Disability – Design and Society

Comparing Approaches to Assessment Fairness (and Deadline Extensions)

Exam arrangements have eaten a lot of my time this year: guiding a record number of students through deadline extensions processes; adapting exam modalities to make sure student with technical or broadband issues are able to present their work; encouraging students to seek assessment and exam arrangements to compensate for the toll the pandemic is having on their mental health or the abuse they face at home; and generally feeling that exam arrangements and deadline extensions processes are not up to the task of ensuring assessment fairness.

(I’m pretty sure I should state here that these views do not represent University of Sussex, the teaching team I am part of or my department and school, and that my examples are drawn from personal, colleagues’ and friends’ experiences that occur regularly and do not describe individual students)

Continuer la lecture

UX + Disability: A Syllabus

This article follows two posts on how to make disability a focus in the design curriculum: the first discussed my own experiments (and partial failures); the second outlined Cynthia Bennett’s advice for teaching disability design. She is a blind scholar specialist of participatory design with disabled people. Benjamin Gorman asked me if I had thoughts about the coursework and design of a computer sciences unit on Accessibility and Assistive Technologies. This is the curriculum I developed for such a unit for post-graduate students in UX design – but this could arguably be used or adapted to other courses on disability and design, or students of other levels. This is a course that was workshop intensive, and about 30 hours long. In terms of philosophy, I know well that I won’t be able to turn them into accessibility or disability experts. I thus aim at making them aware of the resources available, their moral duty to implement accessibility standards in any work they do and to equip them with the basic design and research skills needed.

Continuer la lecture

Our Lives and the Design of the Kitchen

Exploring how kitchen design shapes women’s and the family life (and how men strategically avoided to be expected to spend time there).

There are a number of topics I don’t research systematically but that come up regularly during my readings. I am trying a new post category, for now called Bites of Reading. These posts collects quotes or excerpts from different sources about a particular topic.

Continuer la lecture

Advice for Teaching Disability in Design

A few weeks ago, I published a few reflections on teaching disability design through design projects, as a teacher in both UX and product design degrees.

On Teaching Disability Design, Design Projects, and ‘Disability Dongles’

Folks from the disability design community took the time to discuss, comment and add to this discussion, for which I am very grateful. Cynthia Bennett (@clb5590) made further recommendations on Twitter. I thus invited her to write them up on this blog, so as to ease archiving and to dive a bit deeper in the issue.

Continuer la lecture

Organising a Special Interest Group at ACM CHI

I helped organising two Special Interest Groups during the 2019 edition of the Human-computer Interaction conference called CHI (pronounced “Kay”), in Glasgow. Here are a few thoughts and tips about SIGs and their organisation.

Continuer la lecture

Curious and Dangerous: Participatory Design Research and Identities

A summary of a recent article, co-authored with Dr Katta Spiel.

We, design practitioners and researchers, care a lot about our participants’ identity. We invite them to participate because they belong to a group – a company, a classroom, a labor union, a community. Or because of one of their characteristics – they are children or they are over 60s. We try bringing to the fore marginalised point of views. We care about how our participants enact their identity through materials and crafts. We are attentive to our roles in the participatory design activities, mirroring our attention to the roles taken by children or adult participants. We rarely, however, describe our characteristics as researchers and designers and how they affect this process. Nor do we examine how participants may reject the very characteristics or identity labels that led us to invite them to participate.

Continuer la lecture

On Teaching Disability Design, Design Projects, and ‘Disability Dongles’

Liz Jackson defines Disability Dongle as follows: “A well intended elegant, yet useless solution to a problem we never knew we had. Disability Dongles are most often conceived of and created in design schools and at IDEO.”

Irritation at design students making shiny mock-ups of disability-related products is often shared in the online disability community. For instance, Jocelyn Maffin lists wheelchair models proposed by design students that are either not usable or have very little chances to ever be produced. This creates frustration as, at best, these projects do “nothing for me but tantalize me with ideas in a product that will never be made“. In other words, student design projects addressing disability issues fail either because they fail to take into account users properly; because they do not consider structural accessibility issues hence create solutions to problems that should not exist in our current anti-discrimination legal framework; or because they participate to disability-washing marketing (of the self).

