How can design advance Deaf Spaces, uphold disability justice, and uplift cultural memory?
Lab Leadership
Jeffrey Mansfield
Principal
Jeffrey Mansfield
Principal — Boston
"As designers, we must embrace our role as protagonists in the built environment."
Jeffrey Yasuo Mansfield leads MASS’s Deaf Space and Disability Justice Lab, uplifting the lived experience of Deaf and Disabled communities to bring equity and dignity on a number of education and cultural projects. His current research explores the formation of Deaf and Disability spaces as expressions of cultural resistance in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, for which he is a Graham Foundation grantee. Jeffrey has been deaf since birth.
Jeffrey is also a recipient of the Ford and Andrew W. Mellon Foundation’s Disability Futures fellowship and is a John W. Kluge Fellow at the Library of Congress. He has taught design studios at the University of Michigan and Harvard Graduate School of Design.
His work has been published in the Cooper Hewitt Design Journal, AD, Tacet and presented at MoMA PS1, Bergen Assembly, Sao Paulo Biennale, and the Sharjah Biennial. He is co-author of the book, The Architecture of Health, published by Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. Jeffrey holds a Master of Architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and an AB in Architecture from Princeton University.
Gallaudet University Design Competition
The built environment plays an outsized role in shaping the daily experience of deafness and disability, reflecting broader, evolving social values. For Deaf and Disabled communities, the architectural lineages of Deaf schools, state hospitals, and prisons—typologies of exclusion and isolation—have shaped barriers both physical and psychological in a world not designed to be equitable. Despite significant strides in the disability rights and universal/inclusive design movements, a deeper embrace of the interplay of architecture, disability, and community is necessary. Those most affected by design decisions are still often excluded, resulting in projects that fail to promote community agency and dignity, and deepen distrust.
Newport Mental Health
The Deaf Space and Disability Justice Design Lab (DSDJ) counters these trajectories by empowering Deaf and Disabled communities to reclaim spatial narratives. Led by Jeffrey Mansfield, the DSDJ Lab centers the voices of Deaf and Disabled thought leaders, practitioners, and community members to uplift the social, emotional, and cultural experiences of Deaf and Disabled communities. For these groups who have been deeply impacted by the built environment, connecting to cultural memory and identity through the design process becomes an act of resistance, healing, and hope. Through the DSDJ Lab, projects undertaken at MASS are based in human-centered, Deaf-centric design that amplifies the somatic knowledge and cultural experiences of Deaf people.
