Design (be)greifen [Tangible Design]
Workshop | 2014
Funded by the Kreativfonds
How do blind people judge design? Does an aesthetic picture develop in the absence of the visual sense? Learned sensory perception and the capability to perceive and comprehend one‘s environment in a highly specialised fashion was the central focus of Ottonie von Roeder‘s work, in which she held workshops and interviews with groups of blind people.
The workshops presented participants with tasks pertaining to various aspects of design for which there were intuitive solutions. The design topic of the workshop series is the arrangement of objects in the home: Where do objects belong? What are the movement patterns of household objects? What do we mean by order, and how can we make it easier for residents to maintain order in their households?
An orderly household and the ability to find things are important for everybody, but for the blind it can often be a major problem. The participants‘ approaches to solutions served as the basis for research aimed at determining whether fundamental rules exist in design for the blind, whether a unique design style arises when one discards the visual sense, finding the aesthetic of auditory, olfactory, gustatory, and tactile perception, and where gaps exist in household design and its system of order.