Accounting for the quasi-imperceptible: possibilities of innovation in spatial use, design practice, and the mediation between both

The use and design of space emerge from relational ontology. Their mutual constitution has effects on both spatial and design practice. So too,the latter is true for sensory and mobility disabilities. However, still often spatial experience and practice in #disabled persons# is reduced and blackboxed into so-called immutable mobiles such as building codes, rules and regulations. Once blackboxed, they are taken for grantedas 'objective measures'. Moreover, multiple versions of becoming disabled, which can be extended to be understood as singularized hybrid collectives instead of individual human bodies, tend to get relegated to a regime of accuracy. This subsequently closes down alternative versionsof reality making and possibilities of becoming. 
The intricacyof policy tools (evaluating #accessibility#, for example) in architectural design, on the other hand, tends to render actual design processes more opaque. While along with disability-related instruments, the vast panoply of protocols, tools, building techniques and materials, collaborations 'within' or with 'external' experts, resources, and so on are held to be 'mere intermediaries', i.e. passive matter or artefacts without agency, not being able to intervene in human action whatsoever or semiotically and semantically stabilized epistemes of intersubjective collaboration, things could be accounted for otherwise. 
In a framework of generalized symmetry, stemming from actor-network theory (ANT), both the spatial practice of sensory and mobility disabled persons and architectural design practice will be addressed within the same research frame and with the same vocabularies. Looking into the respective worlds of both, and looking for connections, overlaps, or translations between them, the research objective is to look at/for possibilities of innovation in either design or spatial practice. Moreover, ANT will serve as a more general active backdrop and as a scaffold for analysis. Together with pragmatism (which is subsumed in some strains of ANT anyhow) and ethnomethodology, the empirical research will look into perception, cognition, and action in the abovementioned mundane and professional/engineering practices (how they emerge, how they relate, how they get distributed, and the coordination this implies).
The methodological approach is made up of (i) case studies of some accepted or more controversial innovative architectural projects (Sea Bathing Facilities by Carlos Pereira; House for a Blind Man 2001 by Penezic & Rogina; Fort Napoleon by Vanhoutte & Govaert; museumM by Stéphane Beel); and (ii) visual or more 'traditional' ethnography with people with a sensory or mobility disability, as well as in an actual design project of an actual architectural office. 

Trefwoorden:architectural design, disability

Project type:PhD project