I finally visited London. I have been to many cities around London — Brighton, Birmingham, Cambridge, Oxford — but this was the first time I actually visited the city itself. We went there on a semi-organised trip with my fellow students (and teachers) from the Master Design course in Rotterdam. The idea was that you should organise your own schedule and, if possible, invite others to join the activities you organised. I visited three different agencies in three completely different offices. One owned a complete building overlooking the Thames. Another had a few rooms in an enormous palace. The first office we visited reminded us of an apartment in Amsterdam. Not too big, not very small, with 50 people working in it.

Sounds cozy

Today we did an exercise with so called conversation pieces. Together with my fellow student Barend Onneweer we did an assignment about valuing valued objects. And this assignment was in itself a conversation piece created by Irma Földényi. Again, it was much fun to do, very insightful, and I need to learn how to use this for my own research.

Yes, indeed

I visited this wonderful workshop in which Andrea Stultiens told us about a project she’s been working on. In this project she asked artists in Uganda to make their own representation of this photo. This resulted in some incredible works of art. Some of those works were easy to misplace with our western background — for instance, I saw influences of Picasso, where there really were none — and others were a bit harder to understand without context. But luckily for us we had Andrea who gave us this context.

There’s more

There are things we need to use. We really have to. Things like tax return forms which are mandatory. Or things like webshops. Not mandatory, but often necessary. I wouldn’t know where to buy Sugru if I couldn’t order it online, for instance. For more and more things we depend on the web. Good usability and accessibility is important, especially in these cases. But this is not always the case. In this document I’m trying to figure out the different aspects of why people need to use things. It has a similar structure as the one I wrote about why people want to create stuff, which is from a maker’s perspective. Here I’ll look at things from a user’s view.

Users are important

Sometimes very simple design decisions have unforeseen complex consequences. For instance, it could make sense to design an on/of switch, in order to toggle certain settings on a website. Designing such a control visually can be done within a minute.

Then what’s the problem?

If I want to improve the awareness of accessibility and inclusive design, I think one of the things I need to do is trying to get an understanding of the different reasons why different designers want to make things. Why did they choose a creative job, instead of whatever else there is. Why did they decide to design stuff for others, and not, for instance, decide to become an artist?

Good question!

Today I created conversation pieces that emulate a disability. At first I tried to manipulate my Mac: every few seconds the tracking speed was toggled between super fast and super slow. And the scroll direction toggled between natural and old fashioned. The people who tried to control my Mac didn’t feel disabled though. They simply thought my Mac was broken.

So what did you create?

I went to a few meetups about accessibility recently. They were about quite a few different subjects, which shows that accessibility is a complex field of design, and not a bug list for developers. There were talks about designing for people on the autistic spectrum, for Deaf people, for deaf people, for blind people and people with poor eyesight, for people who suffered a stroke, and more. I asked most of the speakers if they have an idea why so much stuff is inaccessible.

And what did they say?

On the 10th Infographic Conference in Zeist in the Netherlands I saw a talk by Lysanne de Water about a prototype of an app she made for life after a stroke. A very informative talk filled with understanding of the complex issues that people have to cope with after such a life changing event like a stroke.

That’s interesting

For the course Critical Reading I was asked to read five articles about Critical Design critically. During class we analysed these articles further and discussed them. Together with two fellow students we discussed three articles in detail, where we each tried to defend the author’s position. Now, the next assignment is this blog post you are reading right now in which I’ll try to explain my own opinion on Critical Design. In short: I don’t think it should be the only school of design.

Explain

Yesterday I followed a course in critical reading. It’s a method for not just reading texts with a critical mindset, but it helps you placing the text in a wider context. It’s about analysing a text to find out what it says, what it does, and what it means. At the beginning of the course I thought this was something I always do. During class I found out that this is not really true.

Explain

Last week I tried to publish an overview of my research as an interactive outline. This does not work as well as it should. To be honest, it’s almost impossible to use: It’s hard to see connections, it’s hard to spot the complex areas, it’s hard to see patterns. Hanneke Briër, one of my teachers rightly asked me to make a visual version of this map.

What does it look like?

Yesterday Niko Spelbrink explained to me why people want to create award winning stuff that’s not necessarily useful. There’s even a name for this kind of design: it’s called striping. It stands for the extra stripes on your BMW.

Do we still have stripes?

This week I gained some very interesting new insights into accessibility. I learned two things I didn’t know yet. The first one is incredible: It turns out that (some) blind people can see. They have no eyes, yet they can see well enough to ride a bike. And according to these people, the reason why blind people can’t see has a cultural reason. They can’t see because we’re over protective, and because we won’t let them use echo location. It’s the most incredible podcast I’ve heard in a long time.

What’s the other thing?