As I continue to be bowled over by the beginning of classes, it’s time to start chronicling what I’m working on, so here we go.
The first assignment for Designing for Constraints involved designing a clock for the blind. Of course, there’s a ton of issues with that assignment, in its wording at the very least. First off, what’s a clock? When really broken down, a timepiece can be included into so many things, so that’s issue one. Of course, in the thinking of Universal Design, the wording should have been “design a clock that can also be used by people with sight problems.”
At the moment, I’m looking at designing something that looks like a pinscreen (like the one that sits outside the ER), where the numbers will stand up straight off the top. I’ve done a few sketches, which I’ll upload tomorrow or the day after, but for now, if you can picture a small bar where the pins stand up, maybe 1/4″ off the surface, in the shape of the numbers in the hour and day. Better yet, if it’s lit properly, it’ll be visible by anyone, and hopefully look pretty cool.
I’m hoping to address the privacy issue — that not everyone at all times wants to broadcast that they’re trying to get the time, or what the time is. It’d be nice for people with sight disadvantages to not be required to have a mechanical voice shouting the time at them everytime they want to look.
The joy of this assignment is that we haven’t been tasked to make it function in the engineering sense — it just needs to be possible for people to tell time (blindfolded) with the device set to one time. Of course, that’ll be hard enough, but I think my idea should pan out well here.
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