Assignment 3

”Normal”
Normal is an interesting word. In a sense, normal is considered to mean something repetitive, something recurrent. At the same time, normal is also a majority, a minimization of exceptions, something expected. Both the behavior and looks of a person can be normal. Opinions, beliefs, thoughts, actions… The list goes on. Normal is somehow considered to be good, be- cause normal can also be comforting in a sense. For many of us, normal is preferable – regardless of what we’re talking about.

But at the same time, normal has an opposite – abnormal. Something or someone can also be abnormal. Behavior, looks, opinions, beliefs, thoughts – and action all of them can be abnormal too.

But is abnormal automatically bad? Is abnormal something we should avoid, dislike or disregard, simply because it is the opposite of normal – something that we often consider ”good”?

If a person has ”normal” thoughts but looks different, is that person con- sidered to be normal or abnormal? Besides, who delivers the judgement or blessing of someone or something being labeled as abnormal or normal?

Stigmatization
In this assignment, I’ve decided to look closer to the stigmatization caused by hearing impairment. Hearing impairment, much like other impairment, has many different levels . Some can still hear and speak properly, some have a little trouble hearing and pronouncing things right and some can’t even have one single word heard or said. The main reason to why I will further examine stigmatization on hearing impairment is because I find it interesting to observe how not being able to speak and hear often is equated to being unintelligent. It doesn’t really matter if the person i question has trouble with the language or if he or she has any kind of impairment – not being able to communicate properly through speech will often lead to people perceiving you as – more or less – unintelligent.

Interestingly, hearing impairment (or even language troubles) doesn’t neces- sarily have anything to do with the cognitive ability. Placing an intelligent person in a country where he or she doesn’t know the language doesn’t make the person less intelligent, neither is a person with earplugs less in intelligent simply because he or she then would have more trouble while communicating. But why are we so quick to draw such a conclusion? Is a person unintelligent because I have to repeat myself or because he or she talks in a strange way?

Two (rather insulting) terms that come to mind when I’m thinking about the stigmatization of hearing impairment are ”deaf and dumb” and ”deaf-mute”.
The using of ”deaf and dumb” mainly started way back in the medieval English era where it was negative label pinned on the hearing impaired. It originates from Aristotle, the famous Greek philosopher, who said that ”deaf people were incapable of being taught, of learning and of reasoned thinking”. ”Deaf-mute” is also a term used to insult, originating form the 18-19th cen- tury, used to describe hearing impairment as silent without a voice (worthy of hearing), not too different from what Aristotle was expressing.

Clearly, hearing impairment’s stigmatization is far from a recent phenom- ena. To be honest, I don’t think that it somehow will fade out of existence either. But is it possible to use design and technology to minimize it, at least to begin with? Is it possible to broaden what we consider normal with the tools we have available now?

Design
There is no doubt that many of today’s tools are designed to simplify living with any kind of impairment. More and more communication is done by messaging through phones or social media, and that may have minimized the trouble of not being able to speak or hear.

There are also great supporting tools available today to support hearing impairment. The best and most used example of today’s technology is the classical hearing aid. It supports the user by amplifying the sound from outside simply to make it louder and, in some cases, also helps to filter sounds based on e.g. if it is background noise or speech. Most of today’s hearing aids are designed with minimalism in focus and don’t look much different from the regular earphones. Because of its great support and the fact that it is minimal in shape and size, the hearing aid stands out as a great example of how you can use design to minimize the stigmatization of hearing impairment. With it, the wearer would have less trouble in hearing or carrying a conversation and at the same time face less stigmatization as the aid visibility is low as well.

What if today’s hearing aid would resemble its origin, the ear trumpet, instead? Would that really impact the stigmatization?

Unfortunately, I honestly don’t think so. The ear trumpet is a lot bigger and clumsier tool to have or carry around. While it would help in the sense that it would support the user by amplifying the sound, but it would at the same time most likely be the source of stigmatization for other reasons too. A better example would be a wheelchair. It certainly helps as it can heavily support paralysis, muscular diseases or other physical impairments – but due to it’s size, limited usability and added clumsiness it might be- come another source of stigmatization itself by simply transferring the issue.

