Written by:

Fiore, S.
contact@salvatorefiore.com
 
Wright, P.
Department of Computer Science, University of York, Heslington, York
YO10 5DD
peter.wright@cs.york.ac.uk
 
Edwards, A.
Department of Computer Science, University of York, Heslington, York
YO10 5DD
alistair@cs.york.ac.uk

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An approach to Interaction Design emphasising the emotional-volitional construction of experiences with technology as sensual, emotional and embodied, can lead to a betterunderstanding of how to support blind people‘s experiences with interactive technologies ina meaningful way. In this paper we discuss how understanding and interpretation ofautobiographical accounts by people with vision loss, has provided opportunity for reflectionover how people build meaningful experiences without sight. Such critical reflection emphasises the significance of emotion and agency in making artefacts meaningful, rather than just usable, for blind users. An interpretive approach to the texts, supports a notion ofthe designer(s) as creative, empathic subject(s). The research forms a part of a larger project exploring the means and dynamics suggested by a pragmatist aesthetics approachto creating artefacts that help designers understand the world in different ways.

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Introduction

Interaction involving computers is most commonly mediated by visual output andvisual-motor coordinated input. This emphasis, combined with a traditional commitment to atask-based view of interaction (Preece et al, 1994) has meant that Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) research has tended to favour a cognitive account of interaction based on principles of human information processing (Card et al, 1983). Comparatively, HCI researchhas placed very little emphasis on broader questions concerning the quality of experiences with interactive technologies. However, with the confluence of computers, media and communications technology and the growth of computer-mediated services, the question of designing for experience has recently become a central concern in Interaction Design (Preece et al, 2002).The emphasis placed on cognition has meant that some computer users, such as disabled, non-literate and visually-impaired people are provided for only by way of post-hocadaptation of technologies designed for others (Thimbleby, 1995). Accessibility is in this way often achieved by way of exclusion or adaptation of problematic or irrelevant technological elements and the insertion of alternative components to compensate for disabling designs.An example is the adaptation of websites to facilitate the use of synthetic speech screenreaders by blind people. Mostly, technologies support people in carrying out specific tasks and, whilst the comparably limited amount of Interaction Design work devoted to the needsof extraordinary users (Edwards, 1995) has provided innovating and usable technologicaladaptations within the existing cognitive frame of reference, there is a lack of research combining concerns about accessibility and experience.Recently, HCI researchers concerned with user experience have examined the potential of interdisciplinary paradigms as diverse as Literary Theory (Wright & McCarthy, 2004), Art (Dunne & Raby, 2001) and Pragmatist Aesthetics (Petersen et al, 2004) (Fiore, 2003;2004a/b) (McCarthy and Wright, 2004a/b) for ideation. Much of this work incorporates non-cognitive understandings of human interaction and experience. Fundamental to such explorations, is the aknowledgement that a usable technology may not necessarily be one that is also experienced as, for example, meaningful, entertaining or engaging. Emphasis in this way moves from getting tasks done with computers, towards technology‘s integration within the flow of natural activity and experience. The felt-life approach (Wright & McCarthy, 2004b) is representative of an emerging reliance on possibilities suggested by a pragmatist view of experience in design and interaction research. Others (Fiore, 2003; 2004a/b) (Petersen et al, 2004) have similarly looked to pragmatist aesthetics, particularly the writings of John Dewey (Dewey, 1933; 1938; 1958) a sa way of understanding experience that emphasises how humans interact with the physical world as agents of change and meaning. Such researchers contribute to establishing a pragmatist aesthetic approach to interactive systems design which subverts an analytical understanding of computing systems. From the pragmatist perspective, people are understood to be within a physical and cultural world that exists independently. This contrasts with dualist beliefs (e.g. Russell, 1980) underpinning cognitive approaches to interaction, which centre experience in the mind, detached from the world. Dualism has encouraged a widespread conception of interaction as the automatic execution of routines, whereby feelings and emotions are either ignored or relegated to a role of irrationality. In contrast, pragmatism emphasises the essential role of feelings in shaping an experience, whereby some 'satisfying emotional quality‘ marks out  the experience as integral and fulfilled (Dewey, 1958). People construct experience by acting on the physical world we inhabit, wherein we contribute meaning and effect change. There is at the same time, an intersubjectivity that enables collaboration and meaningful connection with one another as we establish cultures and practices that shape the objective conditions for experience. Moving away like this from a view of people as disembodied spectators of the world, leads to the understanding that ".... what gives meaning to our sense of being in direct touch with reality is that we can control events in the world and get perceptual feedback concerning what we have done.“ (Dreyfus, 2001, p.54). The aesthetic of a technological object is in this sense "a result of the human appropriation of the artefact“ that is "released in dialogue as we experience the world.“ (ibid, p.271). This suggests a view of people as beings instrumental in the construction of their experiences around an object whereby "…the world is the site and setting of all activity. It shapes and is shaped by the activities of embodied agents…We find the world meaningful primarily with respect to the ways in which we act within it“ (Dourish, 2001, p.125). In this sense, with the help of Pragmatism, we can understand the way in which our interaction in the world enables us to actively construct meaningful experiences around objects (Petersen et al, 2004) (McCarthy & Wright, 2004a) through various stages of anticipating, connecting, interpreting, reflecting, appropriating andrecounting in the context of other experiences (Wright and McCarthy, 2003).

