Expressive Bodies Engaging with Embodied Disability Cultures for Collaborative Design Critiques

Abstract

In our experience as researchers engaging with non-academic audiences, we observed that it remains a challenge to receive direct and critical feedback from participants. This is particularly amplified in the context of disabilities even if the researchers identify themselves as disabled given that the interaction is governed by social status and material power dimensions to say the least. To work productively with these power dynamics, we explored embodied approaches to articulating critique acknowledging the different ways of knowing stemming from different bodyminds. Here, we line out two exploratory cases illustrating how physical bodies can be directly attended to to express critiques in more direct ways than participants might be used to on a language based level (spoken or signed). We show how communication and critique can take on many forms encouraging us to broaden our methodological toolset to incorporate practices common in disability cultures. Our experiences show that we need to embrace crip approaches to knowledge production to receive more actionable and useful feedback in developing technologies with disabled communities.