Week 2. Adaptive Sports — Project Sketch. 090618.

Although the project is going through an explanatory phase on Inclusive Design, generating forms and ideas is an acceptable method to approach interests and to open a clearer project path, and therefore, a better and complete research phase.
This week’s brainstorming unlocked a field of interest in competitive sports and adaptive products for people with physical disabilities (in this particular case: visually impaired or blind). In the first picture I show a regular football field. It can be interesting to analyze how people answer to the following questions. What is it? Who would be using this? How is it used? Surely, and, without having any reference points, you can answer these questions in the following way: it is a regular football field, where players with different levels of expertise (from professional to amateurs) play to put a ball inside the opposing team’s goal through the construction of smart plays/or moves with the members of the same team.
Is this football field inclusive? Just as a hypothetical case, let’s say it’s meant to be used by soccer players who are blind, or who have any sort of physical disability that prevents easy and fluent mobility. Then, what would make the football field inclusive? Is it the same sport? Fun and play is inclusive, and the tools that allow the practice of any sport should be inclusive too.
In this particular case, I’m proposing an array of smart devices (wearables or smart textiles) that work as navigation systems so that the blind player can be positioned in the field in relation to the players of his/her own team, with the players of the opposing team, and with the goal to which he/she has to kick to. Today, this sport depends on analog systems with sounds, which are usually muted by the noise of the surroundings. It would be interesting to propose a concept where the game is seamless and fluid, posing a communication based on stimuli (in this case the touch and navigation). Briefly the concept is simplified by this equation: Design + Technology + Inclusion + Play.