Experiencing the world without vision

From the pragmatist perspective, throughout a person‘s life, she/he constructs experiences and develops knowledge of the world, interpreting in a way that is simultaneously emotional, sensory and intellectual. As such, the senses help shape the conditions for experience, such that being without the sense of sight, will be reflected in the experience itself. Pragmatism provides a way of   understanding blind experience as equally meaningful, though qualitatively different from experience which incorporates visual perception. That is, the quality or essence which gives an experience its emotional, intellectual and physical completeness, is developed without the influence of visual phenomena. In contrast, perception by people who can see is dominated by visual phenomena (Ackerman, 1990). This has influenced the development of language and ways of interacting with others. Yet for a blind person, concepts like height, distance, light, dark, or colour and visual things or events, such as sunsets, or road markings, would not be expected to have the same meaning. This is because second-hand knowledge, including descriptions ofthings by someone else, are not the same as direct experience. Therefore, although descriptions and visual terminology may prove invaluable for a blind person in achieving tasks and communicating effectively, such descriptions would be limited to a predominantly functional meaning, without the emotional-volitional quality of direct experience where in the person intones each action with a sense of self. We offer some examples of this later, with reference to autobiographies written by blind authors.Similarly, with technological adaptations, it is evident that blind people make skilled and efficient use of technologies. However, we would argue that adapting to the use of visual concepts and styles of interaction, risks denying the real agency of the blind person, as they constantly work to overcome their own way of being. We suggest that potential exists in this sense to extend accessibility to focus on the emotional-volitional aspects of blind experience with technologies, beyond support in 'getting things done‘. Our work here concerns our efforts in moving towards achieving this in a way that respects and supports the qualities of blind experience.

Connecting worlds through autobiographical texts

It is a challenge for sighted designers wishing to create artefacts that will be used by blind people to understand the way that others
experience the world without sight. A way of approaching design is needed, which connects blind and sighted ways of being and communicates some shared meaning to support diversity and nurture empathy and intersubjectivity between people who have different ways of perceiving and experiencing. There is room for an holistic approach that enables designers to engage with the felt life ofothers and reflect both their own creative imagination and their understanding of the user‘sway of being in the object. Specifically, we aim to highlight the inseparable role of the designer creating an artefact in contributing to the construction of any meaningful experience for the user. In exploring the potential of a novel perspective, we hope to avoid obscuring the sense of agency that a person has in constructing meaningful experiences when using technologies. At the same time, our approach emphasises a conception of designer as creative subject and interpreter (rather than detached observer or analyst) whose newly acquired, subjective understanding of blind experience, prepares them to interpret and express their understanding via the activity of designing.

