Architectural activist and educator Jos Boys has spent her career challenging the architectural mainstream. As a co-founder of the radical feminist design co-operative Matrix in the 1980s, she helped expose how the built environment routinely ignored and excluded women’s needs and experiences. Decades on, Boys remains one of the profession’s most original and persistent agitators – now focusing her energies on rethinking how we design with and for disabled people.

Her work today, through the DisOrdinary Architecture Project, is pushing the profession to move beyond minimal compliance and instead embrace a richer, more inclusive design culture. At a time when one in four people in the UK is classed as disabled, and as our population ages, the need for such work has never been more urgent.

When we meet her, Boys is not especially keen to dwell on the past. Despite her status as a pioneering voice in feminist architecture, she’s focused firmly on the present, and on the radical potential of disability-led design. “We want to find strategies and methods to open up much more creative and enjoyable – and it’s very important that they are enjoyable – conversations around disability,” she says.

…