Making the Invisible Visible (Juice Lecture)

Photo Credit: Nate Archer
Edited by Julia
Post by Doug

Last year, my friend Robin Uchida told me about a conference topic he was considering for the annual Juice Dialogues at OCAD. He asked me what I thought of it. As often happens when I’m talking to Robin, I could think of nothing else afterwards. When I got home that night, I sat down to give him a response to the topic and unintentionally set myself off on a long, tangential approach to the questions, “how can you make the invisible visible?”

There are people working away at hardware and software design to compensate for absent human faculties. They aren't well known usually because their research isn't regarded as commercially valuable on a large scale, but the distance between the "challenged" world and the "unchallenged" world is shrinking. In some cases, this might be literally about making the invisible visible, or the inaudible audible, and on a design/industry plane, it's about making invisible value visible, etc.

A couple of examples, if you've got the time...

I was doing a community relations audit of IBM Canada in the '90's when I heard this tale. In the '80's, their lab in Boca Raton was fooling around with something called "voice command". It was an attempt to make text audible and to convert auditory commands into characters (GUI not yet being a part of IBM's world). They figured it was going to be a narrow interest product for blind people, so they weren't treating its development very urgently. In much the same way at about the same time, Xerox was working on OCR (Optical Character Resolution), which converted scans of printed material into revisable text on screen. Both applications found a mass market, one in the handsfree operation of handheld devices and the other in the digitization of archived documents, among other things.

As long as a product is perceived to have a social purpose, companies are stingy at the R&D stage. Almost by virtue of having a virtue, commercially valuable initiatives are overlooked for investment in favour of less innovative and less valuable prospects that have only a commercial intent. Incidentally, at the time, IBM didn't think of their investment in software for the blind as having community relations value either. Corporations are so single minded, they blindly tunnel after profit, like moles, ignoring the easy good piling up behind them.

The same thing goes on today. I walked out in the sunlight with a cheap pair of sunglasses on and as I passed a photo-development delivery van, was stunned by how vivid the reflective decals looked on it. I took the glasses off and lost not only the intensity of colour, but actually lost the ability to distinguish some of the colours at all. Colour blindness affects a huge proportion of men (about half I think), but we all sense the damage differently due to variances in the ways the rods and cones in our eyes are blunted. Different light conditions and different light intensities affect our colour vision in ways that make it difficult for colour blind people to succeed in various occupations. We colour code traffic lights, electrical wires, maps, we sort fruit, diagnose internal injuries, and grade beef according to colour. Would you have a colour-blind man defuse the bomb in your basement?

Back to the Juice Dialogues, there are two levels of invisibility to be made visible by designers.

First, they could help to find and dramatize value where it is hard for corporate eyes to see it - often in the detritus of other product development efforts.

Second, they can have a mediating influence over the form and function that a new generation of "hard wired" (even the mechanistic language needs updating as technology become more intimate with biology) so that we don't find ourselves in a corporatized Tim Burton nightmare of mistuned perceptual instruments housed in hideous prosthetic structures (omigod! My new feet look like a pair of trout and the penis implant between my eyes keeps lifting my hat off my head!)

Are there any others?