Professor Goffredo is really good at breaking down good design. At first, when you delve into what makes a design good, it’s all very heady and cerebral. Very meticulous and calculated. But at the end of the day, when you go into what really makes a design good, the reasoning is so shallow. A design is good when it works and people use and like it. A design is bad when they don’t. It reminded me of something Stanley Kubrick said about movies. He said you can think of a million intelligent reasons for why a movie was good or not, but at the end of the day, the only thing that mattered, the only thing that really determined whether it was good or not, was if you liked it. Simple as that. Goffredo is really good at identifying simple human behaviors that drive all of design. And I’ve been surprised at how much I have learnt about myself while studying design.
At first, the world ‘disability’ seems to have really clear parameters. We think of people who have to walk with canes, and our first reaction is to go, “Well, I’m not that. This doesn’t apply to me.” But I think we are all disabled in a myriad of ways. If the goal is seamless social assimilation, I think we all know what it feels like to be an outsider. The same mechanism that keeps us from saying embarrassing things is the same mechanism that drives us to design hearing aids to be as invisible as possible. We don’t want what we’re lacking to be spotted. But there’s a power you reclaim when you choose to own it. One of my favorite Kanye lyrics goes: “I found bravery in my bravado.” And I think designing for disabilities would really benefit from this mindset. We all know what it’s like to feel weird. But then when we embraced what we had once spurned, we discovered that’s where the source of our strength was. Rumi said, “The wound is where the light enters.” A disability is never a disability as the word is understood. A disability is one of the many types of roadblocks we experience being human. We all experience the disabilities of being human in so many different ways. Sometimes, they even incapacitate us and keep us from seeing the beauty in our struggle. The goal of the good designer is to recognize these incapacities and to free us, both physically and mentally. They diagnose the wound, and design something that allows the light to enter. They make what had once been looked down upon desirable. They make what had once made us outcasts into harbingers, icons, and leaders. Disabilities are fertile grounds for growth, change, and beauty. I think if we start approaching disability from this frame of mind, we’ll see the overall soul of humanity much more clearly.