Exploring autobiographical narratives of blind experience: Reading as understanding and interpreting

Wright and McCarthy (2004) have examined the value for Interaction Design of Bakhtin‘s suggestion that the novel is the best way of seeing human experience, drawing attention to his efforts to preserve the centrality of creativity and avoid implications of the aesthetic as property of the artefact. Exploring approaches to analysing experience, they highlight ways in which designers can engage with user experience through the use of autobiography and other narrative forms. Recognising the capacity of narrative for expressing and understanding experience (Bruner, 1990) and the role of autobiographies as ”conventionalised, narrative expressions of experiences" (Denzin, 1989), we turn attention to the reading of autobiography to understand aspects of blind experience through conscious personal reflection. In doing so, we move away from a conception of the reader-researcher as detached observer of another‘s experience, towards an emphasis on understanding the other person and their experiences, in relation to ourselves (Josselson, 1995). As we read, we engage in a process of constructing a meaningful response to the text; making sense of the work rather than describing some given and definitive sense of it(Shusterman, 1992). Such an interpretive stance contrasts with the assumptions underpinning most HCI research; namely belief in the existence of some antecedent meaning of an object that may be described or interpreted with the certainty that there is aright and a wrong way of doing so. In contrast, pragmatism suggests that as we appropriate the object (text), the interpretation we make and the knowledge we construct, render changes in it so that it is continuously becoming. The work in this way becomes an organising focus for the production of discourse whereby the reader is free to understand subjectively, unrestricted by existing descriptions or conventions necessitating the objective pursuit of truth (ibid). Although the authors have interpreted their experiences in the texts, the reader cannot know these experiences, but must work to interpret them meaningfully: Interpretation is essentially problem-solving, used to examine and challenge meaning, whilst understanding is pre-linguistic, felt and non-requiring of interpretation, merely guiding us towards it (ibid). In this light, we see the reading of the autobiographies as a process initially of understanding. However, as we inevitably encounter difficulties in understanding the non-visual experiences expressed by the autobiography authors, we actively explore, confirm or alter the meaning we have created; interpreting as necessary so that we might make sense. Beauty in such processes, lies with the enrichment of the researcher experience, whereby the activity is legitimised and made meaningful by the agency it allows, enabling the reader to focus upon consequent phenomena and the creative possibilities of action open to them. In the brief discussion that follows, we summarise our interpretation of some issues emerging through such reading of autobiographies by blind authors, including Sheila Hocken (1977), Stephen Kuusisto (1998), John M. Hull (1991), Helen Keller (1996) and Mike Brace (1980), as well as the published exchange of letters between Brian Magee and Martin Milligan (1995).

Discussion

The meanings of invisible objects

Csikszentmihalyi & Rochberg-Halton (1981) have emphasised the distinction between being affected or being passively manipulated by an object: For an aesthetic experience to be realised, people need to be able to exercise "active, critical receptivity to the object so that its qualities may modify previously formed habits or interpretive associations" (p.181). Objects that force a person to adapt to another way of being, expose them to ambiguity, alienation or manipulation and deny the possibility for new understandings.While "the blind are not hungry for objects" (Kuusisto, 1998), some autobiography authors valued things for the way they provided a means of connecting with others and the sighted world. When John M. Hull (2000) invokes Merleau-Ponty‘s illustration of the world-generating character of embodied knowledge in a discussion of the white cane, he illustrates how an object can become a tool that extends one‘s potential for action: "The hand is not aware of the cane itself, but of the ground surface as revealed by the cane… the cane becomes an extension of one‘s body". Nonetheless, the cane is essentially functional, attributed meaning only in terms of what actions it can support a person in doing. In contrast, the guide dog, while fulfilling the same basic function as the cane, also offers for some (Kuusisto, 1998) (Hocken, 1977), the possibility for interaction and the exchange of trust and confidence. As Kuusisto remarks: "Life with a dog will begin my alchemical transformation in blindness, la vita nuova. The harness will unite us in confidence and guardianship" (Kuusisto, 1998, p.154). As such, for the blind authors, the form and appearance of objects they cannot see, holds little value; instead the possibility of  'active,critical receptivity' and emotional-volitional engagement with the object of interaction
forms the basis for meaningful or aesthetic experiences.

