Overview
Quietude is an H2020 (WEAR Sustain) funded research and innovation project, coordinated by the University of Siena, Italy (see: www.quietude.it/). The team includes deaf women, ethicists, makers, designers and technology experts. Our aim is to collectively imagine more sustainable, aesthetically enriched futures for deaf women by approaching disability as an opportunity for wearables design, rather than as an issue that needs to be addressed or solved.
The part of the project I was involved in ran from May 2017 — March 2018, and resulted in a series of prototypes: an ecology of jewellery products designed to support awareness, safety and social sustainability of deaf women in everyday life contexts. My role was to lead participatory Research through Design workshops (in May and November 2017), advise on Design and Aesthetics and write up the project (Wilde, D. Marti, P. Exploring Aesthetic Enhancement of Wearable Technologies for Deaf Women. Proceedings of the ACM SIGCHI Conference on Designing Interactive Systems (DIS 2018), 9-13 June 2018, Hong Kong). I also co-wrote the original funding application.
Publications
Wilde, D., Marti, P. Exploring Aesthetic Enhancement of Wearable Technologies for Deaf Women. DIS’18, In Proc. Designing Interactive Systems. ACM (2018): 201–213.
Funding
Quietude received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement N. 732098, which supported the collaboration between the core partners and myself at SDU to do the work described here and Siena Art Institute for translation services and ethics support.
For project partners see the colophon (top left). More project information at www.quietude.it