Making Disability Modern: Design Histories

Making Disability Modern: Design Histories brings together leading scholars from a range of disciplinary and national perspectives to examine how designed objects and spaces contributes to the meanings of ability and disability from the late 18th century to the present day, and in homes, offices, and schools to realms of national and international politics. The contributors reveal the social role of objects - particularly those designed for use by people with disabilities, such as walking sticks, wheelchairs, and prosthetic limbs - and consider the active role that makers, users and designers take to reshape the material environment into a usable world. But it also aims to make clear that definitions of disability—and ability—are often shaped by design.

Elizabeth Guffey is Professor of Art and Design History and directs the MA in Modern and Contemporary Art, Criticism and Theory at the State University of New York, Purchase College, USA. She is co-editor of Making Disability Modern (Bloomsbury, 2020) and author of Designing Disability (Bloomsbury, 2018), Posters: A Global History (2015) and Retro: The Culture of Revival (2013). She is Founding Editor of Design and Culture and has also published essays in a number of popular publications, including The New York Times and The Nation.