The Art of Inclusion with Sara Hendren
The Art of Inclusion: Rethinking Design for a Connected World With Sara Hendren
Sara Hendren explores the places where disability shows up in design, an inventive tradition of remaking our everyday tools and environments that carries the highest human stakes.
Her art and design works have been exhibited on the White House lawn under the Obama presidency, at the Victoria & Albert Museum, the Seoul Museum of Art, the Vitra Design Museum, and many others, and her work is held in the permanent collections at MoMA and the Cooper Hewitt.
Sara’s work is more than academic - it’s a celebration of the extraordinary in the everyday. Through her writing, teaching, and advocacy, she reveals how disability is not a personal deficit but an invitation to reimagine the world around us. From adaptive tools to inclusive environments, Sara’s insights challenge us to think differently about the possibilities of design and the profound interdependence that connects us all.
As a mother of three, including a son with Down syndrome, Sara draws deeply from personal experience to illuminate the power of inclusive design to foster connection, joy, and belonging. Her ability to re-envision what is possible makes her a beacon of inspiration in a world striving for greater inclusivity.
Sara invites us to approach design -and life- with curiosity, care, and a commitment to building a world where everyone belongs.
Her voice is a rallying cry for creating spaces and tools that celebrate human diversity and nurture the connections that make life meaningful.
Key Takeaways
1. Design for Connection, Not Isolation - The best designs don’t just meet individual needs—they create spaces where people can come together, fostering trust, community, and belonging.
2. Embrace the Power of Adaptation - Human bodies and minds are extraordinarily adaptive. Let’s celebrate and design for the full spectrum of human diversity, not force everyone to conform to a narrow definition of "normal."
3. Rethink Productivity and Time - Life isn’t a race. By embracing slower, more meaningful rhythms—like "Kryptime"—we can focus on what truly matters: relationships, creativity, and well-being.
4. Start with Empathy and Collaboration - Great design begins with truly listening and understanding. Partner with the people you’re designing for, and ask better questions to create solutions that empower and uplift.
5. See Disability as Innovation’s Catalyst - Disability isn’t a limitation; it’s a lens that inspires creative, inclusive solutions for everyone. The curb cut effect proves that what benefits one group can transform the world for all.
6. Challenge the Myths of Normalcy - There’s no such thing as “normal.” Instead of trying to fix differences, let’s design environments and tools that amplify humanity’s incredible variety and potential.
7. Celebrate Interdependence - None of us thrive alone. By recognizing the beauty of interdependence and creating systems that support it, we can build a more compassionate, inclusive world.
Quotes
1. "Disability is not a personal deficit—it’s an interaction with the world. Let’s design spaces and tools that don’t fix people but instead amplify their unique brilliance."
2. "Great design begins with better questions. Ask not just what people need but how your work can foster connection, care, and joy."
3. "The extraordinary is often hidden in the ordinary. Look closer, and you’ll see that adapting to differences is where creativity and humanity truly shine."
4. "Our greatest strength is in our interdependence. When we design with others in mind, we create a world where everyone can thrive together."
Connect with Sara
Linkedin - https://www.linkedin.com/in/sara-hendren-8a854140
Website - https://sarahendren.com/
X - https://twitter.com/sarahendren
Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/sarahendren/
Book - https://www.amazon.com/What-Can-Body-Do-Built/dp/073522000X
In effort to make this conversation accessible to all, the full transcript of our conversation is available below
Erin: When you were growing up, what was one of your first places of connection — and how did that shape you?
Sara: I grew up in Little Rock, Arkansas, in a kind of new development. There were houses, but then there were miles of woods and creeks. This was in the mid-70s to early 80s, and like a lot of people my age, we kids ran around outside until dinnertime. We were in each other's houses, kind of co-raised by those other parents. Kids had to work out their own conflicts. There was just a lot of neighborhood knowledge.
And those were also some of the same people we went to church with. Churches are a kind of under-discussed mode of connection — just sociologically, church attendance is down these days, and it's one of those Bowling Alone kinds of forms of connection. My parents were always involved in churches that had meal trains and people showing up for each other. But the neighborhood thing is really what jumps out at me — the way kids were held by other people's families and parents at the same time they were held by their own. There's something about that that's not obvious right now. It's an under-appreciated, informal, self-organizing mode of belonging.
