UC Berkeley's Disability Lab “makes better crips” through disabled maker-space
2When we think of a stereotypical hacker we often think of a white, male aged 20 to 30 years old, but according to UC Berkeley Prof. Karen Nakamura, the disabled community are truly some of the world’s most prolific tech hackers.
Nakamura, the Robert and Colleen Haas Distinguished Chair of Disability Studies and Director of the UC Berkeley Disability Lab, doesn’t mince words. "If you go to a disabled person's house, you'll see all these different life hacks that they've done," she says. "Because the world's really not designed for them. Things are designed for able-bodied people, everything from chairs, to tables, to spoons to computers."
Which is why she, along with Associate Director Nate Tilton, began the lab back in 2018.
"In a lot of ways, we're trying to disrupt the disruptors and really bring our community in to this environment by centering the design around disabled individuals," says Tilton, an Iraq War veteran.
The lab provides students, with or without a disability, a space to create life hacks such as a rain cover for wheelchairs that can cost upwards of $30,000.
The lab takes cost into account, often a major barrier for the disabled community, says Tilton.
"So when we're designing, we're also thinking, how much does it's going to cost this person? How much how can they make this themselves without having to spend $1000 to $1,500 to make it and we make open source technologies with a budget of less than $50."
The lab, says Nakamura, is building on Berkeley’s legacy of radicalism.
"I really like to think that we're going back to the original days of Berkeley where you had Berkeley hackers working in their basements or their garages, doing cool things that 30 years later have become pivotal to our world."
https://disabilitylab.berkeley.edu/
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