Design Meets Disability (II): On Eyewear and Hearwear.

... a follow-up posting with a few more excerpts from the highly interesting chapter "fashion meets discretion" in the highly interesting book "design meets disability" ... excerpts that focus on the development of glasses from "medical necessity" to fashion statement and compare this trend with the status and stigma of hearing aids. Generally, the latter are "developed within a more traditional culture of design for disability". There are, however, some designers celebrating deafness by creating high fashion hearing aids, for instance here and here and here.

glasses

Glasses or spectacles are frequently held up as an exemplar of design for disability. the very fact that mild visual impairment is not commonly considered to be a disability, is taken as a sign o fthe success of eyeglasses. But this has not always been the case: Joanne Lewis has charted their progress from medical product to fashion accessory. In the 1930s in Britain, National Health Service spectacles were classified as medical appliances, and their wearers as patients. It was dictated that "medical products should not be styled." At that time, glasses were considered to cause social humiliation, yet the health service maintained that its glasses should not be "styled" but only "adquate". In the 1970s, the British Government acknowledged the importance of styling, but maintained a medical model for its own National Health Service spectacles in order to limit the demand. In the meantime, a few manufacturers were offering fashionable glasses to consumers who could afford them. As recently as 1991, the design press declared that "eyglasses have become stylish."

These days, fashionable glasses are available in the shopping mall or on Main Street. It has been reported that up to 20 percent of some brands of glasses are purchased with clear nonprescription lenses, so for these consumers at least wearing glasses has become an aspiration rather than a humiliation. So what lessons does this hold for design and disability? There are several, especially in relationship to the widely held belief that discretion is the ultimate priority in any design for disability. 

First, glasses do not owe their acceptability to being invisible. Striking fashion frames are somehow less stigmatizing than the National Health Service's supposedly invisible pink plastic glasses prescribed to schoolgirls in the 1960s and 1970s. Attempting camouflage is not the best approach, and there is something undermining about invisibility that fails: a lack of self-confidence that can communicate an implied shame. (...)

But neither is the opposite true: glasses' acceptability does not come directly from the degree of their visibility either. Brightly colored frames exist, although they are still a minority taste. This might serve as a caution to medical engineering projects that have adopted bright color schmes for medical products "to make a fashion statement" as the automatic progression from making a product flesh-colored. Most spectacle design, and design in general, exists in the middle ground between these two approaches. This requires a far more skilled and subtle approach - one that is less easy to articulate than these extremes. (...) (Pullin, 2009:15-17)

(...) many fashion labels design and market eyewear collections. Collections, labels, and brands: these words set up different expectations and engagement from consumers. And consumers is a long way from patients or even users. (...)

Eyewear designers Graham Cutler and Tony Gross have spent thirty years on the front lines of the revolution that turned eyewear "from medical necessity into key fashion accessory." It is interesting to note how recent this revolution was, given how much it is now taken for granted. (...), and their customer base transcends age and occupation. 

(...) Certainly, fashion designers are rarely part of teams even developing wearable medical products, which is incredible considering the specialist skills they could bring as well as their experience and sensibilities. But if we are serious about emulating the success of spectacle design in other ares, we need to involve fashion designers, inviting them to bring fashion culture with them. 

hearing aids

Compare glasses with hearing aids, devices developed within a more traditional culture of design for disability where discretion is still very much seen as the priority. Discretion is achieved through concealment, through a constant technological miniaturization. The evolution of the hearing aid is a succession of invisible devices: objects hidden under the clothing, in the pocket, behind the ear, in the ear, or within the ear. As the hearing aid has grown ever smaller, it has occasionally broken cover only to migrate from one hiding place to another. What has remained the same is the priority of concealment. 

