Hello everyone, I am Maitraye Das from Northwestern University and today I’m going to talk about
our paper on a case analysis of accessible making. In this study, I worked with Katya
Borgos-Rodriguez and Anne Marie Piper, also from Northwestern University.
So, I’m going to begin with a story. This is a story of Helen. She's 73 years old and
she has been totally blind for the past 33 years. She lives in a residential community
for people with vision impairments, where she works in a weaving studio with other visually
impaired residents and their sighted instructors.
For the past 7 years, Helen has made many different woven products, like tote bags,
dish towels, runners and so on. The image on this slide is from the last time I met
her, when she was working on a tote bag with black and blue yarns.
She was planning to work on a red-colored bag next,
which she would gift to her niece, since that was her favorite color.
Helen is a visually impaired maker who enjoys working in this community weaving studio and
making woven products that she can sell and gift to her close ones.
Now, where does Helen’s story fit in with the emerging maker culture that has traditionally
highlighted experiences of makers who are younger, able-bodied, well-educated, and affluent?
Although maker culture has been praised for democratizing design work, scholars have also
questioned whether it is truly democratic and inclusive, and who gets recognized as
a maker and designer.
As we see, certain communities, particularly those who do manual, non-technical handwork
as Helen does, have been traditionally under-recognized in design.
Also, many design stories tend to position able-bodied people as designers and disabled
people as non-designers.
As part of this discourse, accessibility and assistive technology scholars have also started
talking about how to make making accessible.
Researchers suggested that the design of physical workspace and software and hardware tools
should be improved to support people with disabilities in making.
At the same time, researchers have also emphasized that
making activities can foster creative expression, independence and empowerment among people
with disabilities.
Much of this work focuses on supporting individuals with disabilities in making. However, we still
don't know much about community aspects of accessible making.
So, in this work, we investigate how accessible maker communities are created and sustained,
and how material workspace and community members shape accessible making.
With that goal in mind, we focused on a specific context of study – a community weaving studio
for people with vision impairments. In this community, visually impaired weavers like
Helen are empowered as designers and they, along with their sighted instructors, come
up with their own practices around accessible making. This slide shows an image from the
weaving studio where Helen was working with a sighted instructor.
Now, why did we focus on weaving? Weaving is a traditional and manual form of making,
but it is also a very complex practice that can take years to master. It involves a form
of algorithmic thinking. Weavers need to systematically interlace threads and follow numerical sequences
of patterns. The image on this slide shows a loom with a work-in progress.
So, to understand accessible making, we conducted field work with approval from the community.
We conducted participant observation at the community weaving studio for 8 months. We
observed 30 weaving sessions in total and video recorded 8 of those. To supplement our
observation data, we also conducted semi-structured interviews with 11 visually impaired weavers
and 3 sighted instructors at the studio. We also interviewed a blind weaver and instructor
at another community.
We collected and analyzed data following ethonographic field research method. Additionally, we performed
iterative coding and constant comparison between data to data and data to emerging concepts
and theories following constructivitist grounded theory method.
Throughout the process of data collection and analysis,
we consider interaction as multimodal, embodied, and situated. We attended to how participants
combine different modalities to establish a shared meaning.
Additionally, we follow Kafer’s political/relational model of disability, and work from other feminist
disability scholars. We view disability as enacted through particular
socio-material configurations rather than located solely in the individual or society.
So, moving on to our findings now. Our analysis identified three key aspects of weaving as
an instance of accessible making. Specifically, we found that accessible making involves attending
to interactive properties of materials, collaboratively creating and negotiating accessibility
in making, and valuing the labor of making.
We see that for weavers with vision impairments, the feel of different yarns— based on their
texture, thickness, composition, elasticity, and other attributes— is a particularly
important interactive property.
For instance, the image here shows a weaver, Amy working on a multi-shaded blue pattern
with two shuttles. During the interview, she traced her fingertips along the woven pattern
and explained, “It’s called 'summer winter' and it’s sorta like the opposite
of each other. See the difference in the texture. And you can feel the diagonals and how they
go with your fingertips.” So, the tactile feel of textured fibers coming together into
a pattern gives a piece its meaning and also signifies which work is one’s own.
Another important and unique practice in weaving is
continuously sensing and creating tension on the threads. The image on this slide shows
a weaver pressing on the threads on a loom with their hand to assess the tension. Weavers
do this frequently to check if the threads are under appropriate tension or not, or if
they are getting tangled somewhere. One weaver described a scenario, he said,
”Let’s say, I put this shuttle through over here and I’ve tangled the thread. When
I get ready to do the other weave, this thread will pull tight and that means something up
here has been done wrong. This thing will let you know.” That is, the shuttle and
the thread will "talk back" to the weaver and alert him of a possible mistake.
Beyond texture and tension, weavers also attend to the ways materials collide with each other
and with their body during the process of weaving. As an example, I’m playing a video
capture where a weaver, Paul is pulling the beater. As the beater collides against the
woven cloth, it makes a distinct beating sound and marks the end of a weaving cycle.
This process is repeated over and over again. And Paul described this as "a rhythm I have
to follow, it’s sort of like music."
So, we see that, instead of visually following the beater, shuttle, and other loom components,
blind weavers engage in a reflective conversation with the materials, where materials talk back
to the weavers through interactive properties such as tension, texture and collision.
While these material properties are important to all weavers, they play a particularly salient
role in the way blind weavers use “their non-visual senses” to understand system
state, potential mistakes and how the product takes shape through their actions.
Also, while making has been typically conceived of as an individual and independent activity,
our analysis revealed that weavers and instructors at the weaving studio
collaboratively create an accessible space for weaving.