Erin: I'm a mom to a five-year-old, and a lot of your early motherhood stories show up in the book. Can you talk about how that early experience shaped everything that came after?
Sara: The contrast is so sharp. Like a lot of people, my husband and I moved where the jobs were. We'd both grown up in that same kind of neighborhood environment — co-raised by a lot of other families. And when it came time to grow up and move away, that was kind of the American story of transience and individual mobility. We went first to Boston, then to LA.
I did a little babysitting as a teenager, but I didn't have deep knowledge of raising a real baby. And in most parts of the world, for most of history, that is a kind of shared set of folkways — everything from putting a baby to sleep is held in common. But we're in a brief historical period right now where a lot of us feel like we're on our own, and in many ways we are left on our own in this kind of unnatural nuclear family structure.
The built environment shaped that experience in ways I couldn't have anticipated. LA has three hundred and forty days of sun per year, but it doesn't have a lot of park space. Even people who don't have a lot of money can often have a beautiful little oasis of a patio or a walled-in yard — Southern California is a beautiful outdoor paradise in that way — but it doesn't have a real social fabric of a city.
So we moved when my oldest was three and my youngest was a newborn. We moved back to Boston, which has six months of winter, but it has parks. In one warm season, living in a tiny apartment, we met all the other families in the neighborhood — because nobody has a yard, everybody goes to the park. And then we showed up for each other in the wintertime, texting people at 7 a.m. on a Saturday: Who wants to have pancakes? We're awake. It's February.
The arrangement of parks and common space, and what that does for raising children, was so apparent to me — in addition to raising Graham, who has Down syndrome, and thinking about typical and atypical development. The parks where he learned to walk are all over sites in Cambridge. One of my favorite parks has benches all the way around the perimeter and big old shade trees. In the summer you could actually be sitting, resting, and still watching your child — but if you have a toddler, not hovering every second. They couldn't get to the street. They could run around and bonk their heads and be okay. Your sightlines were clear. That kind of genius — the care it takes for a city to invest in families — has just galvanized my whole life. Everything about the hardscape and the parkscape becomes abundantly clear to you when you become a parent.
Erin: I was just rereading — I think it's in Eric Klinenberg's Palaces for the People — where he talks about the difference in the design of preschools. Some have a quick run-in to drop off or pick up and run out, and others have social holding spaces where parents can actually connect in those interstitial times.
Sara: Yes — shoring each other up in what has always been, for most of history and most of the world, a shared and collective responsibility. The impossible task it is to foreclose around the nuclear family. It's just unnatural. My kids are bigger now and it's completely different when they can walk themselves home, but boy, in those early years.
Erin: As you talk about that, you're kind of bridging into this question of what is "normal." One of my fist-pump moments in your book — you write that the emergence of modern statistics shifted the point of comparison from a lofty abstraction to a side-by-side analysis, assessing "normal" by observing people relative to one another. And then you go on to say that the habit of statistical thinking broadly applied creates a distancing effect that obscures the specifics that also matter. Can you talk about that?
Sara: It's really just the invention of the social sciences, and I think a lot of times people forget how recent that history is. In the nineteenth century, especially alongside industrialization, it starts to become useful to study populations at population scale — to create averages and norms and percentiles, partly to understand things like traffic flows and the movement of disease through communities. That's really important. It gives you numbers and quantities of understanding human behavior.
What it obscures is what social scientists call the aggregative fallacy. If you're speaking of young children and you're going to the pediatrician's office, a lot of that language governs the conversation: How verbal is your child compared to the average? That can tell us something in a benchmarky kind of way, and yet it obscures the actual task of the parent — which is not actually to measure, but to make a beautiful, safe home with an individual person and to make that person visible.
We are fundamentally specific. For each of us, there is a unique fingerprint in more ways than one. The planet has never seen one of us and will never see one again. That's quite profound. We can hold a social-scientifically informed set of knowledge — but the minute it starts to obscure our view of the individual is where we go wrong in our relationships, because we live in close proximity to one another and we make room for one another.
