Design Meets Disability

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Embracing Fashion

The evolution of glasses from medical appliance to fashion accessory challenges the notion that discretion is always the best policy. Hearing aids, prostheses, and many other products could be inspired by this example. More confident and accomplished design could support more positive images of disability.

Eyewear has come about by adopting not just the language of fashion but also its culture. If medical design wishes to emulate this success, it needs to appreciate that fashion often moves forward through extreme and even controversial work, and to welcome this influence within design for disability. We have to do more to attract fashion designers to collaborate on designs for people with a disability, and bring their perspectives to both the practice and the culture of inclusive design. At times this will expose cultural differences, but these are healthy tensions, well worth embracing and harnessing.

Hearwear

You might expect hearing aids to be less challenging than glasses: They don’t obscure the face; there are strong traditions of ear adornment and jewelry in most cultures; and we all reach for earphones and headphones from time to time. But somehow, rather than adopting a diversity of design approaches, the hearing technology industry has remained conservative.

That is why RNID, the British charity for the deaf and hard of hearing, and Blueprint, the architecture and design magazine, launched Hearwear, a project in which leading designers considered hearing aids and hearing technology from a fresh perspective.

Product and furniture designer Ross Lovegrove’s design, The Beauty of Inner Space, mixes organic forms appropriate for a prosthesis with carbon composite and gold. Like jewelry, the design seeks to complement the body rather than attempt to be camouflaged against it. The earphones are recessed to present an ear apparently open to sounds from the outside world, whereas a more convex form might have signaled that the wearer is listening to something else.

The WearHead*Phone is an enormous set of headphones with a military camouflage paint job. Whatever the technical justification for their size, they also represent a supreme gesture of self-confidence—the antithesis of current hearing aids. The camouflage is a reference to street culture, but could also serve as an ironic commentary on the attempted camouflage of pink plastic hearing aids that are conspicuous but pretend to be invisible.

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