Vasilis’ nerd blog presents
Today I received the sad, sad news that Marijn Meijles has died. Marijn was a fantastic human being and I will miss him.
I met Marijn years ago when I started writing for a dutch niche weblog. He was one of the other writers there. We used to chat on IRC. What used to strike me in his chats was his very precise wording, and his complete lack of haste. Which is exactly the opposite of how people (used to) behave on IRC: answer as quickly as possible, and just talk a lot. Not Marijn. Later, when I met him in real life I understood that this contemplative behaviour was a result of his severe motor impairment (which he refused to call an impairment). Typing took a lot of time, so he thought hard about his sentences before he typed them: is there a more concise way to say this? He told me later that this was also the reason why he was such a good programmer. He optimised his code before he started typing.
More people should do this.
When I worked on my Exclusive Design project Marijn played a very important role in turning it into a success. I organised quite some workshops back then where I asked designers to design something for Marijn. This could either be a possible improvement to travelling by train, for instance. But he especially loved the assignments where the participants had to make stuff even worse: how do you design an even less accessible way to travel by train. When I was asked a few years ago to take part in a large social design workshop about inclusivity, that was hosted in an inaccessible location, Marijn immediately agreed to cooperate. It turned out to be a very powerful workshop where we had to carry him to the workshop location and move him around without his wheelchair, which was too heavy to lift. The participants and the organisers will never forget this event. His fantastic sense of humor played a big part in its success.
Marijn would come over to my university every now and then to test some of the tailor made prototypes my students would make for him. This started as one of the research interventions for my master programme, but later on when these prototyping sessions turned into a full course, Marijn kept on participating. He would test the prototypes patiently, giving constructive and very well informed feedback. Open to experiment, but also always critical, with a devious pleasure to find bugs in their software: He would immediately stress test date pickers with impossible dates like 30 February for instance. And after class he would often have a few beers with my students.
Marijn told me once that I shouldn’t ask him to participate in these workshops, I should ask people with a real disability.
He had a family with two kids, and he had a very busy job as the expert on the field of metadata for music, he simply didn’t have the time to be disabled, he said.
I’ll miss you, Marijn.