“Design can include making something new, but it can also include unmaking the world as it is, or perhaps remaking it, with parts and systems alike.” (Hendren, 2020)
Two ideas really stood out to me in the videos. The first was that holistic support benefits everyone. The second was that having many paths to ‘success’ creates an environment where more people feel able to participate fully in social life. I was particularly struck by Christine Sun Kim’s (Sun Kim, 2023), discussion of the importance of government support, in the form of affordability and free childcare — something on the surface unrelated to her deafness which has given her the space to make choices about her life. Her assertion that it is “easier for you to learn to sign than a deaf person to learn to hear” was also a damning indictment of what inaccessible spaces implicitly demand of disabled people.
There’s also an attitudinal aspect to Sun Kim’s statement — an invitation to reconsider what is possible. What Can A Body Do? (Hendren, 2020), asserts that “all technology is assistive technology” — recasting objects such as phones and shoes as tools that allow us to extend our bodies’ ability to act in the world. Workshop spaces can both enforce rigid social norms through assumptions about users’ abilities, but also question and change them, expanding a space of possibility and learning.
Often, conversations I have with students are about possibility: balancing constraints (time, current skill level, safety, course requirements) with their goals and desires. Part of this process is helping a student to estimate their ability to complete the project (Wolbring, 2025), but another is more imaginative — thinking together of modifications that can accommodate a student’s interests and intention.
UAL’s 2-7% retention gap (UAL, 2026) for disabled students over the past 5 years is upsetting but not surprising to me. Many students I have worked with report overwhelming stress in accessing resources while managing health conditions and finances. A key concern of many students who suffer from chronic illness or mental health difficulties is the ability to complete tasks at home: an accommodation which also benefits students who face intersecting barriers, such as childcare needs, financial concerns, or who have to commute to university.
including free and browser-based options
One way to make technical spaces more accessible is creating an environment where there is more than one way to achieve the same goal: having borrowable equipment, finding software that students can run for free at home or on library computers, making information available in diverse formats, and having different forms and fidelities of prototyping materials available (Steele et. al, 2018).
In Live Programming in Hostile Territory (Reed, 2025), Reed and Shank talk about how accessibility tools create a space of possibility rarely considered in software development. Legal mandates for software to be legible to tools such as screen readers mean that even apparently ‘closed’ applications expose a wealth of information, allowing interoperable tools to be designed in contexts “antagonistic to modification”. They make a case for malleability: the idea that systems should be designed to open themselves up to forms of unexpected use.
Whenever we plan technical skills workshops in the CCI, we try where possible to focus on free and open-source tools. Not only are these tools that can be used at home by students at no cost, but they can also be modified and changed. This expansion of the possibility space of software is a necessity for some students, but it can also be a benefit to far more.
References
Hendren, S. (2020) What Can a Body Do? How We Meet the Built World. New York: Riverhead Books
Kim, C.S. (2023) Friends and Strangers, Art21: Art in the Twenty-First Century, Season 11, Episode 3. PBS. First broadcast: 20 October 2023
Reed, O. and Shank, C. (2025), Live Programming in Hostile Territory, paper presented at LIVE 2025: Workshop on Live Programming, 20 July 2025. Available at: https://folkjs.org/live-2025/ (Accessed: 6 May 2026)
UAL ActiveDashboards (2026) Retention by Profile, 2019–2025, (internal) University of the Arts London
Wolbring, G. (2025), Ability Expectation/Ableism glossary, https://wolbring.wordpress.com/ability-expectationableism-glossary/ (Accessed: 6 May 2026)
I really value your reflection on Christine Sun Kim and the way you draw attention to holistic forms of support, such as childcare and affordability. It broadens the conversation in an important way, showing how structural conditions shape who can participate. The theme of affordability shines through again in your advocacy for open-source tools. Not just as cost-free resources, but as adaptable systems that students can reshape to meet their own needs.
