Had a nice trip to New York visiting friends and a few fun disability-related hangouts, a long breakfast with Alice Sheppard nerding out about disability arts, a visit to Adaptive Design Association looking at their makerspace, and a lovely meeting with Joel Sanders and Seb Choe of JSA/MIXDesign.
Conversation post BDW exercise at Perkins dormitories
Cardboard map, with bump dots mapping the exterior HVAC sounds at the Perkins dormitories by the lower school.
Haven’t complained in a while! Just haven’t had the energy, unfortunately. But here is a quick (and somewhat lazy) one sent to York’s accessibility office about their course registration website. I really wish light-sensitivity was better covered in WCAG, but that’s a complaint for another time…
Photo of Karina and I measuring a wall at Walden Pond for a nonvisual design exercise on drawing a building’s footprint
From Viriginia Woolf: A Room of One’s Own:
“So I went back to my inn, and as I walked through the dark streets I pondered this and that, as one does at the end of the day’s work. I pondered why it was that Mrs Seton had no money to leave us; and what effect poverty has on the mind; and what effect wealth has on the mind; and I thought of the queer old gentlemen I had seen that morning with tufts of fur upon their shoulders; and I remembered how if one whistled one of them ran; and I thought of the organ booming in the chapel and of the shut doors of the library; and I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse perhaps to be locked in; and, thinking of the safety and prosperity of the one sex and of the poverty and insecurity of the other and of the effect of tradition and of the lack of tradition upon the mind of a writer, I thought at last that it was time to roll up the crumpled skin of the day, with its arguments and its impressions and its anger and its laughter, and cast it into the hedge. A thousand stars were flashing across the blue wastes of the sky. One seemed alone with an inscrutable society.”
Months after listening I am still thinking about this interview with Kenneth Frampton. I’ve never heard him mention disability, but I think like it contains all the pieces needed to move from an architecture that merely comes from blindness to a politicized blind architecture.
This week’s notes on the conceptual framwork for the house
Charlotte’s two drawings for a house at Perkins. Still some guts and service missing and some changes coming but we are very feeling a lot of excitement and momentum, which is great. So appreciate her as a collaborator :-)
Quick diagram of metric (top) vs. imperial (bottom) standard architectural scales. Was interested in understanding how these scales are determined in order to develop an architectural scale set for tactile plans, which in my experience need to be much bigger to be legible with the same level of detail.
Old drawing from 2016, and some notes on it
I’m still so obsessed with the synthetic speech and gregorian chant in Toshi Ishiyanagi’s Music for Living Space, and its implications for the artful use of screen readers and synthetic speech.
A list of a few things that I’ve been interested in recently.
- Met Marco Salsiccia and found his BlindSVG generator and lots of other cool materials on his website
- Andrew Stone showed me KnowHow Shop’s ceramics studio for the blind ceramicist Don Katz, which used 1:1 prototypes of construction details as the primary design method
- In that vein, I enjoyed Abraham Cruz Villegas Art21 short on Autoconstrucción, a direct construction practice based on self-built architecture in Mexico City
- One of my favorite artists, Lenka Clayton, was in the recent Human Nature episode of Art21
- Have been designing wall sections for the hosue at Perkins, and thus revisiting Andrea Deplazes
- Some of the work of Rael San Fratello has some tactile interest
- Have loved picking through the reading list on Life, Nature, Time, Community & Happiness at the end of Samin Nosrat’s cookbook Good Things, and oppositely, have just started Misery Meals
- A conversation with Lavendar Darcangelo has me revisiting plain language, and thinking about the tension in Crip Authorship between Mel Y. Chen’s “to hell with accessible writing” piece and Kelsey Acton’s plain language manifesto
- Blood in the Machine by Brian Merchant has been interesting
- Have almost finished Paul Fry’s open course on Literary Theory. It’s almost fifteen years old, but the final four lectures have been immensely helpful in grounding some ambivalence I’ve been feeling around disability as identity
Have also divested from a few things:
- Have replaced google search with Kagi (weird politics, horrible accessibility backslide, and nonconsensual AI is getting to be too much.) You’re next GMail!
- Also shifting out of Adobe into free and open source programs like GIMP, Krita, and Typest.
- Still love Rhino, and vibe-coding actually lets me bypass huge parts of the visual interface, have been talking with their developer team about making it more blind-friendly. May be pretty close to a totally nonvisual 3D modeling workflow there.
- I’m waiting for the Microsoft divestments to feel possible. Maybe I should just jump ship and start using EMacSpeak? The surveillance technology in Gaza is sickening.
- Have not boycotted OpenAI, like everyone else in academia seems to be doing these days, but there’s definitely a lot of ambivalence there. More in this in the future.
Origami sailboat from a blindfolded origami workshop. My table neighbor said the backside of the paper felt shiny. To me it also felt waxy, like there was sealant on the boat, vs the rough papery sails.
