Capabilities Approach

Definition

The Capabilities Approach is Martha Nussbaum's social justice theory, linked by Hadjiyanni to Culturally Sensitive Design: "As a social justice theory, the Capabilities Approach asks: What is each person able to do and to be? In other words, the approach takes each person as an end, asking not just about the total or average well-being but about the opportunities available to each person. It is focused on choice or freedom, holding that the crucial good societies should be promoting for their people is a set of opportunities, or substantial freedoms, which people then may or may not exercise in action: the choice is theirs" (Nussbaum, Creating Capabilities, 2011, p. 18, quoted).

Hadjiyanni connects the approach to design on two fronts. As policy frame: "a shift in policymaking that includes measures of quality of life for a nation's residents among the indexes of prosperity, rather than relying simply on economic indicators such as the GDP." As design frame: the question "What is each person able to do and to be?" converts directly into the interior question — what can each person do and be in this room — making the washing ritual, the extended-family gathering, and the multilingual sign cases of "substantial freedoms" that a designed environment either enables or forecloses (bounded-choices is the foreclosure's name). The chapter grounds the approach's stakes in Minnesota's health disparities: health status linked to "housing conditions and access to healthy foods" — well-being as spatially distributed.

Key Thinkers

• Martha Nussbaum — the approach's philosopher: Creating Capabilities: The Human Development Approach (Harvard UP, 2011); "takes each person as an end"; not yet paged (see log).
• Tasoulla Hadjiyanni — the approach's design translation: "CSD is closely linked to the Capabilities Approach"; interiors as instruments for expanding "opportunities, or substantial freedoms."

Related Concepts

• Culturally Sensitive Design — the approach's design programme: flexibility and adaptability as the spatial form of "substantial freedoms."
• Bounded Choices — the approach's negative case: choices "bounded by limitations brought forward by the built environment" — the contraction of capabilities by design.
• Interiors as Global Constructs — the interior register of the approach: the designed room as the scale where capabilities are distributed.
• Ethics — the approach's philosophical family: virtue and happiness frames (Aristotle via Hadjiyanni) as the approach's alternative grounding.
• Housing — the approach's material site: affordable housing, health disparities, and the GDP-beyond policy shift.
• Practical Wisdom — the Aristotelian virtue frame that runs parallel to the approach in Hadjiyanni's chapter (happiness as "a virtuous activity of the soul").

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Interiors as global constructs (Hadjiyanni 2018) — the founding source: the Nussbaum quotation (p. 18); the "closely linked to the Capabilities Approach" claim; the quality-of-life-indexes policy shift; the "us" versus "them" refusal ("everyone benefits when resources, improvements, and opportunities are spread throughout all areas of a region").

Open Questions

• What would a capabilities list for interiors look like — Nussbaum's ten central capabilities translated into spatial parameters, or CSD's three translations (aisles, washing-ritual materials, signage) generalized into a checklist? Is such a list possible without re-essentializing the groups it serves?
• The approach takes "each person as an end" while design programs, budgets, and codes operate on aggregates — can a per-person capability standard be built into mass-produced housing, or is the tension structural?
• How does the approach relate to the wiki's Kantian universalism (universalism-vs-relativism) — Nussbaum's capabilities are universal in form, culturally inflected in content: is that the same dilemma Hadjiyanni's essentialism/constructivism divide poses?
• Does the approach give interior design a metric ("What is each person able to do and to be?" — measurable per person per room) that could make CSD falsifiable — and has any such measurement been attempted?