This is the kind of knowledge that would have been invisible to me if I had not had a very atypical child on my hands. In addition to all that park stuff I mentioned, raising my first of three children was also an introduction to what's called early intervention — the services in the United States you qualify for from age zero to three: physical therapy, occupational therapy, speech therapy. I was watching this enormous arrangement of clinical and therapeutic tools arrive — play environments and toys, little orthotic braces, glasses at eleven months. All the visual culture and the design that shows up to bridge the body and the world when the body is significantly out of sync with the norm.
But it was also really difficult, because people were speaking at us — him on my hip — in the language of types. When he got his diagnosis — at two weeks old — it was like on a Tuesday he was a radical individual with a name, and on a Wednesday he was a Down syndrome child. He was a type. He got demoted. That's what was so painful. Not really the Down syndrome that people imagine — it's that he suddenly became a subspecies. People would say, Oh, he'll definitely be interested in this, or he'll find this kind of thing funny. And I would think: How would you know?
The thing that's so precious to you about your child is how radically individual they are. That disjuncture — the inventiveness of the play environment, the prosthesis that can arrive just in time, compared to the aggregative fallacy of social science coming in to organize all of us — that was the most difficult time of my life so far. But also the most generative. The most creative. The oxygen it gave to my imagination took me to places I would never have imagined. I wouldn't be here talking to you today for sure.
Life is irreducibly strange. The measurement of our lives serves us in a functional way and is never the thing we finally live for. Staying in connection with that difference, I think, is critical.
“Life is irreducibly strange. The measurement of our lives serves us in a functional way and is never the thing we finally live for. Staying in connection with that difference, I think, is critical.”
Erin: You write beautifully about Audrey Lorde and her Cancer Journals — about the pathologizing of difference. My mom got stage four cancer in my final year of college and had a mastectomy. Reading that story just really hit home. Can you talk about that?
Sara: Just for people who may not know — The Cancer Journals is one of Audre Lorde's many books. She wrote about having a mastectomy on one side and surviving cancer. She describes waking up in her post-operative state in a newly asymmetrical body and going to the nurse's office for a checkup. She goes to the doctor's office wearing one earring instead of two — just leaning hard into this asymmetry. And she gets there, and the nurse says: You're not wearing the prosthesis we gave you — meaning the soft cotton wool you'd put inside your undergarments to appear to fill out the breast. Lord says, Well, I'm good, I didn't need it. And the nurse says: You really should wear it. It's bad morale for the office if you don't.
Bad morale for the office. So transparently saying: we need to see your wholeness in order to reassure ourselves that we have done our job. Lorde is writing this in the late 70s — way before the beautiful photography of women proudly showing scars. She was really out in front on this.
It struck me so powerfully because it helped me see that the choice to opt in or opt out of prosthetics and wearable gear is never merely biological and functional. I want people to hear this clearly: I'm not saying disability is a social construct. It involves our bodies in measurable, biological, medicalized ways that are important. And yet all technologies are doing something both functional and cultural at the same time.
To connect it back to Graham's early years — the little orthotic braces he wore were printed with little insects or butterflies. Cochlear implants for children very often have a housing that's shaped like a dinosaur. All of that is to try to broadcast a friendly covering for a tool that is therapeutic or clinical. That's easy to understand in the child's case.
It's more complicated in a case like Lorde's, or in the case of people I know who either opt in or opt out of a replacement arm and hand. For nearly one hundred thousand dollars you can buy a replacement arm that is really quite sophisticated — beautiful carbon fiber myoelectric arms that are genuinely impressive as technologies. For some of my friends who need one, it is useful. But it's probably not useful in the way that people imagine. The fine motor stuff — picking up your glasses, working on your phone — is not actually easy with those cyborg arms and hands. I know people who were born with one arm and have just found life easier to do one-handed, with incredibly dexterous toes and feet.
Sometimes our rush to replacement technology is doing something more for our story of wholeness and symmetry and normalcy, and it's paying a little bit less attention to whether we can make good, strong friendship with human variation in all its forms. And whether we can ask a more attentive question: What are the tools that would replace the things that actually matter?
