Does the Built World Welcome You?

Crash test dummies, cradles, and couture

A lot of the two-way streets in my neighborhood still only have one lane plowed… but my kids are back in school for the first time in more than a week! So today, I wanted to share a brief triptych of built things that respond to the human body in fascinating ways.

Photo shared by Human Crash Safety via Wikimedia

First, and most centrally Other Feminisms-y, is the news that the United States will finally (in ~2027) begin requiring car manufacturers to use a female crash test dummy as part of their safety tests. I was heavily indebted to Caroline Criado Perez’s Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men when I wrote about this lacuna in The Dignity of Dependence.

Relying on a tiny (5th percentile) male figure to stand in for women in crash tests is one of the more obviously dangerous ways we treat women as defective men. As I wrote:

When interviewed about these disparities by AutoExpress in 2020, Richard Schram, the Euro New Car Assessment Program’s technical director, acted as though the problem was with women, not car manufacturers. “Biologically, females are slightly weaker, and women sitting closer to the steering wheel can be an issue,” he said. “There is a difference between men and women; I acknowledge that, and I acknowledge this may be hard for women to accept.”

Schram spoke as though women sat closer to the steering wheel on a whim. But this “choice” is determined by design. In order to reach pedals that are calibrated to men’s longer legs, women slide their seats forward and place themselves much closer to the explosive force of the airbag. The airbag’s expansion is tailored to a “standard” (implicitly male) driver. The shorter a women is, the more danger she is in. During the 1990s, women petitioned to have a switch that would let a woman disable or re-arm the airbag, depending on whether she or her husband was in the driver’s seat. Car manufacturers opposed the proposed regulation. […]

The NHTSA emphasized that the danger shouldn’t be analyzed by structural differences between sexes; it was, as they framed it, a matter of personal error. “The one fact that is common to all who died is NOT their height, weight, sex, or age,” the brochure stated. “Rather, it is the fact that they were too close to the air bag when it started to deploy.” The NHTSA didn’t address how petite women could avoid this “mistake” except by electing not to drive.

I’m glad to see some real (albeit overdue) progress being made!

I’ve had this one saved in tab for more than a year (eek!) and I still love it:

On a Thursday afternoon in late summer Frances McDormand, the actor, and Suzanne Bocanegra, a conceptual artist, were testing out a Shaker cradle for adults. The exhibit of these little-known furniture items that they put together for the Shaker Museum’s pop-up gallery was days from opening in the Kinderhook Knitting Mill — a converted historic space in Columbia County, N.Y.

McDormand climbed into the handsome, coffin-size lidless wooden box — one of several, along with a baby cradle and rocking chairs on display. She was lying on her back with her arms crossed over her chest. Her position was moribund, her mind alert.

As the article discusses, the Shakers, being celibate, had no need for baby cradles. Instead, they had to think about how to care for the elderly and the dying. (Just as a religious order does). They concluded the end might resemble the beginning:

When [McDormand] first saw a Shaker cradle in a book of photographs, something clicked. “They put so much energy into the beautiful things they made, and they were ready to comfort their people when the time came,” she said. She thought about being able to grow old in a caring community and about the regrets she had for not being around for her adoptive parents when they died. She also thought about the time she spent at the bedside of a dying friend.

“I helped with changing her diapers and feeding her and keeping her from choking,” she said. “We all need that kind of care and the Shakers seemed to really know how to prepare for it.”

Very little about our homes or furniture is designed in anticipation of aging and dying. Thinking about our parents’ coming years made my husband and me pick a house on the lower side of our street’s hill (so there’s no long set of steps to our door). But we don’t have a bathroom on the first floor, and we’ll have to fix that or move at some point if we want our home to stay hospitable.

Finally, and just for fun, I’ve always enjoyed the wild designs of Iris van Herpen, and last summer she made a dress that incorporated living algae for their bioluminescent properties.

You’ll want to check out the full feature (and videos!) at Nautilus, but this was a highlight:

Keeping the algae alive inside the gel is tricky. The cells thrive within a narrow temperature range and need nutrients and a saline solution to stay alive. The gel has to breathe, but too much exposure to the air can bring in contaminants, like bacteria or fungi, which can overgrow the algae inside. The hardest part was getting the consistency right, something “firmer than your granny’s jelly pudding,” said Bellamy, but that could still be squeezed through a syringe, molded and stitched into fabric.

The dress made its debut on the runway on July 7 in Paris, during Haute Couture Week. For Bellamy, the most interesting part of the project was observing the relationship that developed between Iris’s atelier and the material. “The material has a bedtime, the material has a wake-up time, the material gets jet lagged,” he said. “It’s that fragility that makes livingness so beautiful.”

Where have you seen elements of the built environment anticipate and accommodate the “fragility that makes livingness so beautiful”?

What in your home have you already changed / anticipate changing to be able to welcome friends and family as they age?