On Crip Time challenges the ableist systems that are “preventing disabled people from accessing the future”

The product of a collaboration between designer, writer and publisher Kaiya Waerea and graphic designer Michiel Teeuw, On Crip Time is an expanded print publication that documents the results of their project, Woke Designers Reading Club: Designing on Crip Time. The eight-week programme devised by the creative duo was set up to question how systems of time are “enforced to prevent disabled people from accessing the future”.

The project was just one of the programmes organised by the Netherlands-based design platform Designer’s Thinking, a collective concerned with conversations on the politics and history of design. Kaiya and Michiel’s call for the gathering and sharing of ideas on disability and design, the Woke Designers Reading Club was a way to collectively explore the idea of working on ‘crip time’ — a concept that challenges the idea that time is the same for everyone, and something that is experienced differently by disabled, chronically ill or neurodivergent people.

“As a queer autistic person I developed a strong interest and kinship with crip theory and activism, and I wanted to explore this in community with others,” explains Michiel. “I invited Kaiya to co-organise a season of WDRC centred around this theme.” The duo’s gatherings to read, write and discuss throughout the programme produced a range of “unruly resistances” with participants producing everything from flowcharts to prayer mats, diagrams and manifestos surrounding the intersections of design and disability justice.

“In setting out to run this programme, we had imagined it being aimed at design practitioners beginning to think about crip theory and disability justice. Instead we found our participants were mostly creative practitioners from other fields, already engaged with disability justice, beginning to think about design,” says Kaiya. “Early on in one session, someone expressed that they had never thought of design practice as something that they could play any part in. This reveals how prevalent the ableist narrative of who design is for, and who designers are, continues to be.” As each participant’s contributions developed throughout the programme, it became clear to the pair that they weren’t going to be simply crafting a publication on design theory or methodologies, like they had imagined.

The resulting Risograph publication translates the entirety of the programme’s outputs into a collection of printed matter, encased to allow it to “function as a dossier of your own” says designer Michiel. Inspired by official documents, diagnoses and medical files, “the publication design posits a mutiny of these documents making a dossier authored by a pluriversality of crips”, as opposed to the impersonal, one-dimensional narrative of one’s illness or disability often controlled by the medical world. “On one hand,” Michiel says, “it uses very top-down forms of archiving and organisation – cataloguing stamps, typewriter fonts and a dossier folder. However, these forms are cripped – made accessible, anarchic and atypical.”

On Crip Time was printed, produced and distributed this year by another branch of Kaiya’s practice: Sticky Fingers Publishing, “an intra-dependant feminist, queer and disabled-led press” based in south east London, run by Kaiya and Sophie Paul. A project that grew out of their time studying together at the RCA and a “shared concern for what knowledge feels like”, Sophie and Kaiya have recently celebrated five years of the press with an exhibition at Maximillian William gallery of a retrospective of their back catalogue of books, posters, flyers and other ephemera. Kaiya tells us the pair have lots of exciting projects coming up including the launch of the second issue of their new periodical Get Rid of Meaning: A Journal of Interdisciplinary Writing in November. The pair also host a monthly radio show on Repeater Radio and produce a monthly subscription print mail out, so look out for that!