Adaptive works of art
This weekend, while in Kansas City for the American Art Therapy Association’s annual conference, I had the opportunity to go to the Nelson-Atkin’s Museum of Art.
Let me pause here to say a big, enthusiastic YES to museums with free admission. MORE. OF. THIS.
While I was there, I got to see the work in the Access+Ability show. The show exhibited “over 70 user-centered and inclusive designs developed in the last decade — from low-tech products that assist with daily routines to sensors that stabilize tremors associated with Parkinson’s disease.”

The first piece I encountered was the mannequin wearing the work of Francesca Rosella and Ryan Genz of CuteCircut: the SoundShirt and a reflective skirt, both designed for people with sensory loss. The shirt’s embedded sensor system “translates the experience of listening to music into a physical and sensory experience that is felt on the skin.” Pretty remarkable! It is set up now to correspond to orchestral instruments, but I could imagine this continuing to evolve to allow a greater breadth of embodied musical experiences.
The skirt did not say much else other than it was reflective — I appreciated that it is reflective without being neon or obnoxious-looking. One of the big problems with so many adaptive clothing items is aesthetics…not a problem here!

As someone who works with older adults, I thought the jeweled hearing aids by Elana Langer were fabulous and could go a long way to reducing the stigma around wearing assistive devices. You can read more about her work here, in an article about the show from Smithsonian. I know quite a few older adults who would LOVE to have these!

The other project that caught my eye was a video and drawings by Emilie Gossiaux. She uses the BrainPort Device, which has helped her resume drawing after losing her vision in a bicycle accident.
We won’t talk about the inclusion of my most-hated robotic “pet” in the exhibit, or the regrettable continuation of the use of bed-alarms…I was mostly very impressed by the show. The juxtaposition of some of these less user-centered solutions really made the other items stand out in their inventiveness and even beauty.
In order for these pieces to truly impact the world, we need to lower costs, increase speed of development, and most importantly, involve the eventual end-users in every step of design, creation, testing, and validation. Exhibitions like this one are a good way to start, by increasing awareness, but in order to fully realize these “innovations increasing the potential for all people to access the world” they need to move out of the category of precious object and into everyday life.