With the technology we have today, we both have and will certainly con- tinue to broaden the normality area though by – more or less – removing the reason for the stigmatization to begin with as much as we can. Some areas (e.g. physical impairments, cognitive impairments) are a bit tougher than others (e.g. hearing impairment, visual impairments), but far from impos- sible. It is just a matter of finding the balance between usability, support and minimal added negative impacts – providing a tool that is easy to use, helps and doesn’t negatively effect other part of the user’s life.

Assignment 2, The movie “Blind”

In the Korean movie Blind, the story revolves around Min Soo-Ah, a cadet at the police academy. After a car accident, she not only loses her brother, but also her own eyesight.
Due to the events around the crash and her brothers death, she is excluded from the academy, but her drive to work as an investigating police still lives strong in her.

After being the victim of an attempted kidnapping in a taxi and sensing what appears to be a hit and run case, she is taken in to the police station to inform the police of characteristics of the taxi driver. She isn’t taken seriously at first as she couldn’t see the driver, but as displays an ability to perceive other things even more clearly because of her vision impairment, the police gains enough confidence in her to actually give her a chance.

The movie is very entertaining and presents the notion of other abilities being heightened as she lost her vision in what I thought was a believable way.

There are some things thought that are left open for the viewer to interpret. For example, there is no mention of how she has adapted to her surroundings following the loss of vision. She seems to able to cope with her (rather recent) vision loss really good. Certain areas in the film, such as her mothers home, seems to be familiar to her to navigate in. Perhaps she has spend a lot of time in these areas, i.e. talking the walks she does in the film, and feels confident enough to walk what appears to be rather freely by heart.

This would in most cases be a presumably bigger issue in the case where a person has had a vision before and just recently lost it. The first reason for this is that when you’ve lived a life heavily depending on vision, you’ve accustomed your brain to always take the visual into the equation of what you do – be it navigating and walking around indoors or to do the same outdoors with a reasonable pace.
Being born with a visual impairment, or having lived with it a very long time, would reasonably likely play out in the sense that you would learn how to use your other senses to compensate for what you don’t have or have less of in vision.
Though it isn’t impossible, it is safe to say that she most likely wouldn’t have gotten used to (and actually even being confident enough to) use her other senses in that short of time enough to compensate for what she couldn’t see.

One very interesting thing inte movie was when she used the sonar-devices that vibrated when the sonar ping echoed back. I honestly didn’t know that such devices existed to begin with. Though I have seen some really interesting cases of what is called human echolocation – an ability to loudly click your tongue as a sonar to identify your surrounding based on how the sound echoes back. This is in fact is the very same sonar technique that bats use to navigate while flying, as their vision is poor. Though it seems to be taken straight out of a superhero-movie, but it’s most certainly real.

White path at the Central Station

Written by Babak Toghiani-Rizi and Bawer Calli.

Living a life without vision is hard to imagine. Being able to see is such a large part of our everyday life that many of us consider life without it useless. Thanks to our vision, we may spot potential dangers/threats, get emotionally moved by beautiful scenery or paintings and it helps us to communicate more efficiently. But what about people living with visual impairments?

The first pairwise exercise we got in this course was an attempt to raise our awareness of the difficulties blind people encounter on a daily basis. We were instructed to act out an everyday situation of someone living with with a visual impairment: To walk across the white paths on the train bridge without using your vision. The path is not only marked in white (so that everyone else can see it and, hopefully, leave the path free), but also has a certain structure to make it distinct so you can feel when you are walking along it.

We took turns standing on the path, closing our eyes and attempting to walk along it. What we noticed immediately was that the feeling of the paths’s structure is heavily dependent on what kind of shoes you wear. Shoes with thick soles (such as boots), makes it more difficult to actually know if you’re walking along the path or not as it’s way harder sense the difference in structure between the white path and the regular floor tiles.

Shoes with thin soles (such as sneakers) makes it much easier to feel that you’re walking along the right path.

We were at the station under, what we consider, optimal conditions. We were there during mid day when the station was mostly empty and we could conduct the experiment with almost no interference. We didn’t need to rush and we both wore sneakers and could clearly feel the structure of the path.

