Abler.

affinities: Graham Pullin

From an interview in Dwell magazine:
Why do you think so few designers take up issues of universal design, or designing for disability? Is it a question of money, knowledge, a failure of the imagination?
As we’re coming to money later, let’s talk about knowledge and imagination. Many of the designers I spoke with did feel inhibited [...]

affinities: eric gunther

Eric Gunther’s OrganOrgan. His description: “OrganOrgan is a modular multichannel vibrotactile surface. The surface is made of twelve independently driven low frequency transducers and conforms to the shape of the sitter. It is a platform for the composition of organized vibrations for the body. A tactile symphony of gentle waves, rough bumps, and sharp jabs [...]

affinities: JooYoun Paek

JooYoun Paek’s Polite Umbrella (see video!).

projects: international lab coat symbol (ongoing series)

I’ve started a collaborative, public project designed as interventions in medical office waiting rooms, and I’m looking for partners.

I’ve made these postcard drawings of lab coats, and I’d like collaborators to place a card in one of the magazines that sit in waiting rooms, leaving them for the next prospective patient.

The dynamics of what happens [...]

think aloud: happy accidents

From Mitchell Whitelaw’s Metacreation: Art and Artificial Life:
“New media art self-consciously reworks technology into culture, and rereads technology as culture. What’s more, it does so in a concrete, applied way; it manipulates the technology itself, with a nonindustrial latitude that admits misapplication and adaptation, rewiring and hacking, pseudofunctionality and accident. New media art also fractures [...]

projects: tools for historical imagination: jury duty

Tools for Historical Imagination: Jury Duty
Running Time: 7 min 35 sec
I’ve been interested in judicial service for a long time—the daunting responsibility of it, the chance to look inside the justice system, the human stories at the center of any case. After serving on a case in 2003, I couldn’t shake the feeling that somehow [...]

projects: search task

I’m collaborating with the Philosophical Psychology Lab at Gordon College, working with philosopher Brian Glenney on experiments with the vOICe, also known as the Seeing With Sound device. The tool utilizes a camera, embedded in a pair of glasses or goggles, and translates its intake into “readable” soundwaves through earphones—either assigning sounds to light and [...]

affinities: Lynn Bennett Carpenter

Lynn Bennett-Carpenter is a fiber artist based in Detroit. Her work is often interactive, often site-specific, and a number of pieces are wearable, neither proper clothing nor purely functional tools. I asked her specifically about pieces from her “Fittings” series, and from her “Elastic Experiment” works.

image description: two women in active poses, one appearing to [...]

projects: signage/wheelchair (ongoing series)

I rarely see this second image in use, but I was gratified to see it near the entrances and restrooms at MOMA when I visited this summer.