Disability: not just a social care, benefits or health issue

More often than not, debates around disability and the role, for example, that disabled people’s organisations can play, tend to centre around “big” issues like social care, welfare/benefits and health.

This is obviously a very narrow view. Non-disabled people don’t think in such narrow terms; funny enough, neither do disabled people.

Indeed, it’s often in the things that non-disabled people take for granted that disabled people face the most barriers put in front of them.

An excellent campaign by the Muscular Dystrophy Campaign yesterday showed that something as seemingly straightforward as going to the cinema is by no means easy if disability is involved.

Research (which was done, incidentally, by young people with muscular dystrophy) showed that disabled people can expect the following when they visit a cinema:

• Poor disability awareness among staff members
• Uncomfortable and poor viewing areas
• Inaccessible auditoriums and refreshments areas
• Broken lifts
• Heavy doors
• Poorly maintained toilets
• Poor lighting
• Stairways without banisters

A video from the campaign captures the nub of the issue:

As ever, it’s the things that non-disabled people wouldn’t even think of that often scupper the opportunities for disabled people to have the same opportunity to participate equally – in this case, going to the cinema.

And if the relatively small things in life – visiting the cinema with friends, going to the shops, nipping down the pub for a quick pint – are made so inaccessible, what hope do we have for the “big” issues?

If you’d like to know more about the research, visit the MD Trailblazers campaign site. If you’d like to see better access for disabled people in cinemas, you can sign the petition here.

What does Saint-Saëns’s opinion about The Swan tell us?

I bought a hard-to-find hardback copy of the composer Saint-Saëns’s biography as a present to my PhD supervisor. Although I didn’t know who Saint-Saëns was then, and only do so now because my wife knows her stuff when it comes to classical music, a little story I heard about him has stuck in my mind.

Apparently, Saint-Saëns hated “The Swan” – one of the most recognisable parts of one, if not the most famous, of his compositions: The Carnival of the Animals. It goes like this:

Saint-Saëns’s hatred of the piece stems from its popularity: he detested the fact that what he considered to be so simple a piece was so popular with the public.

This set me to thinking about elitism, populism and perceptions of these from the different standpoints they represent. There’s a parallel to be drawn between the purveyors of policy and the practitioners of politics, too.

The thing is, I’m not quite sure what it is yet. But I know that Saint-Saëns’s views resonated for some reason.

If anyone cares to enlighten me, therefore, please do…

All on board the new London bus?

The excellent Boris Watch picks up on whether or not disabled people were engaged up front in the design of the new London bus.

The answer? No.

We Are Enabled By Design event

I’m really looking forward to the “We Are Enabled By Design” event next week.

The purpose of the event is to

reframe the ageing/disability debate by looking at how universal design can help support independent (and stylish!) living.

Thinking well beyond the day-to-day requirements that many disabled and older people have simply to meet their care and support needs, Enabled by Design rightly takes the principles of Independent Living and continually makes the case that good design – in both the practical and stylistic sense – can and should make huge contributions to improve the overall quality of people’s lives. What I love about EbD’s approach is how ‘mainstream’ it is – it’s not just a separate disability-based issue; it’s one that everyone should be conscious of and can support. I also love the peer-based approach it takes, where people with common interests share their experiences through EbD.

And to reflect all of this, the event next week has two absolutely cracking speakers: Wayne Hemingway and Charles Leadbeater. Thus, if you haven’t got your tickets yet, pick some up here!

(Note: I know the organisers of the event. Even so, I’d encourage you to go anyway, and not just because I know them!)

Maths at the British Museum

The Bank Holiday was a great chance to get out and remember why it’s so good to live in London. The two highlights for me were a visit to Foyles Bookshop on the Charing Cross Road and a trip to the British Museum.

Every time I visit the British Museum I am reminded that the roof of the Great Court is one of the best visualisations of maths I’ve ever seen. Imagine, if you will, a huge box that stretches up from the ground to many hundreds of feet into space, well beyond the roof of the Great Court. Then what that magnificent roof does is pick out a wonderful, wonderful surface in that vast 3-dimensional space.

There’s no better physical manifestation of a manifold, of topology, or of what is simply a solution to an elegant equation than that roof.

2009 in pictures

Following last year’s near identical entry, below are some “pictures of the year” compilations:

— The Boston Globe Big Picture (1 of 3) (The Big Picture)

— The Boston Globe Big Picture (2 of 3) (The Big Picture)

— The Boston Globe Big Picture (3 of 3) (The Big Picture)

— 2009: The Year in Pictures (New York Times)

— 2009 in Focus: Best of Times photography (Los Angeles Times)

— 2009 Photos of the Year (Life magazine)

— 2009 Sports Photos of the Year (Life magazine)

Harry Beck in Paris

The Royal Mail recently commem orated one of the UK’s greatest works of visual infor mation design when Harry Beck’s London Underground diagram was included for the first time on a British postage stamp writes Mark Ovenden. The impor tance of Beck’s rectilinear, topologic 1933 diagram is widely recognised and praised by graphic designers. Many wonder why Beck never extended his ideas outside London. The answer is, he did – to the nearest major subway network to London: Paris.

Full story and lots of fantastic images, plus a neat history of the development of underground maps, is at the Creative Review (via kottke).

Radiohead Shelter

Radiohead have given permission for one of their tracks to be used in a TV advertising campaign for the first time in a campaign for homeless charity Shelter voiced by Minority Report and Longford actor Samantha Morton.


The TV campaign, which breaks later this month, is called “House of Cards” and aims to raise awareness of the fragile housing situation in the UK in the current economic climate.

You can see the video here.

(Aside: I’d be interested to know how much this campaign has cost.)

smarthistory

Pretty cool: smarthistory:

For years we have been dissatisfied with the large expensive art history textbook. We found that they were difficult for many students, contained too many images, and just were not particularly engaging.

(Via kottke)

Francis Bacon at Tate Modern

I was disappointed to miss the Francis Bacon exhibition at Tate Modern recently. It closed in early January and the end-of-year rush meant there just wasn’t enough time to make it along.

As ever, the Tate’s site on the exhibition is an excellent overview of the exhibition, and provides a good number of onward resources to look at. The guide through the exhibition in several parts is linked to below — well worth a read if you get chance.

— Introduction

— 1. Animal

— 2. Zone

— 3. Apprehension

— 4. Crucifixion

— 5. Crisis

— 6. Archive

— 7. Portrait

— 8. Memorial

— 9. Epic

— 10. Late

(Image credit: rachiestar_me on flickr)