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. 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 and Disability, Space, Architecture: A Reader have become key texts in this field, with the latter called a "brilliant gathering of texts, both synthetic and surprising should be taught in every architecture and design program, and may well become the new standard text for interdisciplinary disability studies courses generally".'' She has given numerous international keynote talks, including at the Design Museum London, Melbourne University School of Design, University of Innsbruck, Yale University School of Architecture, Victoria and Albert Museum, Aarhus University Copenhagen, Architectural Association London, University of the Arts, London and the Taylor Institute, University of Calgary. Jos has been a Visiting Professor at Ulster and London Metropolitan Universities, she is a Design Council Built Environment Expert 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 and has Masters Degrees in Advanced Architectural Studies and Photography. 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 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, and the feminist spatial practices group Taking Place.
Selected Projects
Matrix Open Feminist Architecture Archive : an online learning resource that brings together archival resources from 1980s London, projected to explore the complex relationships between different kinds of bodies, spaces and architecture.
Architecture Beyond Sight : the co-design, development and implementation of an architecture foundation study course for blind and visually impaired people
Disabled Artists Making Dis/Ordinary Spaces : a series of innovative and provocative collaborations between disabled artists and built environment educators across 10 architecture, interior and built environment courses across England..
A Sense of Place: developing audio-descriptions of buildings and objects for blind and visually impaired people as part of RIBA Architecture Week and the London Festival of Architecture ; in collaboration with University of Brighton and VocalEyes.
