- #HGWORLD
- #HGCREATORS
- #HGEXPLORE
- #HGVOICES
- #HGSHOP
- CAREERS
- ABOUT US
- CONTACT US
Artist and design researcher Sara Hendren's book 'What Can a Body Do? How We Meet the Built World' opens with a thought experiment:
A curator has come to the author's classroom at the college where she teaches a course on technology and disability. The curator, who delivers frequent lectures and presentations for historians and gallery-goers, has asked for a lectern, and this has presented the author with a conundrum. Lecterns, the author writes, play "a sturdy supporting role in so many formalised rituals...". They are full of implications about who speaks and who doesn't — they are manifestations of the assumption that the most important voices belong to people of literal "standing". In other words, people who have an average-sized body relative to most lecterns.
The curator, in Hendren's book, does not. They have dwarfism and fall outside the socially accepted 'canopy of normalcy' therefore meeting the author's criteria for disability: a mismatch exists between them and their environment. Disability is not so much a physical or medical phenomenon, Hendren argues in her book, but a social one.
"Ability and disability may be in part about the physical state of the body," Hendren writes, "but they are also produced by the relative flexibility or rigidity of the built world". In other words: the world is designed poorly, and its poor design is what disables people like the curator — a capable professional and an expert in their chosen field — who simply happens to be shorter than the average human being, and therefore most available lecterns. They are not a person with disability, but they are disabled by a world that was not designed for them.
Hendren's thought experiment is only one example of how the world excludes people with disabilities by design, and this social phenomenon extends to the virtual world as well. Social networking apps — where we spend a majority of our time online — are still largely designed with the needs of a 'normal person' in mind, while disregarding the needs of an estimated 1.3 billion individuals who experience some form of significant disability according to WHO (the World Health Organization). They represent 16% of the global population, or 1 out of every 6 people. Across the world, people with disabilities also report experiencing social isolation and loneliness — now considered a 'global public health concern' by WHO — at significantly higher rates than people without disabilities.
'Buddy Up' — a homegrown social network created by Mumbai-based entrepreneurs Moneisha Gandhi and Gopika Kapoor — is trying to change that. Gandhi's son, Mihaan, has Down Syndrome, and although academically gifted, struggled with socialising and communicating with others as he grew older. Kapoor's son, Vir, is on the autism spectrum, and also struggled to connect with other people. When the two met, however, there was an instant connection. Their friendship inspired Gandhi and Kapoor to think about how they could make it possible for other people with disabilities and their caregivers to find and share similar connections.
In 2024, after a year of ideation and development, Gandhi and Kapoor launched Buddy Up — an inclusive social networking app tailor-made for people with disabilities and their caregivers. Buddy Up allows users to search for and connect with other users based on their age, sex, location, interests, and disabilities. To encourage socialisation, the app also provides opportunities for caregivers to connect with each other and find community. Although it's still a work-in-progress, the app has already garnered over a thousand users, and the number is only growing.
While the userbase grows steadily, Gandhi and Kapoor are also at work making the app more inclusive and accessible. They are currently looking at ways to include voice messaging and adding support for the visually impaired. Eventually, their goal is to make the app available not only in India's metropolitan cities, but smaller towns as well to help people with disabilities and their caregivers find community.
Learn more about Buddy Up here.