When a weaver starts learning, instructors provide hand-over-hand guidance, as shown
in the image on this slide.They do this, because sometimes their words alone are not sufficient
to demonstrate certain actions. For example, to teach the concept of beating, instructor
Laura asks the weaver to place their hand over her hand, and then she replicates the
movement of the beater. This way, weavers get the reverb effect, they get the feel,
the rate, the speed, the emphasis. So, weavers learn the step of beating as they experience
the sounds and the embodied feel of pulling the beater following instructors’ hand-over-hand
guidance.
Again, when weavers face difficulties in navigating their workspace, instructors make adaptations
according to their individual needs and abilities. For example, the weaver in this image had
started a new project and she was facing difficulties in remembering the weaving sequence. Since
she had some residual vision, instructors wrote down the weaving sequence in large font
and attached it to the loom.
Importantly, this kind of adaptations are designed collaboratively. As one instructor
explained, “I will ask the weaver themselves, ‘what would be helpful? This or this?’
and they will then make their decision. A lot of it is collaboration in doing, most
of it is, in fact." So, we see that instructors try to ensure that weavers have agency in
securing assistance rather than being passive recipients of support.
Still there are instances where certain tasks become tedious or distracting for a weaver.
In such cases, instead of doing the work for the weaver, instructors engage in a "co-weaving”
approach, where both of them synchronously perform different parts of the task. As the
image on this slide shows, an instructor and a weaver were performing unweaving together
to fix mistakes.
So, we see that instructors listen to what weavers want
and make sure that weavers’ contributions are highlighted in the weaving process. As
one instructor Sara explained, "I like to be viewed as more of a tool than maybe an
instructor or even a helper. What my goal I think is, for the people that aren’t already
there, bring them to the point of more individuality and more sort of taking the reins and then
for me to be just there to assist in the things that either they’re more interested in or
need help with."
Our analysis also revealed that accessible making is about how the labor of making is
valued. Weavers in this community explained that weaving was a fun and relaxing experience
for them. And it motivated them to get back to work after loss and heal. Also, they explained
that the value of making comes from both the process and the product of their labor. As
Jen explained, "I enjoy seeing how the product comes into being. And that I can make something
that I can use or somebody else could use."
Weavers also find value in being able to gift their products to others who are in need.
Bill said, "It just gives me a good feeling inside knowing that hopefully I helped someone,
like I’ve brightened someone’s day."
In addition to gifting, weavers also sell their products. Many of the weavers in this
facility live on limited income and they also have multiple chronic conditions for which
they cannot engage in other forms of employment. So, receiving profits from a sold product
is an important source of income for them. Adam even explained that, for him, the best
part of weaving is “making the money.”
Also, the staff at the residential facility display these woven products in the common
spaces and arrange public exhibitions in the downtown area of the city. The image on this
slide shows a product display kept near the front desk of the facility. Weavers described
how these kinds of public display can lead to broader societal recognition of their abilities
and existence as a community. Emma said, “It definitely would bring a lot of publicity
for this type of facility. Our names will be up there. It will help communicate to people
that we’re not throwaways, we’re not just helpless, we have something to offer."
So, what do these findings mean for future research in disability and making?
Prior work has examined materiality in design and making for a long time. However, the role
of materiality in making among people with disabilities has not been explored much. In
our analysis, we saw that weavers communicate with the materials in their workspace by attending
to their interactive properties using their non-visual senses.
This prompts us to envision new types of tangible and hybrid systems such as Spyn or Loominary,
but specifically focusing on accessible making. For example, we can think about augmenting
looms to enhance the embodied rhythm of weaving. Texture, tension, collision, colors – all
these could be represented through sonification or haptic signals.
Also, prior work has primarily focused on improving tools and workspaces such that people
with disabilities can perform making independently without assistance from others. In contrast,
we found that blind weavers and sighted instructors co-create accessibility in the weaving studio
something that we also find in other work on ability-diverse collaboration in professional
and home spaces.
However, these co-creative practices between blind weavers and sighted instructors were
not centered around any assistance-based support. Instead, weavers had agency in determining
what support they need and how.
So, this prompts us to rethink the design of accessible maker technologies that can
move away from assuming that support is always needed or wanted. Instead, they can highlight
disabled makers’ contributions and labor by fading into the background. Also, instead
of considering independence from able-bodied collaborators as the ideal design goal, technologies
may support interdependent, co-creative practices between ability-diverse collaborators.
And, following other disability studies scholars, in this work, we tried to broaden our understanding
of who are recognized as makers and designers. However, as Bennett, Peil and Rosner cautioned,
by framing blind weavers’ making activities as meaningful and empowering, we may miss
the fact that weavers need to engage in this labor, because
of their social position, their limited options for employment, and financial constraints.
So, as we discuss accessible making, we should not only emphasize on the empowering aspects
of making, we should also keep in mind the social, political
and structural factors that make this labor necessary for people with disabilities.
Also, since ableist views have traditionally framed design and making as exceptional for
people with disabilities, we question whether the resulting products are valued on their
own merits, or because those are created by disabled makers. As we are talking about accessible
making, we should keep in mind whether this kind of valuation of disabled labor could
reinforce any stigma and ableist views.
So, to summarize, we studied a specific instance of accessible making by observing a community
of weavers with vision impairments. We found that accessible making requires attending
to interactive properties of materials. And, it is co-created through negotiation of assistance
and ownership between disabled makers and their able-bodied collaborators. Also, we
argue that accessible making is inherently political in the sense that it confronts tensions
between recognition of disabled makers as contributing members of the society and how
their labor is valued by others and by themselves.
Thank you all for listening. You can reach out to me by email if you want to chat more
about this work!