I am a design educator, now at University of Sussex, and I was previously organising design and disability workshops in schools such as ICAN and ESAD Reims. I have taught design and disability from a perspective of design history, ergonomics, to both product and UX designers, undergraduate and postgraduate students. Note that I use here disability design (which is also an expression I borrow from Liz Jackson), but I also use the expressions inclusive design, accessible design and universal design, depending on what works best in a given context — here’s the conveniently public Twitter discussion we had on this topic here.

I constantly question my teaching on this topic: in my relatively short career, I met no less than 17 students proposing ‘technologies to guide the blind.’ Depending on the fashion of the moment, these involve drones, robots or smart textiles. I tried a variety of other approaches to disability design projects, collaborative or at least participatory, which each create their own pitfalls.

Why design projects? Design projects are a cornerstone of design education. The ability to conduct an independent design project is in my experience a requirement for any design degrees. Before this, they usually conduct smaller-scale projects: projects demonstrating their understanding of ergonomics; redesigns of apps; design projects based on narrow briefs. The few thoughts below mostly addresses self-directed projects, starting at most from a broad brief given to the class. I hope it can help those interested in this topic. Let me know if you are doing something in this area that I should discuss in this article!

Partnering with a Disability Organisation or Designing for Individuals

I am a firm believer in Participatory Design. Partnering with a disability organisation should be a graal of disability design education, should it not? There are needs that can be met using design, just not necessarily the grandiose projects students initially envisioned.

This comes with a whole new set of difficulties. Disability organisations or disabled design partners come with their own briefs, and students help along. This is for instance what Lieven de Couvreur does in Belgium (and I absolutely love to see students projects there). Although the projects are quite different, I would also include the work done by Sara Hendren‘s students in this category. Except that, typically the end-product will be a prototype, will not be maintained, will sometimes fail to meet the expectations placed in them. In my experience, this results in fatigue: why collaborate with design students, if it means not being sure the final product be worth the effort? As a note, I have never been able to find a way to pay disabled design partners as experts.

From the students point-of-view, the issue is that the briefs they receive does not always match well the marking criteria. It may be considered “too simple,” not to have required enough research, or not having a significant enough market for the product to be viable. If faculty is not well trained on these issues, they can find themselves unable to adequately support students in defining alternative production and distribution means.

From my point-of-view, the key issue is maintenance and ensuring the projects will not be abandoned. This might mean that several generations of students will work on a similar brief, or repair past prototypes. This is great! But it can’t be a diploma project for instance. It is also extremely difficult to do without tenure or stability. The hope I have for UCL’s new MSc on Disability, Design and Innovation is that by focusing on long-term projects they will be able to conduct these kinds of projects.

Critical Disability Design

Another approach to teach disability design is either to propose projects more oriented towards critical design. Here I should acknowledge the work of Sara Hendren and Anne Galloway. These design projects question assumptions about disability and the shapes that disability objects should take, they “ask provocative questions.”

From an educator point-of-view, the risk is always that this type of project might be found insensitive to current accessibility and social challenges, or that it depoliticizes the topic. This has been a criticism of critical and speculative design in the past. I think of critical design as a form of satire, and of speculative design as poetic, provocative, or simply interesting explorations of alternative ways of living. But I agree it can become a way for designers to capitalize on the struggles of others. I never feel sure that I will know where that line is for everybody that might come across a given project. And in the past, I have seen my share of agressive answers to this type of projects. I do not know how to guide students through this, and find this anxiety-inducing. In the past, students have found this difficult to manage as well. I thus personally am wary of encouraging students taking this path.

Focusing on Accessibility

Teaching accessibility norms, although insufficient, is incredibly important. Having students conduct accessibility audits, at different levels of granularity. This is something that should be part of every User Experience (UX) tool and every UX program. When I say accessibility audit, I do not only refer to checking contrast and font-size, but also training students to conduct accessibility pre-studies and interviews. In another design discipline, Ann Heylighen pairs architecture and disabled students to do an accessibility audit of university buildings. Aimi Hamraie’s Mapping Access project seeks to use “mapping as a critical tool for iterative world-building,” broadening concerns for accessibility.

The problem being that whichever app or building these accessibility audits are conducted on do not necessarily act on that feedback. Which can be framed as a valuable lesson: it shows students how much advocacy is needed to improve accessibility in all areas. But as we are involving disabled design partners, this can become exhausting, with little perceived impact.

