Surround Sound Eyewear

Surround Sound Eyewear designed by Industrial Facility for RNID

Regardless of sight capabilities, glasses have become as popular as watches, having been absorbed into accessorized culture, so it is conceivable that someone who is hard of hearing but with perfect eyesight would prefer to wear glasses, even though the lenses prescriptive benefits are not involved.  However, this project was not simply thought of as a way to overcome aesthetic stigmas.  Technologically, the product followed the experiments of Professor Marinus Boone of Delft University and his notion of superdirective beamforming as the basis for a highly directional hearing aid.  By involving a set of four microphones on both side-armatures, it increased hearing capability dramatically and gave much better speech intelligibility than conventional hearing aids.  The result was a type of 3 dimensional hearing, similar to that found in certain animals such as coyotes. 

Hearing glasses have existed before.  But they disappeared primarily because of the combination of two functions that were articulated in an awkward, incohesive and problematic manner.  Instead, Surround Sound Eyewear made an attempt to create a more holistic object not intended to hide the hearing aid, but to incorporate it with Professor Boone’s superdirectivity concept. 

Fashion Meets Discretion

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 hang, 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 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.  There may be tension between these qualities because they cannot both be the absolute priority.  There are also deep cultural tensions between the two design communities.  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.

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, creates 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.

Pullin, Graham.  “Design Meets Disability.” Cambridge, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 2011, 15-16. 

Charles and Ray Eames

an original leg splint alongside a sculpture by Ray Eames

nurturing healthy tensions

The journey from leg splints to mainstream furniture was not a direct path.  Ray Eames began by making sculptures out of spare leg splints, cutting into them with a jigsaw.  She was exploring the visual languages that this new material could support, which was a natural mode of inquiry for an art school graduate - apparently playful, but with serious intent.  Within the Eameses' work, two cultures existed side by side, in a healthy tension: the first directly solving problems and respecting constraints, and the second more open-mindedly, even playfully challenging these constraints and exploring further freedoms beyond them.  The plywood furniture arose from both sides, from the splints and the sculptures.

Within design for disability, where teams still tend to come exclusively from clinical and engineering backgrounds, the dominant culture is one of solving problems.  A richer balance between problem solving and more playful exploration could open up new valuable directions. 

Pullin, Graham.  “Design Meets Disability.” Cambridge, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 2011, Introduction.