Blind stuff I’ve been into lately:
Pretty obsessed with this video of Stevie Wonder singing using a Talk Box (synthetic speech turned into art) On that note, also the imaginary exhibition described in Chapter 2 of Jonathan Sterne’s Diminshed Faculties I keep hearing about Carmen Papalia’s Weather Warlock Recently tested out the DotPad, and have been looking at Christopher Correll and Chancey Fleet’s blind digital fabrication curricula Post-impressionist departures from normal vision H.G. Wells Country of the Blind
Me feeling the top of a sculpture with my cane. Hannah feeling a chair with a pool noodle in Baltimore (Chancey used the pool noodle as an analogy to the imprecise perception of atmospheric perspective, which I thought was quite brilliant.)
BDW released a Rhino-native version of BrailleGen (Braille Now’s Braille Generator) - keep on the lookout for screenreader tools for 3D modeling :-) (smile)
Research map: 1st generation accessible design and design methods movement interchange (and some 2nd generation critiques, interlocutors, revisions…)
And a photo from today doing some structured discovery and tactile “literacy” [still not sure about that term] and design work between Caroline, Lavender, and I.
Lavender Darcangelo created this reaction audio to a talk I gave at NFBMA: great example of good plain language: mature tone, knows exactly where to pause and what to explain, and was created from her authentic experience of trying to better understand the talk. I learned a ton from it.
Reading Audre Lorde’s “Poetry is Not a Luxury” from my bed, pausing when my eyes get tired, or I need to stop and think.
Had our first Blind Design Workshop pilot with students at Perkins today! Had a lot of fun creating a collective audio description and feeling the hollow stones in the Keller/Sullivan Courtyard! Perhaps I’ll share this at some point!
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.