I've seen a peel-and-stick hook on top of a jar of peanut butter — to help somebody with fewer digits get that opposing motion they need to open it — be as absolutely vital and daily in its usage as those hundred-thousand-dollar arms. To me that just means our sense of wonder at what counts as design and technology and tools could get bigger. The tent in our minds could expand.
I am just more interested in the adaptive plastic human — human adaptation with all its extensions, in the richest possible ecosystem of caregiving and receiving — than I am in what's next around the bend with neural interfaces. I mean, it's interesting. I taught for ten years at an engineering school. But if it takes on meaning in people's lives — that, for me, is the true north.
Erin: I love the way your book and your talks introduce a sense of wonder and awe at the rainbow that is the human condition. And it's contagious.
Sara: I think we go straight to a kind of earnestness about disability, and we go straight to the urgency of the matter — but urgency plus earnestness means we're a little bit like, This is a very important issue, with long faces and furrowed brows. And there's some unwitting idea that people are really broken and in need of restoration.
My own theory of change is that you don't actually get sustainable urgency for the long haul without activating wonder and joy. But it's also just the state of the world. People's bodies really are extraordinary — and they're also ordinary in their extraordinariness, which I think is the hardest thing to hold. My friend Chris was born with one arm. It is amazing that he can tie a hair tie around a ponytail with one hand — but anybody born with one arm would pretty much figure that out, right? We shouldn't be inspired in a paternalistic way, like, Oh, wow, you're coping with your terrible situation. This is the only body Chris has ever known.
The brain and body — we know now that plasticity lasts our whole lives. I just made a short film about a friend, an architect who became an amputee ten years ago. It's him in his woodshop working with tools — the ordinary, everyday, vital, and then the extraordinary human being in its habitus, doing its many jobs.
I'm interested in people who don't feel like they have any connection to disability getting a little less certain about their own needs for help — and getting a little more conjoined to the goodness of living a life with help. Like my growing up in that neighborhood: my parents and their neighbors knew they couldn't do it all on their own. Making peace with, and making friends with, assistance and help — by seeing the help of others and recognizing it as connected to your own experience — that's so much of the engine of my work.
Erin: You've talked about being productively uncertain. Can you say more?
Sara: The thing I've devoted a lot of time to in the productive uncertainty realm is working with artists with disabilities, because in art it's called defamiliarization — or estrangement. How can you provide, in an artwork or an immersive theater environment or an object, enough of a surprise from ordinary expectations to get all of us to look again?
I work with a wheelchair dancer named Alice Sheppard, who wanted a ramp — not a ramp for getting into a building, but a ramp for the stage. When Alice enters the room making beautiful movement with a wheelchair — not in spite of it — that is a moment of productive uncertainty that art does particularly well. You have to kind of dial back from your expectations: Did I actually think that a wheelchair was a diminished form of walking? Have I been carrying a lot of pity and charity about this?
We need charity and pity for each other in the world, of course. But having that directed at you all day is the imposition. I'm interested in creating those conditions of uncertainty — so then you see the curb cuts in your neighborhood as doing something really radical and amazing, and you also don't know what it's like if you're a walking person getting on the street. It might be full of hurdles. It might also be balletic and joyous.
That does good destabilizing work for people who walk around thinking: I'm the helper. I'm not the person who gets help. I'm the protagonist and all these other people are my background. We all need to be cured of that kind of myopia.
Erin: Can you share an example of bad design — well-intentioned but missing a greater understanding of what it means to create inclusive places?
Sara: About ten years ago there was a whole slew of student projects trying to augment the white navigational cane. A lot of the thinking was: How can we make this cane smart? Can it do sensing work? Could we replace it altogether with turn-by-turn directions through an earpiece?
Blind friends have said to me that a cane is not like a hand feeling the built environment — it's doing a lot of sophisticated things at once. It's sweeping to avoid obstacles. It's also doing a profoundly social work, letting people know: If you're in my way, I may not see you. It does things like detecting manholes. You really want a mechanical, tactile tool. You don't want to be relying on detection from even the best VR.
