Recently I was asked by a fellow reader of Richard Layman’s blog for the low down on San Francisco. The requester is on a temporary assignment in the City by the Bay, and had heard that I was familiar with it. We both, obviously, had an interest in planning, placemaking and urbanism evidenced by our shared readership in Richard’s blog.
Somehow, I ended up writing over a 1,500 words on San Francisco. I made a comment about this on Twitter and was subsequently asked for the piece again. So I thought I’d share it with the world at large. Or at least the world that reads Inaudible Nonsense. All three of you. After the jump, my recommendations a follow-up passage. (I take no responsibility for typos, it was totally stream of consciousness. Also, this is my recommendations and what I love/miss about SF, your mileage may vary.)
I have thought, written and created art about the urban enviornment for 15 years (as an anthropology and architecture student then as an artist and now as a designer), and yet I rarely share that here. Since Inaudible Nonsense is about nothing and everything, I think it’s time to start sharing more about design, art and life in the urban context.
What inspired this sudden need to share? This post at PingMag about the art on construction fences in Tokyo. The Japanese have a refined sense of design. No place is so obscure as to not create moments of beauty. A couple of my favorites from PingMag at the top and after the jump.
I’m working on a longer post about the accessible web inspired by Jeffrey Zeldman’s Designing with Web Standards, Second Edition when what should pop up on my Twitter feed?
“CaptioningSucks.com. Now let’s fix it” from none other than Zeldman himself.
In Designing with Web Standards, Zeldman lays out an incredibly strong case for accessibility in Web design. He’s not Deaf. He’s not Blind. He’s just a Web designer and business person that understands that ignoring even a small part of your audience is bad business strategy.
A friend wished someone a happy blogoversary on Twitter today. This got me to thinking about when mine was. I blogged the last semester of my senior year in art school that was 2002. My first post was September 26 of that year. It was an interesting experiment. I tried to use the format as an open sketchbook to talk about my influences, and to follow my ideas as they became projects. In light of my renewed interest in the human environment (the interaction between people and the space and community around), I had forgotten how important that was to my work 5 years ago. I found the following post (after the jump) dated 9-27-2007 and thought I”d repost it here. Its more relevant to who I am today than ever:
Continue Reading »
In theory, I live in the Deaf Capitol, the District of Columbia, which would be great and all if that was the only thing that defines me. But it’s not. And what was supposed to be a one year stop-over in DC has turned into almost four years. (Egad!) So although my hearing continues to decline, I’m also not getting any younger — it’s time to move.But where? Continue Reading »
A number of years ago, I read Aaron Betsky’s Queer Space: Architecture and Same-Sex Desire, a examination of LGBT cultural geography in the built environment and how it is manifest through leading gay and lesbian architects. It’s a fantastic read.
Now comes Deaf Space, and an architecture and planning for Deaf interaction and accommodations. Call me fascinated. From the Gallaudet article on this:
Hansel Bauman said it makes sense that this class is offered through the Department of ASL and Deaf Studies. “Architecture is one of the key ways a culture manifests itself in the physical world,” he explained. “Deaf culture centers around the language. The language has all the elements of architecture-the spatial kinesthetic of sign language, the desire of deaf people for the visual access that open space affords-lends itself to express the deaf way of being.”
So what say you? Where does this lead? I look forward to someone exploring this idea in book and essay form in the future. Understanding the importance of how identity structures our environment and vice versa is a developing area of geography, cultural studies and architecture history. So to me, this feels like a logical step forward to understanding Deafness.
Do you Twitter? I’m pretty smitten with it. It’s simple and easy to you. I Pownce as well, but at present hardly never use it. (Although I like the UI better in many ways.) I recently discovered Twitter packs “where the community recommends fellow Twitter users by topic of interest or geographical area” and also self identity.
I have a listing under Graphic Designers and the two LGBT sections. I didn’t see one for Deaf/HoH, so I created it. Feel free to add your name. It’s a great way to find new people to follow and new followers. Or just follow me, directly.
In my constant quest to start self-learning projects that I don’t finish, I am looking for a speechreading program. I swear I had found one through Seeing and Hearing Speech but that apparently now is only Windows-compatible (I have a Mac). I am positive that they used to sell a DVD version, but I may be just hallucinating. I really want this mostly to brush up on my skills and learn a few pointers and have some lessons to practice. There are options, but the designer in me tends to look askance at any book or DVD that doesn’t look well designed. It automatically loses credibility to me. So help me out here, anyone tried a program at home that they were satisfied with? Any program specifically that I should avoid?
I’m in the process of looking at graduate programs in design. Simultaneously trying to figure out what kind of accommodations I’m going to need. As I’m not fluent in ASL, I’m leaning toward something like CART, but not every school is ecstatic about this choice. So in my quest to find a less biased opinion, I came across Anonymous Deaf Law Student, who happens to write about just this question:
Oh, how our lives are defined by these individuals! (interpreters and captionists, that is) They are the gatekeepers to our education and success. Scary, right? Oh, I could tell stories about bad interpreters and captionists until the cows go home, but I’m not going to do that. Instead, I’ll just look at the general pros and cons of both approaches (for me, at least).
From time to time, I need to clear out my Google Reader shared and starred items, things I star because I thought I should write about them. Ha! Instead you just get a list. You’re welcome.
- Captioning Sucks!
Now let’s fix it!
![[Advertisement] Captioning Sucks! Now let’s fix it!](http://nonedesign.net/upload/captioning_sucks.jpg)
What I'm Reading- Event-Prototyping Talk in DC May 15th
- Un-Regressing a Carbon Tax
- Chris Sugrue's digital bugs
- Two Deaths and a Retirement: The Strange Shape of British Architecture
- Cycling is for Lovers
- new language of marketing
- Walter Disney now?
- The Bottom Third
- Google at Serious Play Conference in Pasadena.
- Get on the Bus: How Mass Transit Design Affects Participatory Potential