Such miniaturization has involved amazing technological development, but it is not without a price. (...) hearing aids' performance is still compromised by their small size and (...) they could deliver better quality sound if they weren't so constrained. This is how fundamental the priority of discretion can be. Yet for many hearing-impaired people, their inability to hear clearly is far more socially isolating than the presence of their hearing aid. (...) (Pullin, 2009)

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- Pullin, G. (2009). design meets disability. Cambridge & London: The MIT Press.
- image (Pierre Cardin) via

Design Meets Disability (I): Fashion Meets Discretion.

These are a few excerpts from the highly interesting chapter "fashion meets discretion" in the highly interesting book "design meets disability" (Pullin, 2009). In this chapter, the author discusses the tension between the notion of design for disability having to be discrete and invisible versus fashionable and a statement. The two approaches are exemplified by contrasting the development of glasses and hearing aid devices (see the following posting).

discretion

The priority for design for disability has traditionally been to enable, while attracting as little attention as possible. Medical-looking devices are molded from pink plastic in an attempt to camouflage them against the skin. The approach has been less about projecting a positive image than about trying not to project an image at all.

But is there a danger that this might send out a signal that disability is after all something to be ashamed of? If discretion were to be challenged as a priority, what would take its place? Invisibility is relatively easy to define, and may even be achieved through technical and clinical innovation alone, but it is more difficult to define a positive image purely from these perspectives. 

fashion

Fashion, on the other hand, might be seen as being largely concerned with creating and projecting an image: making the wearer look good to others and feel better about themselves.

Eyewear is one market in which fashion and disability overlap. On the rare occasions that the words design and disability are mentioned in the the same breath, glasses are often referred to as the exemplar of a product that addresses a disability, yet with little or no social stigma attached. This positive image for disability has been achieved without invisibility.

tension

Fashion and discretion are not opposites, of course; fashion can be understated, and discretion does not require invisibility. Nonetheless, there is a tension between these qualities because they cannot both be the absolute priority. There are also deep cultural tensions between the two designs communities. Perpaps fashion with its apparent preoccupation with an idealized human form is seen as having little to say about diversity and disability. The extremes and sensationalism of cutting-edge fashion can seem inappropriate in the context of disability, where discretion is seen as being so important. For some in the medical field, the very notion of being in fashion, of designs coming and going, is the antithesis of good design. 

But learning from fashion might require embracing not only its design qualities but also more of its values. Fashion does not just arise from a particular set of skills but creates and requires a culture. The mechanism through which fashion design evolves, whether through haute couture or street fashion, ceates extreme designs that can provoke negative as well as positive reactions in different audiences. It may not be possible to have one without the other, to have the results without the culture and the values. (...)

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- Pullin, G. (2009). design meets disability. Cambridge & London: The MIT Press.
- photograph (Pierre Cardin) via

Men and Women Feeling Discomfort During Flights

According to a study, significantly more women than men report flight anxiety, and significantly more women than men become "quite much" or "very much" more afraid of flying after having children. Situations that score highest are turbulence, terrorism, highjacking, collision, and foreign objects in the engine. Men feel more confident that airline companies do enough to ensure safety. There are, however, no gender differences when estimating the frequency of flight accidents and the mortality rate in airplane accidents.



- Ekeberg, O., Fauske, B. & Berg-Hansen, B. (2014). Norwegian airline passengers are not more afraid of flying after the terror act of September 11. The flight anxiety, however, is significantly attributed to acts of terrorism. Scandinavian Journal of Psychology, 55, 464-468. LINK

- photograph (Olympic Airlines, 1969, designed by Pierre Cardin) via

Ageism among Nurses. Excerpts.

Compared with other healthcare providers, nurses have less accurate knowledge about the aging process. They have also expressed higher levels of anxiety about aging, and have shown a tendency to assign a lower status to geriatric nursing (Wells et al. 2004).