So there was a whole set of — Bluetooth shoes for the blind, and so on — where it was so clear that non-disabled young engineers who hadn't done much human-centered research thought: This cane is an albatross. This is an outmoded, stigmatized, nineteenth-century tool whose time has come to be superseded.
I did an interview with Georgina Kleege, a blind scholar at Berkeley, and she was just like: Wow. This is such a fundamental misunderstanding of what my cane is doing. She was using a smartphone, using a cane, and also saying: Remember, my proprioception is informed by smell, by hearing — the auditory landscape. When I'm walking through Berkeley, I'm thinking, I smell the bakery, which means I'm a block away from the Thai restaurant. The rich human sensorium that is always adaptive.
If you're a sighted person and you put on a blindfold, yes, you're going to feel stymied. But if you were to be blind for two years or five years, your brain would do this radical thing — which is totally ordinary and also extraordinary.
That's an example of a lot of energy and excitement about technical novelty, and not a lot of close attention to human needs.
Erin: What about simulation exercises — like wheelchair for a day — as a design research tool?
Sara: I've seen some data suggesting that the outcome of these well-meaning exercises tends to be that folks come away thinking: Wow, I'm so grateful I'm not disabled. And also: Being disabled is really hard. That's a one-dimensional way of thinking about disability. If you're taking it on to create empathy by thinking this is really hard — you're thinking about disability as nothing more than hardship.
I've worked with Carmen Papalia, a blind artist, who has a project called Blind Field Shuttle — he leads people through space in a long chain, each person holding the shoulder of the person in front of them. It's not meant to be a simulation exercise. It's meant to be a beautiful exercise in trust, walking through built space with your eyes closed. I like that uncertainty better than Come try on what it's like to be disabled.
I will say I have a colleague from Olin College named Cathryn Lynch, an anthropologist who specializes in aging. She runs a class called Engineering for Humanity that partners engineers with older adults living in nearby neighborhoods. She will sometimes use a tool that simulates cataract vision — and I think that is a high-integrity way to do it. It's not the only thing she's doing for design research. It is clearly coupled to interviews and a rich ethnographic approach. She goes out of her way to say: aging is not synonymous with disability. We have to be really clear about all of that.
You could defend it in a design class if it's coupled and framed in those other ways. There are also unbelievable resources now — disabled voices are really prominent and visible — that weren't available even ten years ago.
Erin: Can you introduce us to crip time — and what does good design look like in relation to it?
Sara: You might have heard about the difference between a medical model of disability and a social model — which is just to say that disability is not only a property of the body; it's about what's available in the built world for you to flourish in or not. The difference between a hard step down from the sidewalk to the street versus a curb cut — that's all the difference for a wheelchair user to get to their job or the voting booth. Disability is an interaction between what's going on in the body and what's happening in the world.
Crip time looks at that same dynamism. What can an individual body do in terms of its motor skills or relative mobility, and what is available in the world? Very often disabled people have named the disjuncture between the slowness of their bodies and the relentless pace of what I'd call market logic — the machine-like efficiency that organizes our lives. It's that logic which is so antithetical to everything we know about human happiness when it colonizes everything: when it takes over families, schools, cities, shared spaces.
The time we want in our lives is time for connection, relationship, trust, celebration, rest. Crip time is disabled people's particular insight that their own bodies are already out of sync with that relentless market logic — either because it takes a long time to get out the door and down the street, or, like in the case of my son Graham, intellectual disability is a disability in time. That's the failure to show up as an economic citizen at the end of an education — which in twenty-first century America is sometimes the only outcome of education we have an imagination for: Are you a worker? Will you pay taxes? Can you pay your own rent?
There's a long history of thinking of education as the creation of wisdom, of free people collaborating with one another and building democracy. That's been quite lost. Disability just makes crip time vivid and apparent. If you can't make it through on this pace, at this cadence, crip time says: No — it's the status quo that is the problem. It's machine logic.
To have Graham proceeding through school is to see that even the imagination of special education is sometimes too narrowly oriented toward Can this person have a job? We don't have a machine running our household. I've got people in and out. It's a family life.
Crip time is an invitation to take back the time we want for things that matter.
