Disability Differently: Pulsing the Energy for a Radical Allyship in HCI

Abstract

This work attempts to do the impossible: to bridge the personal, the political, and the critical concerns in HCI through artistic practice. It is my confession, my contribution, and my provocation. For years, I built interfaces for disabled groups, believing I was “assisting” them. This submission—a video essay installation—offers an antithesis. Combining moving image and physical artefacts, the installation exposes the able-bodied ideologies embedded in my training and my past “fixes,” and, in turn, asks the viewer—fellow HCI practitioner—to locate themselves within that same complicity. Through subjective, ethnographic storytelling, the video traces my shift from distance to allyship, while the displayed interfaces—built with my disabled collaborators, Eric and Christian—are presented not as tools, but as socio-technical artefacts shaped through friendship, experimentation, and disability-led art-activism. Navigating between critical disability studies, HCI, and artistic research, this work calls for a radical shift—away from fixing disability and toward desiring it as culture, as allyship. In doing so, it engages NordiCHI’s theme of Pulse by proposing a different energy for HCI: one grounded not in solutionism, but in relation, accountability, and collective practice.