain multiple and often contradictory futures. In exploring these intersections, this special issue aims to expand how we historicize designed artifacts and environments and the methodologies through which we approach them.
We seek scholarship that contributes to this literature with a particular focus on the ways in which design has critically intervened in shaping distinct futures for disabled individuals and communities. We are interested in methodological interventions in the writing of design history that are either inflected by the critical lens of disability studies or are the direct result of the distinct aesthetic and sensory experiences of diverse body-minds. Contributions might discuss disability futures by examining how design mediates different bodily experiences and relationships and negotiates social norms and forms of assembly. We hope that contributing authors might engage with contemporary concerns with themes such as futurity, sustainability, crip time and genealogies, the intersections of power and access, and the role of imagination, all of which are pertinent for design and disability histories past and future.
Guest editors are available for inquiries, and 500-word abstracts can be sent to them for feedback before December 1, 2024 (igalan@barnard.edu; dserlin@ucsd.edu). By December 15, 2024 authors will be notified whether they should develop a full draft of their submission.