But if we would to imagine the worst possible case –  the station is crowded, you have shoes with thick and stiff soles and you are in a hurry – the experience would be totally different.

When the morning rush is underway people are usually in a hurry and less considerate towards their environment.  people are rushing past you in a hurry and you are trying to walk along the right path using just the soles of your feet to direct you.

There’s also a greater risk for accidents to occur. Stressed people who might not know what the path is for, or maybe just doesn’t care, can run into you.

We asked 10 randoms if they even knew what the white paths were used for, and only one of them knew. There is no visible information for people to learn what the path is for. If people do not know what the path is for, how can they then leave it free for blind people to use? How can people be more considerate towards people who might walk in a slower pace because they can’t see if they don’t know why the person is walking slowly? This is crucial information that has been left out and it needs to be fixed. There is also the issue that blind people might be unaware of the path’s existence.

Before we started this course we had no idea what the white path was for, and we’ve been living here for years, so we imagine that a lot of blind people are also unaware of it.

As we are not blind we don’t know how blind people perceive these tiles and the situations they face when trying to navigate through a stressful environment. We are told that when one of your senses is impaired, the other ones are heightened, so all we can do is hope that blind people really find these tiles helpful. In our most unprofessional opinion, we like the idea of the tiles but there are lots of improvements to be made. But as we’ve said, we were thrown into a situation we are not at all used to. Blind people have been walking around independently for a long time and are used to it. They might feel the tiles through thick or thin soles, they might be used to stressful people walking around them and bumping in to them from time to time, so we hope they can cope with it better than we can.

“I can still be who I am, I just do it sitting down”

– What’s the difference between being abled and disabled?

We have the tendency to mix the importance of some attributes in our lives. Legs, arms, vision or hearing are some of the things that many consider important. However, how important are they really? How about the ability to move, to communicate and to manage life without any of these?

Malcom Gladwell, a Canadian writer and journalist, discussed the topic of advantages of disadvantages in his book “David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants”. In the book, he brings up several examples of a number of people where disadvantages, such as cognitive impairment, ultimately forces the person to cope with life despite of that by developing a way around it, exploring new opportunities and finding new ways manage in their everyday lives.
He clearly states that there is no guarantee that any disadvantages may turn out as advantages, but for some people – for whatever reason – it has an advantageous outcome.

A usual misconception is that many take for granted that what we see is all there is – so to say that if we see a disabled person struggling to get in or out of a car, we often assumed that he or she would want our help. In the documentary, Barney Konoferesini clearly states that it might not be the case. The person struggling to get in our out of the car may have struggled with that for the 10th time that day, and maybe even 10 times a day – every single day. Offering help could in that case be interpreted as a reducing insult (i.e. “you need me”, “you can’t live life on your own”) depending on who received it.

The common denominator of the participants in the documentary is their attitude, in many ways making them appear more able than anything. The optimistic attitude they carry raises the question if the pessimism surrounding disabilities is more commonly coming from someone who is not disabled to begin with. From how it appears in the documentary, many of them are not just optimistic, but also focusing on entirely different things in life than disabilities, living normal lives. Some of them mention goals of becoming a recognised lawyer, others talk about enjoying fast car rides – none of them seem to be hindered by their respective disabilities – they have already accepted it and have found a way around it – but in our mind, have we?
Are we pulling the break by constantly pointing out the fact that they aren’t abled? Are we feeling sorry for them since we, ourselves, can’t imagine a life being complete without sight, vision, legs or arms?

There is a clear red line through the experiences of the subjects in this documentary has had with the public: the little knowledge the public has about living with disabilities. Some people think that disabilities are contagious, others don’t consider them actual humans because they visually look different from what we consider “normal”.
No matter how awful that is, I really don’t think that hate, anger or any actual disliking has any part of this. This is, as stated, simply the result of our lack of knowledge.

A lot of our years in elementary school has been spent learning the alphabet, math and science – but what about people?
And not just people as in anyone who’s sitting beside us in class, but people as in someone who lives and has a totally different life from our own. Getting to know someone (or something) outside of our own world would not only strengthen our experience, but also help us to better apply our understanding in our everyday life.
The more we would understand, the less we would fear.