I’m curious how students respond to this mindset of reimagining and repurposing tools. Do they tend to adopt it readily, or does it take time to develop? And do you approach this on a tool-by-tool basis, or try to foster it as a more self-sustaining way of thinking?
hi Daphne! thanks so much 🙂 To be honest, I think it’s very important but can take a long time for anyone to feel like they have real agency to modify the tools that they use in a general sense. That said, sometimes students will just turn up with a piece of tech and be like “I want to make this work differently”, and that can also be a really cool way into thinking more malleable. I suppose it’s a mixture of the ad-hoc ‘tool-by-tool’ approach, combined with a more general intention to see things differently. Sometimes there’s a nice thing about having a bit less experience, because you have fewer preconceptions about what is and isn’t possible.
The lack of feeling of agency with a lot of tools like phones and computers particularly is partly by design. I think what I find so exciting about Orion’s work with Mac applications is that he works so much with software that everyone (myself included!) assumes is totally closed down / closed off — there’s something really exciting about learning that actually it can be modified and changed.
As a technician, I know that it’s been really helpful to feel very supported and trusted by my managers to do this kind of work. It’s maybe a micro version of what Christine Sun Kim is talking about — having the baseline support to know that it’s okay for something to go wrong means that you can be more open-ended and experimental. One example was helping a student a couple of years back hack a knitting machine. Another more recently was making a tool for the diploma students as a way in to capturing satellite imagery — so they could get started without initially writing code, but then I could also open the tool up and show them how it was made.
This sense of agency over your tools is something I hope (and think!) we often get at in teaching, though it can take a lot of time and thought to get there — it can be a lot easier to just do the default version of things. There’s a nice line that Tom Armitage, one of the BsC Creative Computing lecturers likes to use, which is — “my job as a lecturer is to get across that software is made by people, and you are people”.
I really appreciated your discussion of “malleability” and the idea that accessibility can expand possibilities rather than simply remove barriers. Your point about tools and systems being both enabling and disabling depending on their design felt particularly relevant within technical teaching environments.
I was also struck by your reflection on Christine Sun Kim’s discussion of childcare and government support. It was a strong reminder that disability is deeply connected to wider social and economic structures, not only physical accessibility. Your emphasis on creating multiple pathways to achieve the same outcome also resonates strongly with my own teaching experience, particularly around reducing pressure and supporting different learning styles.
I found your point about open-source and adaptable software especially interesting. Have you noticed that students engage more confidently or creatively when they are given flexible tools and multiple ways of approaching technical processes?
thanks Gregory 🙂 really appreciate. To your question — it’s a big mix!
In my experience, our students initially gravitate toward the free thing with the lowest barrier to entry, but with some extra work can also try out other tools as well. We’ve had this with embroidery software — everyone tends to use InkStitch (which is open-source, and uses a graphical interface), which is fantastic but also not everyone learns it in a lot of detail. I think a lot of this also relates to how the interface is designed — InkStitch is open-source and actually very powerful and lets you change a lot under the hood, but it also lets you press a button and make a file from an image, which doesn’t require any thought and can be the default.
We felt a bit like people weren’t taking a lot of time to make good embroidery files (and breaking lots of needles), so we started running some workshops on some different open-source embroidery software which requires you to write code (which is a lot harder up front but means you have to engage much more directly with the medium), and students that tried the second type then also got to be a lot more discerning with how they used InkStitch — not just pressing a button but really exploring the different parameters.
This sort of stuff can also be environmental — we had a student last year who got really into embroidering electromagnets, and so was doing some really interesting experimental programming of the machine. I think other students got a lot out of seeing you could do that, and that whole cohort had some really interesting approaches to the medium as a result. Sometimes it can be harder for this kind of environmental adjustments around accessibility to be communicated, especially as normally these are either private or involve students being able to do things at home. In these cases we’d probably just continue to highlight that it’s a possibility.