Providing a Design Brief based on my own Research

What I have been doing recently is making small briefs, grounded in my doctoral research, of design projects that I know will have impact and can be produced.

The issue is that I have a limited number of such briefs. These are based on four years of research. I can not produce the quality research that would be needed to generate even just, consistently, two or three briefs per year. And I can not expect from students to conduct that kind of extensive research even for a diploma project. It is the work required of a PhD…

What’s next?

I find myself in a precarious position: I believe school design projects are also here for students to explore “design spaces,” the possibilities of design, and that by accumulation and review, these may, sometimes, lead to viable products. Although we ask product and industrial designers to consider feasibility in theoretical terms… launching an actual product is something else entirely, requiring skills that students do not necessarily have and should not necessarily be expected to have (we are already asking a lot from them). Moreover, when conducting, admittedly limited, investigations in the design of disability objects, they learn things they would not have if disability had been an off-topic for the reasons mentioned above. They learn about adapted research methods, they have to use ergonomic data related to usability, they learn about the market for disability aids, etc. The fact their final product does not demonstrate mastery and full understanding of the challenges in this area is not, from a teacher point-of-view, always an issue. Their projects still show the development of the skills they will need and I think it is excellent they have a developing grasp of accessibility issues — I definitely did not when I graduated with a master in design.

This being said, I believe there are many other ways to include disability and disability studies in the curriculum other than through design projects that can quickly turn into disability dongles. Disability studies teachers using design (such as Aparna Nair) can help us figure it out. This will be the topic for another post! Ultimately, I do not think we can be teaching disability design well without changing the structures of design education and, probably, of design professions. The issue would be entirely different if more teachers had studied accessibility and disability, if more design students were disabled. The good thing is that there are lots of research and work to be done in this area!

Notes on More Than Meets the Eye: What Blindness Brings to Art

With policies and funding bodies encouraging museums to diversify their audiences and guarantee equal participation comes the question of how to design inclusive museums. Although this is not the motivation behind Kleege’s book, it offers insights about how to improve current approaches to accessibility in museums. Beyond insights for design, she builds a solid case for considering how social class shapes sensory experiences and ways of reflecting on these experiences, with a different angle from the previous literature on this topic. I presented this book to the SCHILab reading club. SCHILab explores how to build and use technologies using taste and smell, among other thing in the case of art. Here is an extended version of this presentation.

Kleege is a senior Lecturer at University of Berkeley. Her work often offers a critique of representations of blindness in movies, literature and art. This is the case of one chapter in this book, focusing on uses of braille in art. She also critiques cognitive sciences’ approach to blind cognition. She argues they are primarily rooted in the figure of the hypothetical Blind Man, the thought experiment particular popular with philosophers during the Enlightenment. It goes something like this: What if a blind man recovered sight? How would he connect his proprioceptive sensations to visual ones? Are concepts acquired through non-visual means the same as those acquired using visual representations? Kleege contests these are the right questions to ask:

Scientists are using pictures as an indication of cognitive capacities and conceptualization skills. [They] think of pictures as techniques of representing three-dimensional reality on a two dimensional plane, with a history and an array of conventions. While it is nice that science has shown that blind people can learn to interpret some standard conventions of drawing, I’m not sure it proves that the drawings they learn to interpret or to make are necessarily an unmediated representation of their own concepts about reality. […] These research subjects […] build new theories about human consciousness in general [not theories to understand blind people in particular].

Beyond her questioning of the results obtained in this way, she points out how little the pictures made accessible, in this case tactile, can help understand art:

A raised-line rendering might help a blind person appreciate the bold drawing and skewed perspective of an Henri Matisse, but it would seem an inadequate reproduction of work by Mark Rothko or Jackson Pollock.

Yet,

Too often, programmers assume that the point of tactile exploration is to recognize forms through tracing their outlines, as if viewing a work of art were merely a matter of identifying the objects depicted.

What would be preferable then?

Here’s another thought experiment. If we imagine, after the fashion of H.G. Wells short story, “The Country of the Blind,” a culture where everyone was born without sight, would they develop a tradition of tactile picture making? […] Wouldn’t it be more likely that these blind people would devise a system of symbols to record tactile features of objects beyond their contours such as texture, temperature, volume, and weight? […] and would these pictures be recognizable to a sighted viewer?

