my psmd nuzleaf appreciation post

I’m feeling really anxious because Communicating With People TM is hard, so I want to get my mind out of it by rambling about something random I’ve been reminiscing lately: huge art realizations. Like those heureka-moments when you learn something that becomes really vital for you as soon as you hear about it! Maybe it’s just because I tend to be oblivious even to some very simple things, but I’ve had quite a bunch of these moments throughout the years.

These are going to be in order from oldest to newest.

First things first. I was still a little kid, way before I was old enough to go to school, when I saw a pretty picture of a mermaid sitting on a stone in some magazine. I wanted to try drawing the same thing myself and started, as a child’s logic suggested, by drawing the ocean. The rock was already fairly difficult to draw when the whole paper was colored blue, and the mermaid on top of the rock was just a colorful mess. I was pretty upset and didn’t understand what went wrong until either my mother or grandmother explained that I should’ve drawn everything in reverse order: the mermaid first, then the rock, then the ocean. That really blew my mind. =‘D

Sketching is magic. When this one happened I was already in school, maybe in 3rd grade or so. I had a friend who confessed me that she had spied how the best artist of our class drew. (She was really good and always placed first in every art competition of the school.) My friend told me about this weird technique she had seen her use: she drew the lines hairy instead of smooth! We, too, tried that out and Io and behold: we had learned how to sketch.

Inked line art makes everything look professional. I was still in elementary school, but in a different one with different people than previously. Once again in my class was an amazing artist who I admired a lot and tbh who I tried to mimic a bit. For a long while I had no idea what exactly she did to make her comic art look like it was printed and perfect (to my eyes at least) and I went through a lot of trial and error when I finally decided it was because of how the line art looked like. I tried pressing hard with normal pencil, tried to use black crayon and finally even tried this horribly thick and messy marker that bled through everything and smudged like there was no tomorrow. The last one, no matter how inconvenient, produced a look that was already somewhat close, so I continued to try out different markers until I finally got my hands on an actual piece of gold: a thin writing marker with permanent ink. I felt enlightened once again! Here’s a piece from the time when I was still testing all sort of markers: https://imgur.com/b4Bxv10

Circles really are useful. Pretty soon after that, maybe a year or two, I just suddenly one day decided that I want to start drawing cartoon dogs - and that I indeed did for darn many years afterwards. But at the beginning I didn’t really know how to draw dogs, and because I wasn’t nearly good enough artist yet that I would’ve understood anything by studying live models, I used another technique I had heard of instead: the famous circles. One circle for head, one for chest and one for butt. It’s actually pretty cute how clearly you can still see the circles in the first finished canines & circles art piece: https://imgur.com/kDtIO7h 

If digital art is hell, drawing tablet is your Jesus. At some point I started occasionally using computer in art making, and that process in itself was full of amusing mistakes and huge discoveries. I’m not telling detailed stories of them all just because I think most people go through the same things: omg layers, wow brushes, wtf layer masks and so on. But the thing that changed things a lot for me was, of course, drawing tablet. At first I was even somewhat hesitant of using it as I had actually became pretty okay at coloring stuff with mouse and didn’t feel like starting the learning process all over again, but for a reason or another I didn’t completely give up on it. First I used it just for coloring, then occasionally even in making line art on a hand-drawn sketch. Finally, when I was feeling exceptionally lazy and had a big art meme waiting to be drawn, I said fuck it and just jumped to the deep end of the pool by making everything from start to finish with the tablet. I don’t think I’ve had to sketch anything separately ever since.

The first thing I colored digitally: https://imgur.com/2OFi75s

The first thing I drew with tablet: https://imgur.com/H6TinbC

The meme drawn from scratch with tablet: https://imgur.com/uFVG0on

The magic involving quality pens and white color. Even though after that I’ve drawn the vast majority of my art with computer simply because it’s so easily accessible, I hadn’t abandoned traditional art completely. What had always bothered me though was how it was darn impossible to scan a work colored with pens in a way that the scan would show all of the light shades of the actual work. That’s why I became interested in making my color pencil pieces to have as smooth, vibrant surface as possible; if the paper was full of color, even my shitty scanner couldn’t miss it. Eventually I learned two things, one of them being that the quality of your pens matters a lot in this one. You just can’t squeeze pigment out of pens that don’t have any! But the more interesting one was that you can smoothen the surface and blend the colors by coloring over everything with either white or transparent pen. (Or oil - a technique I haven’t yet explored much.) The difference the white layer makes can be seen pretty clearly in these two aceos from the same era:

Without the white pen: https://imgur.com/xh3c2In

With the white pen: https://imgur.com/KypkUqT

And, for now, that’s pretty much it! Ahh, my nerves have indeed calmed down a lot, so I guess this pondering was worth writing.

