Two constellation drawings experimenting with high and low contrast

Points on a map, circled stars, floating symbols, all in the deepest darkest night. Points on a map, circles and lines, all the hazy background of the collective light of many tiny stars.

Showed a book by Irma Boom to low vision specialist today. There’s no table of contents. Page numbers are everywhere. Some of the text is less the 4pt, printed in orange or red or blue or even yellow. In some ways, the perfect book to read with assistive technology :-)

Test joint on the CNC. Taking something, even a small test like this, from idea to material always reveals so much.

My hand is holding a wooden block with a notched design. I'm outside, on my walk home from the shop.

Image that popped into my head in the shower today representing the fantasy of standardization. Maybe future iterations will come that clarify it. We’ll see.

A grid with dots. at the top the dots are floating around. At the bottom they're increasingly locked into a grid. People often describe accessibility as the "floor" on which other standards build on (the bottom of the grid), but Increasingly I feel the division between standards and experiments is, in my mind, artificial. Code-compliance people and experimental people rely on each other. We're frenemies, I guess.

Soft and hard light effects on double-screened window.

Hard, wavy lines of light on a fitted flannel sheet pulled loosely over a window frame. Bits of scratchy cloth texture catch bits of shadow. Light from slatted blinds curl across the fabric, like the hard shadow lines left by a rake pulled through white sand.Soft, wavy lines of light on a fitted flannel sheet pulled loosely over a window frame. A warm, soft, cloth balloon. The room is cold. Light peeks through the slatted blinds, leaving lines of light to curl across the fabric.

Little joint test for a piece of knock-down furniture. Let’s see how it goes :-)

Thinking about the politics of scale-figure libraries today as I prepare this exercise. A few initial notes as an introduction to the topic. Will revise at some point.

Some notes on disability aesthetics

Quick image collection on the theme of “Dark Mode”

Showed this work yesterday while co-presenting with Hannah Wong at the ABLE Assembly (Berklee College of Music). When I started making tactile drawings a few years ago, I had a really hard time getting people to touch them in architecture reviews. This was probably partly because I was still making “visual things you can touch” rather than truly tactile artworks.

One strategy I came up with to remediate this was to start etching my drawings on glass. It reminded me of something that happened in my first architecture course. Everyone was encouraged to draw with extremely light, delicate lines. The argument went something like: If you draw with really light lines, people have to get closer to see your drawings. Your drawings moves people in physical space, and that’s powerful.

I was unconvinced. Part of the reason was probably that I couldn’t see these drawings even if I was very close. But when I made my first invisible drawing, I kind of got it. There is something powerful about a drawing that subverts you expectations and coaxes you to use your body in a different way. There’s also something interesting to me about a drawing that no one can see… Rather than helping blind people see, the tactile art becomes about helping sighted people to not see. Still have so far to go with these… they are really just scratching the surface of what tactile can be.

A hand touching a piece of plexiglass mounted on a white surface. We can see the faint impression of a white on white drawing, partly because the hand is casting a shadow through the drawing. The photo is black and white, and the hand has the middle finger pressed down onto the drawing on the surface of the glass.

Saw these on the Instagram of Boston Architectural College a few months ago…

A person with long hair stands outdoors, touching a textured wall, with a palm tree visible in the background.A person wearing a black and white striped sweater is touching a pillar inside a large, ornate building with colorful stained glass windows.A person wearing headphones is touching two colorful, textured columns with a humorous caption about design students above.

New email to NAAB sent after our listening session

Thinking today of this quote from the first Disability Meets Architecture episode we did. It’s a quote from Karen Braitmayer:

_“One of the things I do is talk a lot about how we need to encourage young people with disabilities who have an interest in design to come join the design field. There are too many people down the food chain in a student’s life who say “oh, architecture, I don’t think you can do that, because… maybe you can’t climb a ladder… or your fine motor skills…” If there’s anybody listening out there who has had someone say to them “I don’t think you can be a designer,” just come talk to me [laughs].There are lots of ways to go around all those supposed “barriers” so that you can contribute. I think design is about having great ideas, and getting them down in a way that somebody can build it, and we need more people who understand different aspects of the world to engage in that process.” _

Now we’re getting somewhere.

Bzz beezzz bop fssshhh poppoppop glowy zzt psst fizzle glish glish

February: our first field recording for a house at Perkins. Audio quality is not great, but it brings me back; chatting with Charlotte, discovering the road and the water, rushing water at the dam, and the clucks and honks of geese echoing in the open air over the frozen river.

Transcript

Little experiment with blur and pixelation together

Honestly, who knows...

Created this resource list for the class I just spoke to. I remember just four years ago I spent so much time trying to figure out how to connect architecture and disability. Now the connections seem so clear and abundant. Feeling grateful for everyone whose work taught me to make them.

Showed this photo in a presentation today on critical access and disability aesthetics for Nima Javidi’s class “Forms of Accessibility” at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. It’s a fragment of a concrete map from my thesis project, with holes representing moments of absence in the existing city. The cast is fragile, so as you run your hand over the map it is wiped away, creating an imperceptible tactile surface with only the moment of absence remaining.

An image of two hands holding a concrete panel with a white hole in it. The panel is cast concrete and the hole is 3D printed, like a trunacated cone inset into the material. There is a rough bitmap texture etched into the concrete but it looks very fragile and irregular, like the image could be wiped away at any moment. And you can see a bitmap of the city and a subway line. it's a map of a piece of the San Francisco Bay Area, and the map depicts imagined futures / moments of absence and desire for the city.

Great first day at the National Federation for the Blind Conference with Hannah Wong, promoting a new pre-college architecture program for blind students. Learn more at BDWBoston.com

A photograph of Hannah, a Chinese-American woman with Albinism wearing all black and standing at a tactile table. She is gesturing with her arms towards a set of tactile architecture models and a lump of unsculpted air-dry clay for a co-designed architecture model we will be making tomorrow.

Unfriendly complaint to Apple from today.