Design Meets Disability
While reading the chapter from Graham Pullin’s book, I caught myself thinking about a recent case from my friend’s life – she is a student at Tandon, working on a project in collaboration with Langone Hospital. The theme of the project is development of products for accessible environment, specifically a belt that allows people with blindness to orient in space. My friend’s immediate suggestion was to move the sensors from the belt to hands, e.g. to gloves, so that calculation of the distance to objects was more precise – makes sense, right? However, her idea was met with criticism from the professor – she forgot about that very discretion.
“Our goal is to make sure that their limitation not only does not interfere with their lives, but also remains absolutely unnoticeable” – although I do understand the point of my friend’s professor, I would formulate this objective differently. From my understanding, discretion is not simply about hiding the product, but rather about its seamless integration into one’s life. Balancing both engineering and design aspects in one person’s mind is extremely complicated, since the “perfect” solutions in both categories of tasks can be mutually exclusive.
As a person who wears glasses and contacts, used to wear braces and orthopaedic insoles, I have been concerned with the image of such products since I was a child – when I was five, I refused to wear Birkenstock sandals because I was convinced that they were ugly, even though they were prescribed to me by a doctor. That fear of looking stupid and funny is relatable to many people, so I believe that there is a huge room for improvement in the field of design for disability.