This thesis examines the lived experience of the disabled body and takes its relationship with the built environment as a starting point for investigating access. The research employs interdisciplinary strategies of repair and modification, mimicry and repetition, improvisation and speculative proposals, and utilizes critical design approaches to increase awareness, provoke dialogue and confront misconceptions about what constitutes accessibility. Incorporating sculpture, drawing and graphic design, the work in this thesis is concerned with exploring the intended function, use and uselessness of design art objects to highlight the unseen conditions of disability and design. This practice organizes itself around forms of failure: structural failure, failure of personal mobility devices and failure in disability culture and arts scholarship. Through material engagements, humour, absurdity and urgency as expressed in makeshift constructions, this thesis asks how the localized failure of artist-designed forms can draw attention to failures of access within larger systems.

Keywords: access, design, disability