Designing Access Together: Surviving the Demand for Resilience

<p>This paper critically reflects on our attempts to design access with disability artists and designers. Together we engaged in a project to co-design and co-create a fictional near-future world that would enable us to interrogate our present techno-social dilemmas. Accessibility was central to our workshop for the way that access is always central to enacting crip, mad, Deaf, and spoonie communities. Without access, we cannot meet, discuss, share, struggle, fight, dismantle or create. Crucially, access was tied to our desire to co-create crip near-futures. Crip near future, a methodological intervention we engage in our work, refers to a temporal period a few years from our present day. It is a future close enough for our individual experience to be and remain directly relevant, yet distant enough that the boundaries of our experience could be ‘cripped’ - expanded, revised or ruptured - by technological trends. Crip near futures also promise our survival and reference our resilience in the face of past and present ableist violence. Our presence in a crip near future suggests that we have somehow disrupted the current normative order. In alignment with our methodological orientations then, our work sought to disrupt normative artistic and design studio practice to open a space for crip, mad, spoonie and Deaf artists to imagine worlds in which our body-minds are anticipated, welcomed and integral. In what follows, we describe our work and the steps we took to transform it into an accessible space where we could interdependently imagine and create future worlds. Our reflections pivot to consider how access is an “unfinished project” (McKittrick, 2013), always in tension with the demand for individual resilience within the neoliberal university.</p>