1.
I think for me this brief reinforced my belief that unless you yourself have experience with the disability you’re designing for, you shouldn’t be the one making final decisions about the design, as well as the idea that the more people with experience you can bring into the conversation, the better the design will be.
This became clear very early on in our explorations, before we had even decided what direction to go in. As we talked about different topics we could explore, the ideas that were the strongest were the ones that our group could personally speak to. Personal experience is important in many conversations within the practice of design; however, it’s vital in spaces where disability and accessibility are being considered.
Specifically, after we decided to narrow our focus on conversations around mental health (something two of our group struggle with personally), we began roleplaying what our ideas would look like in reality. Without that experience to inform our decisions, our final outcome had the potential to be inaccessible to the individuals we were designing for.
2.
Case, C. & Dalley, T. (2022) The Handbook of Art Therapy. Routledge.
The Handbook of Art Therapy is considered the one-stop-shop introduction for everything related to art therapy, and as someone who has little to no knowledge of the tool it was incredibly helpful in setting the tone for how we would explore the ‘Feelings Cards’ in our project. Specifically, in the fifth chapter of the book (titled The Image in Art Therapy) the author talks about the way images are used to build a bridge of understanding between sometimes indefinable thoughts/feelings and the therapist. This really shaped the way we approached the images drawn to represent the feelings used in our ‘Feelings Cards’. We chose to take a more narrative approach in the imagery to help the listener understand what the speaker was feeling, rather than focus on the stigma around the specific words. This resulted in abstract images that emphasize color and shape and how they interact with the subject of the cards (the tiny pink dot) to tell a story that feels more intuitive.
Jencks, C. & Silver, N. (1972) ‘The Spirit of Adhocism’, in Jencks, C. & Silver, N. Adhocism: The Case for Improvisation. Cambridge: The MIT Press, pp. 38–53.
There was one specific quote from this excerpt of Adhocism that stood out to me while reading last term: “Everything can always be something else.” While this book may have less of a direct relation to the work we did during this brief, this quote felt relevant to me, though maybe through a different lens. A difficulty we faced regularly towards the end of our iteration process was that, when drawing emotions, the pictures we drew could be completely different from person to person because of the subjective nature of feelings. In this way, “everything can always be something else” (thought misapplied somewhat) became an important disclaimer while we worked. We had to accept the reality that no matter how much we iterated or discussed the different feelings we were representing, and even if we agreed upon a final design, there would always be someone who would see our representations as something else because of their own experiences.
Koenig, J. (2021) The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows. Simon & Schuster.
In the early stages of our explorations, The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows played an important role in shaping the non-traditional language we wanted to use to express our feelings. Because we were exploring language and its relationship to our emotions and experiences, we first thought it would be interesting to create a new language to convey the stigmatized words we avoid in daily conversation. The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows was helpful in teaching us how to approach building a new language to convey difficult, traumatic, and sometimes obscure experiences and feelings. In some of our earliest iterations, we took inspiration from the dictionary by combining different languages or rules of languages and alphabets to create these substitute words. We thought about combining Chinese and English (see PIDGIN reference below for more details), which is how we came up with the idea to provide a Chinese word but spelled out with English pronunciation guides.
Marian, V. (2023) The Power of Language: How the Codes We Use to Think, Speak, and Live Transform Our Minds. Dutton.
The third chapter of The Power of Language stood out the most to me while we were iterating during this brief, particularly as we began to hone in on using words and images in conjunction to create the disruption of our chosen system.
In this chapter, the author speaks about how for her, writing this book would not even have been possible for her to do in her native or second language, not only because she lacked certain scientific or academic words to support her ideas, but because she associated those languages so strongly with sexist or antiquated views that it felt restrictive to write about something like this topic in those languages. The idea that language can be a tool to free or restrict creativity wasn’t new to me, as I have felt that learning new languages opens doors for a wider creative vocabulary. This belief was supported as we iterated on the different ways images could be used in our toolkit. For instance, my drawing would sometimes change based on which translation of the word I used to create my representation of the word.
Mitchell, W. J. T. (2005) ‘What Do Pictures Want’, in Mitchell, W. J. T. What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 28–56.
As we iterated in this brief, we discovered two major problems that needed to be solved. The first being that some people found it difficult to say certain stigmatized words in their native language. We ‘fixed’ this problem by substituting that word with one in a different language to create emotional distance for the speaker. The second problem came after: the person listening to the speaker would not have any idea what they were talking about unless they spoke the other language. To help solve this problem, we experimented with the idea of creating images to go along with the words to help the listener understand the basal feelings being expressed by the speaker.
Once we decided definitively to use both written language and pictures as symbols to represent words, we wanted to explore the role that images could play in bridging this gap of understanding. This reference specifically helped us understand that because we as humans often automatically assign feeling/emotion to an image, using an image in our narration of the speaker’s trauma could help create empathy for the speaker while distancing them from the stigma of the word.
Tan, E. (2001) PIDGIN: Interrupted Transmission [Installation].
The reference that really set us on the path toward our final outcome was the installation work PIDGIN: Interrupted Transmission by Erika Tan. The piece is no longer in installation form, so we weren’t able to experience it in person. However, the video that is played on a loop in the installation was available to us, and this (rather than the installation as a whole) was one of the inspirations for us to explore language the way we did. Again, while we were exploring the idea of creating a whole new language to express obscure thoughts, experiences, and feelings, we were inspired by the way the language in the video attrited to become the ‘stand-in characters’ used when a typeface doesn’t have assigned characters for that language. Using shapes as language became the foundation for our later explorations, as we began drawing shapes to represent the stigmatized words.
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