CHAPTER FOUR

Once I had noticed this mapping... this assemblage... it was as though I had sprayed luminol on the design cycle. I could see inaccessibility everywhere. Glowing and staining this system I had once worked so carefully to. 

It showed me that everyday unseen practices are happening. It showed me where these are happening.

The dominant traditional design industry can be wasteful. It is wasteful of diverse creative experiences and expressions. 

I notice three very separate ecologies.

There is a monoculture of design production. A dominant interfering foundation that breeds practice exclusion, inequality, systemic burnout and damaging bodymind events.

There is a second practice environment that facilitates diversity, whole-self creativity and bodymind sustainability. There is no cutting of grass or getting rid of "weeds". Wildflowers grow everywhere... but additional labours of industry translations can be exhausting and exclusionary.

And there is a deforestation of diversity of practice, perspective, lived experience and abilities by only serving a certain kind of normative-body "well" designer. 

And then there is all of this waste. This creative waste (Figure 1). 

In her book, Hospicing Modernity: Facing Humanity's Wrongs and the Implications for Social Activism (2021), Vanessa Andreotti calls these kinds of experiences of being, that are more than and beyond the "ontological security" and "certainty" of modernity, exiled capacities (2019, 2021). Andreotti says, within everyday modern culture, we are conditioned systemically to inherently exile anything of ourselves that does not serve a modern neoliberal, productivist, colonial society. That which doesn't serve it becomes excess. These excesses are expelled, exiled from our everyday ways of living.

I scale Andreotti's thinking to the size of the design cycle model. A rigid modern system and environment designed for particular people and so makes excess and exiled capacities of some people working within it. Waste as excess according to the modern mapping of existing. Waste that is exiled. Waste, failures as capacities that some bodyminds have excess of. Waste as more than and beyonds.

I look at the design cycle diagram now and have this awful image of primary practice as a foie gras of my bodymind. Force-fed, stuffed with productivist conditioning. When I first started noticing second practice as a creative disability phenomenon... my first instinct was to find ways to sustainably integrate second and primary practices. And now three years later... that instinct has been unlearned. If I keep on working to this paradigm... I am complicit. Complicit with the inaccessible, wasteful, monocultural, prohibitive practice inequality; the restrictive and exclusionary paradigm of this system. I do not trust in this process anymore.

I am no longer interested in waiting for an industry or institution to okay my needs. 

"How do we within our work, you know... within your work, my work, all the people that work within disability arts or Indigenous arts, how do we constantly recalibrate our own... practices in the spaces that we hold to cultivate and unexile those capacities you know?" (Jimmy, 2021). 

Margaret Price calls the pace in meeting time sensitive disability accommodations at work, the Slow System (2016). I know, named after my beloved shining armour: slow. In this systemic context, slow refers to the unknown gap of time between a time sensitive disability need and the processes of these needs may be being met. Slow here is differentiated between the needs of individual pace and the speed of movement of workplace processes and systems; the too long of waiting to be structurally accommodated. Too long is the process of applying for, proving and being granted accommodations. Too long is the time it takes for the accommodations to be put in place. Feedback and iterations of the accommodations are time consuming. The accommodations can be energy and financially costly to prove also, needing doctors and specialist notes to support the accommodating needs. I know this cost has often affected my side of this process too.

Price talks about how people often know, through previous experience, of the Slow System and so take on the labour cost and responsibility themselves. I call these second practices also. Each of these entangled lines are additional physical, emotional, cognitive and practice labours that bodyminds with any kind of needs outside of the centred design system have to carry out themselves. 

Second practice affords me a complex reading, understanding and telling of the what and why behind the accusations of ableism when spoken from the illness and disability design communities.

Looking through a lens like second practice offers a specific invisible embodiminded exploration and possible dismantling of design industry problems with burnout, exclusionary practices that prevent people with "non-normative" bodyminds from staying in the design industry and ableist neoliberal approaches to praxis in general. I know that I can't solve capitalism from my bed. But I'd rather be a door, window, explosion while waiting for industry to deeply recognise diverse needs and bodymind events within the ecosystem of workplace systems; not as added-on accommodations.