Ramps are an ancient technology. Ramps helped build the pyramids. Ramps make it possible to haul wheeled luggage around at the airport. Ramps are probably the most visible architectural consequence of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). Ramps make skateboarding more fun.

Ramps are so low tech as to be barely noticeable as a technology at all. Artist, designer, and academic Sara Hendren wants to re-enchant them, turning them into something that designers might notice again and begin to work with.

It’s part of Hendren’s larger aim to widen what people think about when we think about bodies and technology.

The sleeping machine

Written in 1600, Galileo’s Le Meccaniche defines and sets out a dynamic theory of six simple machines: the lever, the wheel and axle, the pulley, the wedge, the screw, and the inclined plane. Each provides a mechanical advantage, which amplifies force. The inclined plane, or ramp, seems like the odd one out.

Unlike its siblings, which must rotate or be used as an active tool to perform work, the plane lies still. It barely seems like a machine at all. “I’ve been calling it a ‘sleeping machine’ for that reason,” says Hendren, who focuses her work on disability studies. It’s “a static object, deceptive in its simple geometry.”

Right now, Hendren is really into ramps.

Hendren calls herself a public amateur. Her research and practice, documented on her website, is a riot of associations that cross the lines between high-end design, architecture, medical theory, prosthetics, and cybernetics. Spend some time with Hendren and you’ll find yourself in a conversation that veers wildly between fashionable hearing aids, Braille tattoos, the design of space suits, the relation of curb cuts to gentrification, and the origins of the smooth curves of the Eames Chair in the lacquered wooden leg splint that Charles and Ray designed for the US Navy.

Her own projects tend toward the informal and the temporary. She seeks out what she calls the margins of design: work that’s happening away from the spotlight of the mainstream tech and design press, “either because they’re made of low-cost materials, or in informally organized settings, or because they happen in the context of, say, special education.” Her low-tech approach allows her to intervene and launch discussions in graphic design, architecture, and prosthetics.

“All of these fields are professionalized for good reasons — standardization of practice and form,” she says. “But you can easily get some calcification around the ‘proper channels’ for the way things are done.”

“Defining what counts as health, as normative experience, as quality of life — these are easily as much cultural questions as they are about statistics and data,” she says. “I want the latitude, as an amateur, to also ask those questions in public, to engage with specialties as much as possible as an outsider.”