The body

A law, in physics, means it holds everywhere we have looked. Gravity does not ask permission to work in the suburbs, does not charge more if you are left-handed, and does not take the day off when you are in a hurry.

Ours do not do that. Miller’s LawMiller’s lawGroup into blocks of up to four, and make the blocks contrast with each other.Open the law → became famous for the magical number seven, and the seven later became four — a constant of physics does not halve when somebody measures again. The Doherty ThresholdDoherty thresholdRespond in under 400 ms, even if only to say it is processing.Open the law → is 400 milliseconds that IBM took from trained terminal operators in 1982, and we cite it as if it were a property of the brain.

Borrowing the word has a practical effect, and it is not sounding impressive. A law is what we stop questioning. Nobody asks a law for its sample. Nobody asks in whom gravity was measured.

When I went looking into the provocation, I found out it already has owners, and that the owners are better than me. Good. It means the ground is firm.

Rosemarie Garland-ThomsonGarland-ThomsonWrote about how culture constructs the idea of the extraordinary body, and, by contrast, that of the normal body.One reference in this work:1997Extraordinary bodies: figuring physical disability in American culture and literatureSee in the bibliography → named it the normate in 1997: the position of bodily normality from which someone presents as the definitive human being, and against which everything else is measured as deviation. It is the ballerina, with an academic name. Aimi HamraieHamraieTold the political history of universal design, who built it, against what, and what it left out.One reference in this work:2017Building access: universal design and the politics of disabilitySee in the bibliography → took the concept into architecture in Building Access (2017). Sasha Costanza-ChockCostanza-ChockWrote “Design Justice”, which asks who decides, who is measured and who foots the bill for a design decision.One reference in this work:2020Design justice: community-led practices to build the worlds we needSee in the bibliography →, in Design Justice (2020), calls the same character the unmarked user.

What I looked for and did not find was anyone who had taken the catalogue designers actually consult and annotated it, law by law, with which body each one presumes. The general critique is thirty years old. The application to this list, I did not find. If it exists and I missed it, tell me here and the correction goes in with credit. The six studies that measure famous laws in other bodies are discussed in References.

All of this is lovely to say and tedious to enforce. A11Y.md, which I wrote for AI-generated software, solves something similar in a place that is easier to measure. There, accessibility leaves the review stage and becomes a precondition: the model receives the constraints before the first line, and what does not meet them never comes to exist.

Here it is the same move, applied to theory. “Which body?” is not an accessibility paragraph at the foot of the law — it is a condition for citing it at all. Each of the 38 now declares what is known about that, and declares alongside it how much is known.

In practice there are three questions, and they fit before any citation. In which bodies was this measured? What in the law depends on a specific sense or a specific movement? And what changes when the context is another? The first two are in the studies. The third has almost never been answered, and knowing that nobody answered is already information about how much weight you can put there.

PS: if you look at a law here and think it does not survive your user, that is the right reading. Tell me which one.