Historian, Elizabeth Guffey: So much of your life, when you're a disabled person, is dictated by the way the world has been created for everybody else.
I am Elizabeth Guffey, a Professor of Art and Design History, but I also identify as a disabled person.
We're in front of Kazuo Kawasaki’s Carna Folding Wheelchair. It has the general outlines of a traditional wheelchair, but it also feels futuristic, with those solid bright red wheels, a textured black seat, and it uses color really playfully. For example, a green ball, where the brake hold is, and these yellow finials on the ends of the footrest.
Kawasaki has said, “To be a visionary designer, I want to design products for myself first.” He’s telling us that he's the expert on his own needs. The modern collapsible wheelchair was introduced in the early 1930s by Herbert Everest. He found that these huge, rickety wheelchairs were not going in and out of the car easily, and so he started tinkering and developed that wheelchair that we see everywhere today now. It was a design by a disabled person for other disabled people. And that’s what Kawasaki is doing as well.