So Kleege discusses her own experiences with visits dedicated to visually impaired visitors. She talks us through various adapted representations she has met in various museums over the years. She focuses on audioguides in the later chapters. She discusses Diderot’s lively descriptions of art salons, arguing they are the result of his acquaintance and conversations with Melanie de Salignac, a young blind lady. She also proposes to consider ekphrasis, poetry written about the art, as a design principle for future designs. In other words, she invites sighted scholar to consider what visually impaired people might teach them, instead of only considering how to do the reverse.

Kleege’s book is a useful reminder that there is no perfect answer as to what makes the museum accessible. It is not only about making high quality tactile picture of a few paintings (as she saw at the Prado). It might be about having reproductions at different scales, representations with different levels of granularity, sample of the materials used… The list goes on. Sometimes, it might be a different kind of experience entirely: she suggests “the best way to appreciate a cathedral is to climb its tower.” Not for the view but for the embodied experience of climbing the steps and feeling the walls and the height of that building.

Scale models and plaster casts have their drawbacks. While a scale model can convey a sculpture’s overall form, it cannot replicate the proprioceptive experience of standing before a monumental work. The casts of the Parthenon frieze were made before the marbles were transported to England, and so preserve a record of some portions of the originals that were damages en route. But plaster has a slick, artificial feel with little in common with the cool pleasure of natural stone.
p. 61

She also demonstrates the value of theories of multimodality. She uses the concept of translation (Kress discusses braille as a transduction):

In my head, I was trying to work out how the would have translated these sensations into the necessary eye-to-hand instructions that would allow him to draft a similarly abstracted portrait on canvas. I scanned my memories for some sort of similar experience. All I could come up with was a memory of the difficult mental exercise required when I first learned to type Braille on a Perkins Brailler. […] I said some of this to my docent, attempting to articulate this idea about translation. In the case of my learning to type Braille, it was translating from the horizontal to the vertical. For Matisse, it was the more complex task of translating these three-dimensional forms to two dimensional images. My docent and I had a brief, rather esoteric, discussion of tactile versus visual perception. […] Keller’s description of tactile eloquence emphasizes variety, perhaps even disorder. The point is always made that touch is sequential while vision is comprehensive and instantaneous. […] I refuted this, showing my docent how I could wrap my palms and fingers over and around considerable chunks of the form. My point was that my haptic exploration was not merely to trace the form’s outline with my fingertips but rather to envelop the three-dimensional volumes with my palms and fingers.

Jeannette I-V, by Matisse. The picture, in black and white, depicts five busts. The first, on the left, is realistic, and each bust becomes more and more abstract.

In describing her experiences of museums, Kleege troubles external descriptions of blind phenomenological experiences, and “blindness as a monolithic experience.” She insists that “in defining [her] blind identity, the degree of sight loss is only one of many factors. It is equally significant to consider age of onset and what we might call visual interest or literacy. The simple binary–blindness versus sightedness–is not adequate [when considering experiences of visual arts]” (p. 7).

This book should be of interest beyond sensory studies scholars and museum trying to become more inclusive. Continuing a discussion present in Sight unseen, Kleege highlights how social class and its associated cultural practices shape one’s sensory knowledge:

In Poor miss Finch, a similar connection is drawn between the ability to talk about visual beauty and class differences. Lucilla is accustomed to have the natural world described to her, but she laments that her servant is less adept at the practice, suggesting that these values have as much to do with education and background as with vision alone.
p. 89

She proceeds to demonstrate museums attempt to transmit these cultural practices to children, audioguides being designed to lead their sight in rooms and pictures and encourage reflexivity. They however tend to deny their blind visitors have, or can develop, this knowledge. Audioguides for blind visitors emphasize a stationary, passive vantage point. They describe artworks following a grid instead of dynamically: whereas sight might jump from an object to another, provide a general impression before enabling to examine details, blind visitors are supposed to only be interested in factual descriptions. This participates of their exclusion from cultural practices and museums. Other ways of doing are possible, and more importantly, desirable.

Reference: More than Meets the Eye: What Blindness Brings to Art, Georgina Kleege, Oxford University Press, 2018.