“I am, rather, an impresario of scientists.”

“I am, rather, an impresario of scientists.”

Stefany Anne Goldberg examines Jacques Cousteau’s life of exploration and discovers a big dreamer.
Cousteau was a storyteller, and only able to gather support for his projects as long as he was able to ignite the interest of collaborators. “I am not a scientist,” Cousteau told The Christian Science Monitor in 1986. “I am, rather, an [...]

read more

affinities: rebecca horn’s ‘finger gloves’

affinities: rebecca horn’s ‘finger gloves’

Rebecca Horn’s Finger Gloves, from 1974. I’ve included a video of the gloves in action below; you only need to watch the beginning to get a sense for how they work.
In Barcelona as a young artist in the early 1960s, Horn was working with glass fiber without a mask. Unaware of any harm, Horn used [...]

read more

not Luddite but ludic

not Luddite but ludic

I wanted to revisit Svetlana Boym’s work on broken-tech art; here’s more from her essay and its relevance for the work here at Abler.
**************
Svetlana Boym’s Off-Modern Manifesto describes her interest in “broken-tech art”—and this is very much at the heart of my collaborative work on sensory substitution with Brian Glenney:
“Technology, we are told, is wholly [...]

read more

Adaptation, Part III: Art as Research (Braille tattoos! Socially-adept handbags!)

Adaptation, Part III: Art as Research (Braille tattoos! Socially-adept handbags!)

Read Part I of this essay here, and Part II here.
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 [...]

read more

projects: signage/wheelchair (ongoing series)

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.
03/28/10: Found the newer image in use at Marshalls, in a shopping plaza here in Cambridge. Bargain-basement prices AND evolved design sense:

read more

projects: signage/wheelchair (ongoing series)

projects: signage/wheelchair (ongoing series)

A first intervention:

read more

Adaptation, Part II: hearing aid jewelry, chairs that give hugs, and the art of changing the question.

Adaptation, Part II: hearing aid jewelry, chairs that give hugs, and the art of changing the question.

In Part I of this series, I wrote about the still-new territory that is true adaptive design. As shown in the case of the Eames chairs, we’ve only begun to explore the aesthetic-and-engineering innovations that may shift our cultural ideas about ability and disability, independence and dependence, normalcy and variation.
Let me point to some exciting [...]

read more

Adaptation, Part I: How the Eames chair came from leg splints, and why “disability studies” isn’t just identity politics

Adaptation, Part I: How the Eames chair came from leg splints, and why “disability studies” isn’t just identity politics

In 1941, the husband-and-wife design team, Charles and Ray Eames, were commissioned by the US Navy to design a lightweight splint for wounded soldiers to get them out of the field more securely. Metal splints of that period weren’t secure enough to hold the leg still, causing unnecessary death from gangrene or shock, blood loss, [...]

read more

affinities: Graham Pullin

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 [...]

read more