Supposing a new form of transport that runs on electricity could redefine pavement mobility as we know it. Surely analogue would become the past?
“Think of [Segway] as a digital solution to an analogue problem.”
Segway is a new digital product for the walkers, a leap for mankind; yet, mobility products such as electric wheelchairs have been around for a good thirty years. This product reclaims the name Puma (another wheelchair branding itself on the cutting edge of technologies); P.U.M.A. (Personal Urban Mobility & Accessibility). The keywords of Mobility and Accessibility are here reappropriated into a funky new prototype, representing that somehow meagre notion of walking and the imagery of sleek black panther roaming into an expanding urbane landscape.
The point I would like to raise in complying our futuristic imagery of an urban transporters, does this product transform walkers into non-walkers? Moving into the realm of deconstruction of the binary; does this dissolve boundaries or categories so in actual fact disabled and able bodies travel as one in harmony.
Introducing a new breed called the puma-ism? Somehow, I think not. I think my reaction against this lies within the fact that disabled people occupy the category of ‘the other’ in normative society. Until these boundaries between able and dis-abled bodies dissolve of their own doing and thus disabled people gain their autonomy, separate from the able bodied; this choice for a walker to step into the P.U.M.A denies disabled people their own choice about whether to integrate themselves into society.
