[Image description: a hand-drawn diagram with arrows, bubbles, and words on lined paper. Visible phrases include “spatial inquiry,” “what is access?” “whom? “what conditions? “how do we map it?” “I’ve never noticed it before!” “I notice it every day…

[Image description: a hand-drawn diagram with arrows, bubbles, and words on lined paper. Visible phrases include “spatial inquiry,” “what is access?” “whom? “what conditions? “how do we map it?” “I’ve never noticed it before!” “I notice it every day!” “critical corwdsourcing” “how do we teach each other to notice?” “Let’s imagine anew world, not just reform this one,” “what do institutional policies” and “what does it mean to access an institution”]

 

Critical Design Lab

is a multi-disciplinary arts and design collaborative centered in disability culture and crip technoscience. Our work pivots around the concept of access: access is our ethic, our creative content, and our methodology. We use digital media and social practice to craft replicable protocols that treat accessibility as research-creation, an aesthetic world-building practice, and an invitation to assemble community.

Our work embodies crip interdependence in form, aesthetics, and content. We define critical design as disability culture’s challenges to existing social and built environments. We approach this work with joy, relationality, and a commitment to embodied design processes. We embrace interdependence as a political technology and design methodology.

Our work is rooted in Disability Justice. We reject forms of accessibility rooted in anti-Blackness, settler colonialism, and white supremacy. We use technologies of remote and collective participation to enable accessible world-building across time-zones, disciplinary boundaries, and access needs. We center sustainability and community as the basis of our work.

 

Follow us

Instagram @critical_design_lab

Bluesky: @criticaldesignlab.bsky.social

X: @criticaldesignl

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