Artistic Technologies is my latest project, which makes up the core of my JSPS Fellowship here at the Keio Graduate School of Media Design in Yokohama. The aim of the research is to find new ways to leverage assistive devices for empowering users to express their creativity through different forms of art in everyday life.
While there are specific devices designed for dancing, painting, playing music and engaging in other forms of artistic expressions, most assistive technologies is designed with primary functional purposes in mind. But this idea of “bridging the gap” promotes an image of people with disabilities which is almost always negative, highlighting missing capabilities instead of existing ones. By using assistive devices as a means to promote novel creative expressions I want to subvert expectations around disability and assistive technology, moving away from a deficit focus and towards a vision of uniqueness of capabilities.
As part of this research I am focusing primarily on wheelchairs as an example of artistic technology, but the aim is to expand to other assistive devices overtime.
In the initial phases of the project I conducted remote interviews with artists (including visual artists, musicians, dancers, actors and others) who use wheelchairs for mobility to understand how they integrate their own wheelchairs in their artistic practice, what creative opportunities it has unlocked for them, and discuss how these could be enhanced through disruptive new designs. The resulting paper has recently been accepted for publication at the 24th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility, and you can access a pre-print version of it below:
Assistive or Artistic Technologies? Exploring the Connections between Art, Disability and Wheelchair Use
Currently, I am working with teams of disabled artists, HCI researchers, designers, and engineers to co-develop new open-source technologies to unlock new creative possibilities for wheelchiar users.
If you want to know more about the project you can contact me at any time.
