Multi-colored sparkling gray-green background reads “2022 USA Fellows, celebrating visionary artists, Media: American Artist, Salome Asega, Critical Design Lab, Andy Slater.

United States Artists Fellowship in Media (2022)

January 26, 2022

Critical Design Lab is honored to have received the 2022 United States Artists fellowship in Media, which will support our continued work in disability culture and design!

A collage of three headshots. 1) Aimi Hamraie, an olive-skinned Iranian transmasculine person with short dark curly hair, wears rectangular glasses, a plaid jacket over a blue collared shirt. 2) Jarah Moesch, a person with short brown hair and glasses wears a patterned shirt and looks into the camera. 3) Kevin Gotkin, a white person with a brown beard and brown glasses, looks back at the camera over their left shoulder. They wear a grey beanie hat, a black mesh shirt, and a light denim vest adorned with colorful feathers on the back. White text reads “Critical Design Lab, 2022 USA Fellow, Media. Critical Design Collective, Nashville, TN, Troy, NY, and Lenapehoking (Brooklyn, NY). Unbound, celebrating visionary artists.”

On Plain Language

January 14, 2021

Kelsie Acton on the practices and artistry of plain language.

Announcing #EugenicsSyllabus

August 10, 2020

Announcing the first draft of #EugenicsSyllabus! Please consider teaching about eugenics and its connections to the COVID-19 pandemic in your courses this fall. This crowdsourced syllabus includes over 100 primary and secondary sources, and creative works.

This collaborative project with Jay T. Dolmage includes crowdsourced contributions. We will do another round of updates in October for your Spring 2021 syllabi, so please feel free to keep adding things at the link in the syllabus.

URL: https://bit.ly/EugenicsSyllabus

Anti-Racist Critical Design

June 2, 2020

Critical Design Lab Statement on Design Commitments to Abolishing White Supremacy

Accessible Teaching in the Time of COVID-19

March 10, 2020

As universities declare class cancelations and mandate a shift to online teaching, instructors have the opportunity to design online course materials to be as accessible as possible from the beginning. This will also ensure that your course materials are accessible moving forward.

Accessibility mapping and the smart city

November 9, 2018

Critical Design Lab director Aimi Hamraie publishes “A Smart City is an Accessible City” in The Atlantic.

Exploring the Sphere of Sound - an essay + website

October 22, 2018

CDL member Alessandra Pearson shares her critical design project, Sphere of Sound, which explores sound as a multi-sensory experience .

Narrative and Design: Remembrance as Memory Fades

October 15, 2018

CDL member Rebecca Rahimi meditates on a new art project in which she curates objects for elders with memory loss

Criptic Innovation

October 8, 2018

CDL member Cassandra Hartblay reflects on the values and priorities assigned to assistive technologies, coining the term "criptic innovation," to describe "design innovations that a crip user immediately sees as privileging ableist values over others."

Mapping Access in Cultural Spaces

September 24, 2018

CDL member Alessandra Pearson shares her thoughts on the process of designing a project on the accessibility of cultural spaces, including how accessibility mapping methodologies and specific digital tools can inform ways of thinking about accessibility as a right and obligation of public amenities.

Co-mentorship Dispatch: Patches, Circuits, and Metronomes

September 13, 2018

CDL members engage in regular, structured co-mentorship, with members pairing off to discuss and workshop projects every two weeks. We do this to distribute expertise and power, share unlikely skills, and theorize new possibilities for academic work. CDL member Maggie Mang reflects on a recent co-mentoring experience with artist-in-residence Kevin Gotkin, which offered her the opportunity to dabble with coding in Max7 as she worked through a project on crip time.

Ethnography Looks Back at Design

September 10, 2018

CDL member Cassandra Hartblay discusses new work in design ethnography, including her co-edited series, Keywords in Ethnography and Design

protocols for unfinished technoscience

September 3, 2018

Critical Design Lab director Aimi Hamraie meditates on the uses of "protocols" for destabilizing the typical "checklist"-style approach to accessibility.