disability & augmentation

Every time I think about what kind of "thing" would my project turn out to be, it comes back to the same question: what do visually impaired people need?

Take white cane for example. In the beginning, I had this presumption that people who use them would not feel good about it, or even be embarrassed about it. After talking with some people, to my surprise, they don't think it that way at all. An interviewee even told me that he's proud of it, because it's a symbol of his independence.

I also got to know, during a telephone interview, that the number of "special schools" dedicated for visually impaired people education is DEcreasing in Sweden, contrary to my presumption again.

Aimee Mullins, A record-breaker at the Paralympic Games in 1996, gives me a new way of looking at disability. "it's no longer a conversation about overcoming deficiency, it's a conversation about augmentation, it's a conversation about potential."

Daniel Kish, the creator of World Access for the blind, said that "In my experience, what we call "kindness" or "compassion" has stood among the biggest threats to blind people. It is compassion with lack of understanding that has landed many blind people in institutions and kept us out of the mainstream "for our own protection" over the years."

What they share in common is the attitude towards "disability", and that, would change the way I look at this project fundamentally.Like what Aimee says, "a prosthetic limb doesn't represent the need to replace loss anymore."