I really enjoyed listening to these talks personally because I myself deal with disabilities so it was nice to hear people wanting to improve living with new ways of design. The most moving talk or example showed was definitely the short film about the man in a wheelchair just trying to get home for his daughters birthday but struggles with NYC transportation. I can’t believe how little handicap stations for the subway there is and actually dealt with his struggle when a friend visited me a couple weeks ago and had a cast on and trying to get around the city was pretty hard. I really enjoyed the other talks and how we need to design things not only for disabilities but for inclusion as well for everyone. I liked the talk about how glasses have evolved over time and how they used to be cookie-cutter and was for medical purposes only but evolved to have a design element and look different and still be used for medical purposes. Another talk I enjoyed was about how they asked all these pilots about crashes and how the equipment was. How these planes were mass produced and using what a basic size of a man would be to place where they should be on the plane wasn’t working and then changed and then reported less crashes after changes. The last thing in the talk that really stuck out was when someone said that we should start designing now for those disabilities because we will be the ones with more disabilities as the years go by so we should just be helping ourselves.
Since I do deal with disabilities myself, I do see the need for improvement in some things I use daily. For example, I’m a diabetic and see a lot of room for improvement to help with living with the disease. One inconvenience I deal with is when its winter time and I have mutual layers on and it’s a huge hassle to try and get to my skin to be able to take a shot of insulin. A thought to fix this is to design new clothes with like zippers or patches or holes in them and look fashional so it’s easier to get to my skin. Another design intervention that needs to happen is “One size fits all” clothing. ONE SIZE DOES NOT FIT ALL! I’m sorry but no. This needs to not be a thing anymore because not everybody has the same body type. And lastly, I think there need’s to be more brail and ASL signs in public places because I don’t see a lot of those signs around and a lot of the population can only communicate that way.
