Jos Boys

Jos Boys is an architect, activist, educator, and writer. She was a founder member of Matrix Feminist Design Co-operative and co-author of their 1984 book Making Space: Women and the Man-Made Environment (Pluto Press 1984). Since 2008 she has been co-director of The DisOrdinary Architecture Project with disabled artist Zoe Partington, a disability-led platform that works with disabled artists to explore new ways to think about disability in architectural and design discourse and practice.
Her books Doing Disability Differently: an Alternative Handbook on Architecture, Dis/ability and Designing for Everyday Life (Routledge 2014) and Disability, Space, Architecture: A Reader (Routledge 2017) have become key texts in this field, with the latter called a "brilliant gathering of texts, both synthetic and surprising [that] should be taught in every architecture and design program, and may well become the new standard text for interdisciplinary disability studies courses generally" ("Susan Schweik, Professor of English and Disability Studies, UC Berkeley)."
She has given numerous international keynote talks, including at the Design Museum London (2019), Melbourne University School of Design (2019), University of Innsbruck (2019), Yale University School of Architecture (2018), Victoria and Albert Museum (2018), Aarhus University Copenhagen (2017), Architectural Association London (2016), University of the Arts, London (2016) and the Taylor Institute, University of Calgary (2016).
Jos has been a Visiting Professor at Ulster and London Metropolitan Universities, she is a Design Council Built Environment Expert (BEE) and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.
Career.
Jos Boys works at The Bartlett Faculty of Built Environment, University College London and is Course Director of the MSc in Learning Environments. Before that, she worked for over 10 years as an independent Learning Environment consultant and researcher; and has written extensively about the complex and often contested inter-relationships between pedagogies, academic development, institutional policy and strategies, facilities planning and management, and building design.  She has also worked as an educator in architecture and related disciplines across many institutions both in the UK and internationally, and as an academic developer and instructional designer. Underpinning this, as well as all her community-based design activism, is a particular interest in how to improve our understanding of everyday social, material and spatial practices, in support of the most disadvantaged in society. All her work explores how we can act across different perspectives and agendas to collaboratively discuss and improve built environments.
Jos Boys obtained her BSc at the Bartlett School UCL (then called the School of Environmental Studies) and has master's degrees in Advanced Architectural Studies (UCL 1981) and Photography (De Montfort University 2003). She obtained her PhD from the Faculty of Urban and Regional Studies, University of Reading entitled“ Concrete Visions? Examining inter-relationships between housing design, material practices and everyday life in England 1830 – 1980” in 2001. Originally training as an architectural journalist for Building Design magazine, she also undertook projects at the Greater London Council (GLC) writing guidance on Women and Planning; and at Women's Design Service where she was a development worker, with co-founders Vron Ware, Sue Cavanagh and Wendy Davis. Throughout her life Jos Boys has been involved with many feminist and related networks, including Cutting Edge, a cross-disciplinary feminist research group exploring new design technologies, based at the University of Westminster (1995 - 2001), and the feminist spatial practices group Taking Place (2000 - ).
Bibliography.
Jos Boys' research, writing and teaching is concerned with understanding the social construction of 'normal' architectural and design education and practices; and about co-developing alternative forms of producing built spaces that instead start from difference, from the perceptions and experiences of marginalised groups, whether in education or other spaces. There remains a lack of theoretical understanding as to how built space works, or its complex relationships to diverse occupation, whether for living, working or learning.  Boys' co-edited collections all aim to open up multiple perspectives and voices, so as to share approaches and attitudes; to critically reflect on different assumptions; and to work together to build better models for architecture as a discipline that based on social, spatial and material justice.
Disability and Architecture
Learning Environments
Feminism and Architecture