Category: News

Videos show content in International Sign (left) and Austrian Sign Language (right).

ACCESSTECH was represented at the conference for Designing Interactive Systems, where members of the team co-organised a workshop on techniques for queering data and AI systems.

Each participant brought one or more queering techniques along to discuss in the workshop — our examples, destruction and non-use, were part of a zine we created.

We have also made a neat set of stickers for one of our queering techniques!

Inspired by the workshop to make trouble, we spent the conference engaging in mild scholarly vandalism, getting an overview of the design scene in HCI, and scheming about future work with fellow troublemakers.

We used those two days to fully concentrate on how to approach our big project, what we want to achieve within its different subtopics and what we need to do so. Along the way we also got to know each other better as a team with our strengths as well as weaknesses and defined our guiding principle for the project:

Everybody is talking about access, accessibility and equality, but to really give a sense of what access actually means, we decided to use this project to make a little ‘BAM!’ to increase crip (self-)awareness in this world!

Sidenote: Breaks are important! In between, we also took enough time to clear our heads again and how could a project better kick off than with a full rainbow…

Videos show content in International Sign (left) and Austrian Sign Language (right).

We are pleased to announce that members of the ACCESSTECH team are co-organising a one-day workshop on “Material and Tangible Research Methods in HCI” at the “Mensch und Computer 2024” (MuC) conference. We will use this opportunity to reflect collectively with other researchers on the capacities of materials to serve as multifunctional resources that can serve as data, methods, processes, and outcomes of research projects. In particular, we are keen to explore how materials help us to convey nuanced meanings and make abstract concepts more “graspable” and thereby more accessible to a wider audience.

Here are some of the questions that we are interested to hear other researchers’ thoughts about:

• What objects have (had) an impact on your research? What role did their materiality play in this? Examples: a specific book, your first 3D print, an artifact from one of your earlier projects, …
• What material is/was important in your research, and why? Examples: building bricks in pleasing colors, a box of crafting materials that feel just right in your hands, a deck of cards that helps your research partners think about the topic at hand, …
• Which objects or materials do you treasure or care a lot about in a work context, and why? Examples: souvenirs from a specific person, time or place, inspirational works by other people, the perfect fit to your target group’s needs and preferences.
• How does material/how do objects relate to you and your work? Example: a space you have conducted research in, a recording device you use during your interviews, a library where you spent countless hours researching, writing, thinking, …

Making things to find a shared critical language

In my own work, I have spent much time making/crafting together with different groups of people: sitting together in a knitting circle creating pieces for an activist yarnboming installation; joining glass artists and interaction designers in a workshop to experiment how to make glass conductive; designing a brochure for a Men’s Shed and editing it together with its members; 3D-printing with disabled makers to fabricate their own ideas. In all these situations, our creative engagement with digital or physical materials has helped us to find a shared language for articulating complex thoughts and discussing intricate issues.

Here is a concrete example from the “Empowering Hacks” project: 3D-printed “wheelchair golfballs”. They are rather simple in their design, but they help me to tell a far greater story around the socioeconomic injustice that people with disabilities face on a daily basis and the empowering capacity that research projects can have if they give people with disabilities the opportunity to switch their role from users to designers. The creators of the “wheelchair golfball” are Nick and Norman, two men with disabilities who are frustrated with the expensive price range of assistive gadgets. Wheelchair golfballs are a typical example for this. They are a popular modification of the joystick shape on the control panel of power wheelchairs. The original design consists of an actual golf ball with a hole drilled into it so that it can be put over the joystick’s metal rod. Home-produced wheelchair golf balls are sold online for surprisingly steep prices (roughly 10-15 times the price of a single golfball). “Empowering Hacks” hence aimed “to produce disabled tools at a cheaper rate but with a more customisable outcome” (in the words of my participants) and so we collaborated on designing, modelling and 3D-printing “wheelchair golfballs” in different shapes, forms and colours. Over time, Nick and Norman became known for their designs and even started to work on commissions – such as the “wheelchair golfball” pictured on the right that is produced in the magpie design of the Newcastle United soccer team. In the research project, this also signified the moment as my collaborators fully embraced their new roles as makers.

Call for Participation

If you are considering attending MuC 2024 and have your own story to share about the role of materials in your research, please consider participating in our workshop. It will take place on Sunday, September 1st, in Karlsruhe and we have planned a full-day in-person hands-on program structured around co-creating a zine with participants. If you are interested, please refer to the call for participation and submit a zine page until July 16, 2024 (AoE).