Re-blog: Ross Atkin’s talk at the Global Disability Innovation Summit

“I was invited to speak at the Global Disability Innovation Summit held at Here East on the Olympic Park in London. I shared a slot with Tom Watt-Smith, the showrunner (producer and director) for The Big Life Fix. Tom introduced the program and covered the cultural trends that lead to a program about assistive technology getting commissioned in a primetime slot on BBC2. I used my slot to reflect on the approach we took to developing technology during the program and look at the strengths and weaknesses of scaling it to help more disabled people. I drew on some of the arguments Sam Jewell and I made in our 2013 report ‘Enabling Technology‘ which was commissioned by Scope, BT and the RCA Helen Hamlyn Centre for Design.

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On the Big Life Fix we, as designers and technologists, got to do something that we don’t often get to do – build technology products specifically for particular disabled individuals.

This work is in a totally different mindset from doing the ‘industrial design’ most of us do in our day jobs. Even user-centred industrial design.

There you are designing for a ‘segment’ that includes a large number of people. You try and recruit users that are representative of the segment and design around their needs, but you must focus on the needs and preferences that are common to multiple users.

Being able to focus, as we did in the Big Life Fix, not on a segment but on an individual user was an incredible privilege. It took us, and the audience, on an emotional journey,

and it was always crystal clear whether or not we had made the right thing.

Being realistic though, even at the bargain basement rates that the BBC paid us, the cost this kind of work would be beyond the means of the vast majority of disabled people. If we weren’t subsidising that work with our other jobs it would have been an order of magnitude more expensive still.

This reality check doesn’t mean that the approach we took can not benefit more disabled people, beyond those involved in the program.

I was lucky enough to have been able to explore these issues back in 2013 in a research project for Scope and the Helen Hamlyn Centre with Sam Jewell.

We realised that there was a fundamental equation at play when industrial design economics are applied to assistive technology.

As disabled people are very different from one another, the assistive technology that works best for an individual is often one that is aimed at a very narrow segment – or small group of people.

The problem is that set-up costs for industrial manufacture are usually fixed, so a narrower segment means fewer units to spread those costs over, increasing the cost of those units. This equation explains the eye-watering cost of much assistive technology.

As Sam and I pointed out back in 2013, general purpose electronic devices like smart phones and tablets and affordable digital fabrication technologies like 3D printing and laser cutting, can disrupt this equation – effectively removing this industrial set-up cost.

These are exactly the technologies we used to create the products we made in Big Life Fix and, now the design work is done, theoretically, anyone who wants a robotic camera rig like the one we made for James can download and 3D print the parts, put it together and download the app from iTunes.

How disabled people access the infrastructure to actually do this is an important question, but I’m running out of time.

The last thing I want to say is a defence of industry. Many disabled people don’t want to have to find a makerspace and some hackers, or even a shiny new East London tech startup, to get the products they need to live independently. They want products supported by a organisation they can rely on.

The UK Assistive Technology industry leads the world and is full of dedicated designers and technologists who work every day to improve the lives of thousands of disabled people.

I’m lucky to count some of these companies like Stannah and TFH as clients and I know there is so much we here could do to ensure that more disabled people get the support to benefit from their work.

Outside of assistive tech there is a growing awareness in industry that designing for disability makes business sense. For me getting to work with companies like Marshalls, the UK’s largest manufacturer of landscaping products and Cusack, the largest supplier of roadworks equipment, on accessibility technology projects affords the opportunity to have an impact on the lives of huge numbers of disabled people up and down the country.

I believe that as technologists, reaching out to industry, even in less fashionable parts of the country and focusing on partnership rather than disruption is most likely to maximise the positive impact of our work.” I stumbled upon this blog post by Ross Atkin the other day and I’ve been thinking about it so much I felt compelled to share it. It’s an interesting insight from the unique perspective of a designer who has had the privilege to design for the individual, but due to his industrial experience, he understands that in itself is a privilege. Ruby Steele of Smart Design, also part of the Big Life Fix team, has also spoken on the topic of ‘Designing for one’,  and the ability to “restore a bit of humanity to a person who had lost so much.” The inevitable individualism of people with disabilities, the large spectrum of unique cases and challenges, is something I’ve encountered and struggled with whilst trying to improve cooking for the visually impaired. The ability and confidence of each person I spoke to depended on a variety of factors including the level of visual impairment they live with, when they lost their vision, their lifestyle and living arrangements and their access to occupational therapy or understanding friends. Such is the challenge of designing for disability.  Ross touches on other themes like the accessibility of design and makerspaces, and the trust in a brand that a generalised solution can bring over an individualised one.  Discussion of this issue can spiral and grow, there will always be more to say, some of which Ross explores in his report ‘Enabling Technology’ with the Helen Hamlyn Centre...but this short talk is a good starting point.