The act of adapting products, places, and performances by able-bodied people for disabled individuals is something that has always made me a little uncomfortable. I’ve never been able to explain it; why an act that is supposed to help people like myself sits so awkwardly with me. Surely this is something that I should just be grateful for. This world wasn’t designed for people like me, so shouldn’t I be happy with any attempt to include me in it?
We’ll I think I’ve figured out why it makes me so uneasy... The nature of adapting means that you are taking something specifically designed for a certain user and changing it in order to fit the needs of someone else, someone the original creator didn’t have in mind as a potential user. In adapting products, places, and performances for disabled people, you are highlighting the fact that those things was never intended to be used by us in the first place. You are taking something, often with a long history of use by able-bodied people, and trying to translate it for a disabled body, but that process is hardly, if ever reversed.
Take ballet for example, there are many adaptive ballet classes designed for disabled people, where able-bodied choreographers take ballet movements, which have a long history and are steeped in tradition, and adapt them so that disabled people can attempt to perform them, often alongside their able-bodied peers. However, the peers of these disabled dancers are never taught dance that has roots in disability, that were designed with our disabled bodies in mind.
Then we have places, which are often adapted with additions such as ramps or viewing platforms, to make them somewhat accessible to physically disabled patrons. More often than not though, the experience within that space by disabled people is still subpar to that had by able-bodied patrons because designers fail to think outside of the box. They design so that a disabled body can merely get into the space or witness what’s inside of it, rather than designing the space so that the experience of those who are disabled is enhanced. To that notion I pose the question; what is a place without the experience you have within it?
In other words disabled people are constantly left to translate, or we rely on others to do it for us, but there is very little that is written in our language, written for us. This is why I would like to see less adaptation and more innovation. Dances, tools, cultural hubs, meeting places, with roots in our disabled bodies, and in our experiences. I want to see innovators encouraging our peers translate our movements, our ways of being, so they have a greater understanding of our lives and so that we can have a future of collaborative experiences not an adaptive ones.