50 Distillation Guidebook Co-Lab • 9.18–9.19 2025 What role can universities play in fostering strong, collaborative relationships between designers and communities? Since our landscape of Eds and Meds has been effectively described in its dedicated Small Cities Co-Lab Booklet, I thought that I might use this response to speak about my own experiences as a student engaged in community-based research at the Small Cities Lab. For the past year, I have been collaborating within a larger project facilitated by Lehigh University faculty Christina Zhang (architect), Austin Duncan (disability anthropologist), and Jiin Jung (social psychologist). Together, we have been working to surface and visualize the ways that disabled residents of the Lehigh Valley care for each other informally, in order to navigate a landscape of inadequate systems and ableist experiences. Through individual interviews and group mapping sessions, we have attempted to make legible the spaces and the social relationships that disabled people depend on for their everyday survival. At the same time, these conversations reveal how the same scarcities that make informal care necessary also prevent informal networks from forming, resulting in a cycle of danger and isolation for disabled individuals. Kyra Zimmerman Bard College Class of 2025, incoming Master of Architecture student at Rice University, responding to C.L. Bohannon on how disability studies and community-engaged research redefine design practice.
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTA0OTQ5OA==