Posted by:

Alex Haagaard

I am Alex Haagaard, a design researcher and founding member of The Disabled List, a design advocacy collective that approaches lived experience of disability as a kind of creative and technical expertise. I live on unceded land of the Haudenosaunee, Huron-Wendat and Mississauga peoples in so-called Ontario, Canada. In 2016, I transitioned to working full-time as a patient, pursuing diagnosis and care for my chronic illnesses. I call this experience the world’s worst paying, least prestigious design research fellowship. Now I design speculative access supports, infrastructure for non-extractive participatory research practices, and tools to restore the agency of the sick-person within medical interactions. I am still not receiving clinical care for the diagnoses I received in 2018 because every one of my clinicians has regretfully and sympathetically judged my complex and overlapping health conditions to lie outside the narrowly circumscribed purview of their practice.