Critical Design Lab

Critical Design Lab is a multi-disciplinary arts and design collaborative rooted in disability culture and crip technoscience. Their work revolves around the concept of access, treating it as an ethic, creative content, and methodology. Using digital media and social practice, they craft replicable protocols that view accessibility as research-creation, an aesthetic world-building practice, and a means to build community. Their work embodies crip interdependence in form, aesthetics, and content, defining critical design as disability culture’s challenges to existing social and built environments. They approach this work with joy, relationality, and a commitment to embodied design processes, embracing interdependence as both a political technology and design methodology. Critical Design Lab’s work is grounded in Disability Justice, rejecting forms of accessibility rooted in anti-Blackness, settler colonialism, and white supremacy. They utilize remote and collective participation technologies to enable accessible world-building across time zones, disciplinary boundaries, and diverse access needs. Sustainability and community are at the core of their mission.

https://www.mapping-access.com/