Crip time is an invitation to take back the time we want for things that matter.
Erin: That's something I've felt too — I moved to New York and became obsessed with the efficiency of relationships. What are our action items? No time for small talk. And in getting broken out of that, I also expanded my ability to let people in. That was such a gift.
Sara: Yes. And I got off of social media a few years ago — partly because I didn't want my teenagers anywhere near it, but partly because when I got off it experimentally one summer, I thought: Wow, my sense of time has come back to me in a powerful way. The software has a way of vacuuming up interstitial minutes. It is the enemy of timefulness and of being present.
I don't see my college acquaintances' pictures of their kids anymore. But I am now making more time to talk to my close friends — who are going through a divorce, whose parents just passed away. I'm expanding those time containers in a human-scale way. The digital is not fundamentally human scale. I need to take ownership of that and say: I'm going to trade one kind of good thing for another thing I think is ultimately better.
Erin: What about the medicalization of difference? I've been thinking about Gabor Maté's The Myth of Normal alongside your work. Have we created a world — a society — that is itself not normal? Not what we evolved for?
Sara: That's a really strong argument. I had my students reading a challenging piece by Joseph Davis called "All Pathology, All the Time." He's saying: most of the DSM categories where there's been a change in the threshold of diagnostics have expanded — they've collected more people under medical diagnosis. He says the exceptions are things we'd celebrate, like taking homosexuality out of the DSM. That is a form of human freedom — this is not a pathology, this is life, variation, difference. But those, he says, are the exception. The rule is an increased medicalization, and his complaint is that this doesn't actually make people more free. It may in the near term create strong communities of shared experience, but it actually narrows the scope of normal by creating a diagnostic for variation.
Erin: And the counter to that is: in a society with no margin, you have to have a diagnosis to be allowed to be different. The medicalization is what allows the teacher to accommodate you, what gives you access. If we could create a softer society with space for that, then let's demedicalize it — absolutely. But in the meantime, people need the legitimation.
Sara: Yes — and that may be the canary in the coal mine. People seeking the legitimation of medicine because we're not able to reclaim things in other systemic ways. I have a strong pragmatic streak. I think: what else can we do? I just told you I got off social media — I don't mean everyone has to make that choice. I just mean we do need to think about what agency we have and what we're willing to give up to get other kinds of goods. And to be okay with being out of sync with the way the real world works right now.
Every adult has to decide what they're going to accept about the historical era they've been assigned to live in. We don't have a lot of choice about being caught in capital. But we do have some realm of choices where we can say: this I refuse. That is what it means to be an adult, negotiating these things.
I suppose I worry a little bit about what medicalization does to young people's feeling of agency and their stories of self-efficacy — even if it's a near-term symptom of something outside their control.
Erin: As we wrap up — when you think about designing for social connection, if there was one thing you wish designers would consider, what would that be?
Sara: I would ask designers to think rather than in terms of a user, to think in terms of a twoness or a threeness — a dyad or a triad. Most of our most meaningful technologies and tools are actually about mediating between people. Whatever tools return us to one another, accompany us in our togetherness, are going to be more informative than even the most user-friendly concept of a user journey that is individuated.
Widen the lens. Think about what's the dynamism between this user and another ancillary user, a partner user, a background caregiver. Think of the human as the social animal that the human is, and have that in your representations and your research.
Erin: Is there anything else you wish I had asked you?
Sara: I often say to people that it can be incredibly nourishing to let some disability in your own life conjoin you to a story larger than yourself. If you are caregiving for an older adult and trying to figure out how to move a parent into assisted living — if you are experiencing acute depression, if you are arthritic in your wrists — I want people to know: you are part of an enormous story of disability rights and legacy. The incredibly inventive tradition of refashioning the world is one we all share. Your closed captioning, the kitchen tools in your house right now — all of that. And moreover, you are caught up in a negotiation of dependence that can actually fortify lives. On any given Tuesday it can be really challenging. But you belong to something that is so profoundly human. And really not exceptional. I hope people find some solace in that.
Sara Hendren's book What Can a Body Do? How We Meet the Built World is available wherever books are sold. Learn more about her work at sarahendren.com.