A study conducted in the Netherlands found a correlation between nurses’ attitudes toward older patients and the quality of communication and care provided to them (Caris-Verhallen et al. 1999). The more negative the nurses’ attitudes, the shorter, more superficial, and more task-oriented their conversations with older patients were. The nurses tended to speak to older patients in a patronizing tone, and did not involve them in consultations or decisions. McLafferty and Morrison (2004) reached similar conclusions in a study conducted in Scotland. The nurses’ negative attitudes towards older patients were reflected in their low expectations for rehabilitation as well as in their detached treatment of the patients. The nurses used shallow language and shouted, without any humor and without even addressing the patients by name. In an updated systematic review of research conducted since 2000 in various countries (Eastern and Western countries such as Singapore, the US, Canada, and Australia), a steady decline from positive to more neutral attitudes towards older people over time was found among student nurses (Liu et al. 2012).



Risk factors for ageist attitudes among nursing students and registered nurses in Sweden include young age (25) and male gender (Soderhamn et al. 2001). Similar results have been found in Greece, where young age and male gender were positively associated with ageism as reflected in narrow knowledge about aging and negative attitudes towards older adults (Lambrinou et al. 2009). However, a recent systematic review of 25 studies carried out in different countries (such as Australia, UK, the US, and Taiwan) suggests that age and gender are not consistent predictors of nurses’ attitudes toward older patients, whereas preference for work with older patients and knowledge about old age are more consistent predictors of positive attitudes (Liu et al. 2013).

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- Ben-Harush, A., Shiovitz-Ezra, S., Doron, I., Alon, S. Leibovitz, A., Golander, H., Haron, Y. & Ayalon, L. (2017). Ageism among physicians, nurses, and social workers: findings from a qualitative study. European Journal of Ageing, 14(1), 39-48. LINK
- photographs (nurses uniforms by Pierre Cardin) via and via

How diversity gets lost in design practices of information and communication technologies

Abstract: This article adopts an intersectional approach to investigate how age, gender, and diversity are represented, silenced, or prioritized in design. Based on a comparative study of design practices of information and communication technologies (ICTs) for young girls and older people, this article describes differences and similarities in the ways in which designers tried to cope with diversity. Ultimately diversity was neglected, and the developers relied on hegemonic views of gender and age, constructed older people and young girls as an “other,” and consequently their input was neglected. These views were thus materialized in design and reinforce such views in powerful yet unobtrusive ways. Oudshoorn, Neven & Stienstra (2016)



- Oudshoorn, N, Neven, L. & Stienstra, M. (2016). How diversity gets lost: Age and gender in design practices of information and communication technologies, Journal of Women & Aging, link
- photograph by Pierre Cardin (1970) via

European Day of Languages

"The general aim is to draw attention to Europe's rich linguistic and cultural diversity, which has to be encouraged and maintained, but also to extend the range of languages that people learn throughout their lives in order to develop their plurilingual skills and reinforce intercultural understanding. EDL is an opportunity to celebrate all of Europe's languages, including those that are less widely spoken and the languages of migrants."
Council of Europe



photograph via

Spaceflight and the Culture Assimilator

As spaceflights became more international and crews more multicultural, cultural awareness and sensitivity became one of the skills required for astronauts. Finding the right balance is crucial since overlooking cross-culturality might lead to cultural insensitivity and exaggerating it might promote stereotyping.
An approach to cross-cultural training (used in astronauts' training) is the so-called culture assimilator which consists of 100 to 200 scenarios where people from two cultures interact. Each scenario is followed by several explanations of why the member of the "other" culture acted in a specific way. The learner selects one explanation and then gets feedback for the chosen explanation. Trainees, after a while, start selecting explanations of the others' behaviour that are closer to the others' culture. In other words, the trainees' attributions become more specific, more complex, and less ethnocentric (Draguns & Harrison, 2011).

 

- Draguns, J. G. & Harrison, A. A. (2011) Spaceflight and Cross-Cultural Psychology. Contemporary Research in Historical Perspective; edited by Vakoch, D. A., 177-194
- Space age fashion à la Pierre Cardin, photograph via