Language: Connecting with a sighted world

The texts have enabled an understanding of the inadequacies of language in reflecting the realities of blind experience As Hocken notes
"…everyday vocabulary reflects the predominance of the sighted world. Language is relatively poor in terms for precise descriptions of sensations other than sight, and so blind people are not able to describe their perceptions very accurately". (Hocken, 1977, p.16). As Hocken describes her endeavours to become skilled in imitating the visual conventions of colour matching and fashion, the power of language to subjugate people to the limitations of its expression becomes clear. The learning of such conventions merely acts as a one-way bridge between blind and sighted worlds that enable Hocken to fit in relatively unnoticed, or 'pass' as Kuuisto labels it. This is most starkly realised in the context of Magee and Milligan‘s arguing over whether  "propositional knowledge, knowledge by   description, is pale, grey, thin, second-hand stuff compared with the knowledge by acquaintance from which it is abstracted" (Magee & Milligan, 1995, p.41) and of Hocken‘s experiences after her sight is restored, when she remarks that "reading about things, or having them described…were substitutes… until that day all I had ever had were second-hand sunsets" (Hocken, 1977, p.171).

The ambiguity of visual concepts and things

Concepts dependent upon a visual perception of the world, such as space and time, may also be incongruent with the way a blind person experiences. Hocken for example, remark show, "To those accustomed to doing it, the placing of a towel on a rail or a cup on a shelf are automatic. A blind person has to think. 'six steps to the door. Five paces down the hall to the bathroom'. Every instance has to be worked out  mentally" (Hocken, 1977, p.16). Just as distances are measured in the meaningful units of footsteps, landmarks are heard or, asHocken (1977) and John Hull (1991) both suggest, sensed by the entire body from disturbances in the air. For the sighted reader, the meaning of such phenomena is as hard to comprehend as that of appearance for a blind person. However, such qualities of blind experience are accompanied by a degree of ambiguity of things and concepts that the person has little reason to pay attention to. The appearance of lines painted on the road are a perplexity for Hocken when she first regains her sight and John M Hull (1991) similarly alludes to the way that, by losing awareness of space, blind people have less awareness of unchangeability, so that the world of the blind becomes more ephemeral, as sounds appear and disappear. Through the contrary experiences of Hull, who loses his sight later in life, and Hocken, who gains hers, one can understand something about the way certain concepts that the sighted reader takes for granted, often bring ambiguity to the emotional-volitional aspects of blind experience.

Conclusions and next steps

These issues represent just some of the myriad of understandings brought forward through reading the autobiographies. The research experience of reading, understanding and interpreting the texts has been a phase of enrichment that has enabled a greater sense of empathy to be established towards the autobiography authors. Encountering suchambiguities, unrealised potential and beauty in blind
experience, has opened the path towards the evolution of the design project.This research is not intended as a comprehensive or usable design methodology: It is linked to a wider project that incorporates several phases of discovery and critical reflection over how we might address the question of designing across phenomenologies of experience. From this initial phase of understanding and  interpretation of the autobiographical texts, the research moves towards a secondary phase of interpretation; the creative expression of one researcher‘s understanding of blind experience in fictional narrative (Fiore, 2005). The process continues when the interpreted 'story artefact' is itself given over to an artist for interpretation into storyboard. Further phases of modelling of the imagined object and engineering of its technical functions will ensue, each forming a new stage of interpretation by subject designers within an expanding interdisciplinary team of computer scientists, artists, designers and engineers. The object to be designed - an interactive chair - remains an idea in the early stages, understood by the various contributors from their own perspectives, interpreted differently by each. This ongoing work seeks to build a link between the pragmatist theoretical framework and design practice: Starting from experience, the process gradually defines and interprets experience into form. In proposing the value of autobiographical narratives to help sighted designers come to understand something about blind experience, we have explored a deceptively simple approach which provides a way of empathising with others that would not be accessible in a way so supportive of agency, through analytical methods of enquiry. A pragmatist aesthetics approach has enabled us to better understand issues of relevance to blind people in making use of technology. In particular, it has helped make sense of some of the emotional-volitional aspects of blind experiences involving technological artefacts as meaningful objects in interaction. Adopting the autobiographical texts as expressive accounts of everyday experience helps the sighted designer or researcher in exploring the richness of non-visual experiences of blind people and the importance of agency and the subjective self in meaning making.

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