Personal Reflection

Personally, midterm critique reviews helped me think upon a few points which I was previously unaware of, one of them being building a trustworthy relationship with the community and how important it is to get the vision impaired to trust us completely before we get them to try any solution developed by someone. Also, instead of jumping in as a fresher and start designing for the visually impaired, it’d be a rather helpful and better to collaborate with designers already researching and working on accessibility issues for the vision impaired.

I researched on people working in this field and came across Chris Downey’s contribution towards having an enriching environment for the visually impaired. His projects range from rehabilitation to cultural centers, reflect his 20 years of traditional sighted architectural experience and ongoing practice since losing sight in 2008. Chris also serves on the California Commission on Disability Access, teaches at UC Berkeley, and speaks internationally. Reading about his works instantly linked to the reading “Changing Perspective” by Stuart Silverstein on how looking like a blind person changes our perspective on how we view things and how our perspective matters in designing.

I would also like to highlight another thing brought up by Anna, “I wonder if part of your prototyping can be thinking about interviews and what those questions would be for different people.” It makes me think about how I can have more rigorous research and preparing a questionnaire for asking vision-impaired people on specifics of my research topic. This will also help me further funnel the problems and have a more precise look at my research. The process from critiques to analyzing the feedback gave me a more transparent look at how can I proceed in the prototyping phase. While analysis and reviewing my research until now, I also came across the fact that many people consider visual impairment as getting blind and aren’t aware of multiple cases of vision impairment. It was interesting to see this thing getting highlighted. It can also be a significant problem that would be interesting to address how to design for people with different vision impairments.

Looking at Christin Sun Kim’s work showcasing about navigating a visually impaired through a band playing different notes portraying a special symbol to the visually impaired who was being steered in a space. Her other works also interested me, one of them being Seeing Voice, though it didn’t deal with vision impairment with the deaf and how they see the world. Apart from this, I also looked up Georgia Tech Sonification Lab and their work on Auditory displays (using sound to relay different kinds of information). It was impressive to see how data was analyzed and communicated through sound. I was opposing the use of sound entirely before, but looking through this and a few other examples I have a shifted opinion to use of sound but in a way that does not hinder a vision impaired’s listening ability, since, it is an ability which generally becomes more sensitive after loss of sight.

Before presentations, I was focused more on creating a technical product and not looking for other factors that can help me illustrate or solve the problem. Post presentations, I am also exploring the possibility of designing non-technical solutions for the problem I am addressing. Apart from this, I felt I am still very broad about the research I am continuing and need to bottleneck my topic even further.