About six months ago I found myself spending a lot of time thinking about finally returning to normal and if there would be a new normal. That line of thinking evolved into the question of what normal is - what activities are considers normal, who can participate in them, who is normal , and how society sorts out questions like that. Some I had puzzled out before and had even worked on, but many new questions came up.
Normal populations of people are a fairly construction dating to the 1800s when people began to study people as groups using techniques taken from astronomy. We tend to think of populations fitting in a bell shaped curve - "normal" distributions. Height is the usual example. A few people are very short, most fall within certain boundaries of the bell curve and a few are very tall. This shouldn't really matter, but the made world is not flexible enough and excludes populations at the tails. Cars, bicycles, clothes, chairs, restrooms and so on aren't made for the very tall or very short. A few readers happen to be very tall. Nothing fits and resorting to custom manufacture is often necessary. It's a tax on being too tall. Short people arguably pay a stiffer tax which is nothing like that those with physical and mental challenges bear.
In the 1950s aircraft design was evolving rapidly. The US Air Force needed a standardized cockpit. Well over 100 measurements were taken on over 4,000 pilots to determine what was average so a "golden cockpit" could be easily specified. Unfortunately the data designed cockpit was a disaster. Skilled pilots were making lethal errors. A young analyst - Lt. Gilbert Douglas - cracked the problem by asking if it was possible "average" didn't exist. Douglas looked at a midrange of pilot heights - something like 5'7 to 5'11 and created an average pilot for the ten most important cockpit measurements allowing for what seemed to be a reasonable 30% variation. Then he went back to the measurements of the 4,000 real pilots looking at these ten measurements. Not a single real pilot was average. The golden cockpit was abandoned and new cockpit designs were created allowing for a broad range of adjustments.
Mechanically simple, the new cockpit adjustments for everything important were just simple assistive technologies. All of us use assistive and adaptive technologies. Glasses, oven mitts, hammers, utensils, baseball bats - I remember a physical anthropologist saying "the human animal is coextensive with its tools" We are now adding electronic adaptations with varying degrees of success.
Why is it we see adaptive technologies for those who doesn't fall into the normal classification in the same way we look at glasses or running shoes? Why are some people excluded from the made world? Who makes the designs? What questions does the design process ask as does it go deep enough? Do the solutions have utility, significance and even desirability and beauty?
"Normal" is a privilege most of us inherit that blinds or biases us to those outside the bell curve. The view from the tails of that curve tell us just how unfinished the world is.
What interests me at the moment is the question of individuality and independence. Some people have a difficult to impossible time making it in the world without the help of others. Some are forgotten and even warehoused. How they are treated often depends on societal norms and often the wealth or lack of wealth of their families. Some designers work on these issues. I'm not a designer, but have had a bit of first had experience. Independence is often the end goal, but now I wonder if that's correct? With the isolation many of us have been experiencing I have to wonder if the best designs might be hybrid. Enough independence, but also enough real human interaction. Dignity requires both. Having to deal with aging parents taught me how awful loneliness is for so many. How can designs integrate dignity and shared humanity?
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