gracewoo@ml

resonance: designing for the extreme

I had this conversation with Inna a while ago about researching technology for special needs. To be completely honest, I've never been really interested in delving into this area. However, she made a strong point that often times, designing for the extreme cases gives strong insight into designing for the average user.

We thought along these lines and there seems to be several examples of this. For example, reading devices for the blind might lead to low-power haptic displays. However, none of them seemed particularly compelling only because I hadn't did any of this type of work myself. Anyway, yesterday, I was shown Dasher, which is an inference-based text input device.

http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/dasher/

This is really neat! It not only has a strong underlying modeled principle, but also a strong case for using it with people with disabilities. Further, as I can already see, this has really neat implications for working with non-traditional displays like public-signage or PDA input. Anyway, cool stuff!

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