What is High-tech for? Why our human beings devote all our lives pursue excellent technics? How to make use advanced technology?After reading Design Meets Disabitily, I arose these questions. For me, technology is helping us see what we cannot see, hear what we cannot hear, it can be our arm and hand, our eyes and ears, it’s tools which help us stand higher, see more widely and go further. However when it comes to disabilities, how technology works? Appreciating the development of technology, advanced appliance give disable people chance to live like normal ones, we believe using elegant invisible gadget can help disabilities more comfortable and feel less shamed. But is that being disability humiliated? Graham Pullin introduce different parts of assistance garget for disabled people.
Eyewear: eyewear positions glasses not only products but also fashion things which can represent one’s taste and express one’s self consciousness.
Hearwear: The evolution of the hearing aids is a succession of invisible device: hidden under clothes, in pocket, inside ears.
Bodywear: It’s more sensitive than other products, because it not only assistance products, not the garget you pick it up or put it down but extension of the body. With prosthetic limbs help disable people do what they cannot do before.
Does technology really make disable people feel comfortable? It does help, but it just make the prosthetic more reliable and delicate. Design changed our way to see these prosthetic, and it also changed our view of physical deficiency, and how the disabled judge themselves.
The revolution of glasses from medical assistance to fashion accessory give us an inspiration that discretion is not the only way to design for disable people. More confident and fantastic design can convey positive image of disability.Fashion design changed our view to optical defect. Instead of judging it as unhealthy and weakness，people now wearing glasses to show their taste and style. There are more and more glasses styles, fashion design has been added to glasses’ design processing. Wearing glasses has some advantages. For instance, it can protect you eyes from harm in the natural world; it’s an accessory to make face more beautiful and smaller; It can give other’s an impression that you are good educated. Stylish glasses make you different from others.
In this way, people who do not myopia even wear glasses to show their taste, they think it’s really cool and can give them some freshness feelings.
Glasses is an inspiration for us and give us an good example to combine fashion and discretion together. Maybe in the future, even our healthy people can use stylish prosthetic to express ourselves and make us more powerful. Disable is not shameful， designer shouldn’t design the things only with discretion, as well as inventing invisible facilities is not the best way to help them feel better.
When we aware it’s time to change our perceptions，the conception and the processing of design should both be changed, designers with diversity background and disable people should participate in product design. People with diversity background just like fresh blood and they can help traditional industry break the wall.
I once saw a TV show , a blind girl in it can walk well without help. Instead of walking stick’s help, she can identify the direction and if there is obstacle by feeling the air flow in front of her. It really moving and inspired me a lot. I started to believe sense power can transmit. Just like ' The god closed door and open the window', the disabled have their own way to feel this world. If technology can help blind people change the visual information to sound information or smell information， it may help them a lot.
We can now anticipate assistance garget in the future, it not just the thing hidden in disabled body but also the thing which can make them live with more self-confident and self-identification.