99% Invisible - 99% Invisible-50- DeafSpace

Episode Date: March 22, 2012

The acoustics of a building are a big concern for architects. But for designers at Gallaudet University in Washington, DC, it’s the absence of sound that defines the approach to architecture. Gallaudet is a university dedicated to educating the deaf … Continue reading →

We get support from UC Davis, a globally ranked university, working to solve the world's most pressing problems in food, energy, health, education, and the environment. UC Davis researchers collaborate and innovate in California and around the globe to find transformational solutions. It's all part of the university's mission to promote quality of life for all living things. Find out more at 21stCentry.ucdavis.edu. This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. Do you mind if I talk to you while we walk? If you've ever seen an episode of the TV show The West Wing,

you probably know one of its trademark scenes. The walk and talk. You're going to this meeting? Yeah. WW160, you've been able to find it? I don't even know where I am right now. I'm looking on this side again. the walk and talk. The West Wing is filled with these. Two staffers, the White House walk through the halls, talking about some government policy or political plot point.

The dialogue isn't necessarily exciting on its own, but add a little motion and you've got some compelling freaking television. Well, we may as well get used to having meetings in the quarters from now on. Maybe our only hope. And now know why they made the Oval Office a special shape. But after you watch a few episodes, you might notice something. The characters almost never look at each other. They mostly look straight ahead.

Do you mind if I talk to you while we walk? And there's a good reason for this. When people walk and talk, they don't need to look at each other. We use our eyes to navigate. We use our ears to listen. But that doesn't work if you're deaf. That's our reporter today, Tom Driesbach. He went to Gallaudet University in Washington, DC to talk to a researcher in Robert's Servage. Gallaudet is the only university in the world designed entirely for the deaf and hard of hearing. Robert is deaf himself, and he's been looking

into this question of how deaf people walk inside. He told me about his latest experiment. So I'm doing a comparative study between people who are speaking, walking along H Street. I think that doesn't sound like a Robert. Yeah, that's actually the voice of Carolyn Restler. She's an interpreter at Gallaudet. Carry on that.

So I'm doing a comparative study between people who are speaking, walking along H Street, and walking together and speaking to one another. So two hearing diets with the same kind of camera on their head, and then two deaf diets who have this camera mounted on their head. Diad is just a fancy term in sociology for a pair of people. So Robert put cameras on these two pairs of people, hearing and death, and he had them walk down the street.

And he did this so he could precisely monitor what people look at when they walk and talk, versus when they walk and sign. And he found very clear differences. To hearing people look straight ahead the whole time they were walking, you might see just a few seconds, very rare seconds, when the person would look at the other person who they were walking beside and speaking. They wouldn't ever make eye contact.

One would look at the other. Well, as with deaf people, there was a continuous maintained eye contact. So because American sign language is a visual language, it requires constant eye contact. But maintaining eye contact also means you can't pay full attention to any obstacles up ahead. And that's a problem if you're walking. I mean I guess if you can think about yourself as a person you can hear. If you weren't looking at the road as you were

driving and looking at your passenger, as you're driving down the road, you can imagine how difficult that might be to mediate your car down the road. Well the same kind of things happens with deaf people, but we watch out for one another. For walking and signing to work, the people holding a conversation need to keep an eye out for obstacles. But it's not like deaf people make a deal at the beginning of a conversation, you talk, I'll be the lookout. When deaf people are looking at one another, there's an agreement, an internal agreement, unspoken agreement that's understood between the two people conversing. It's almost like the people when you're in a conversation, you're in a kind of dance, where you're not discussing what's happening between each other,

but you just sort of know what the next move should be. That's exactly it. When you're dancing, you kind of work with your partner in the way they breathe, the way they move their body, and you respond accordingly, the same thing holds true with deaf people in a conversation. When they're designing buildings, most hearing architects are not thinking about providing a venue for this dance. Robert says a lot of spaces are too narrow and confining for a good conversation.

There's this sense that buildings were not designed in such a way as if they accommodate deaf people. So how does that feel? I guess the best way to say that is like we feel like sardines. You know, like we're all lined up one after the next and we're trying to converse in that way and there's no ease in our communication. It's actually also true of many buildings

at Gallaudet University, even though it's dedicated to teaching the deaf and hard of hearing. It's a relatively old campus. A lot of buildings were built in the mid 1800s and it looks like a typical northeastern liberal arts college. But there are signs that this school is different than your Wesleyans and your Amhersts or whatever. Take for example the doorbells on campus.

Nowadays people use lights, you can flick a light switch and let somebody know that you're at the door, but in the 1800s before electric light they used vibration. The university has a display of an old doorbell. It's about four feet high with a round metal handle attached to a chain. And at the other end of that chain is a lead weight. You'd arrive at the door and you'd simply pull the chain. With that hit to the floor, I mean we're listening to the chain, but that hit to the floor, you'd immediately get it, someone's at the door.

That's Hansel Bauman. He is now the director of design and planning a Gallaudet. Bauman is not deaf, and in this case that is his voice. And this was one of the really cool, but kind of a necronomistic innovations at Gallaudet. But several years ago, the university realized that some of its standards of architecture and innovation had slipped. So they asked Hansel to help lead a group project that would rethink the campus design with deaf people in mind. They called the project Deaf Space. Deaf Space really started at the beginning of time whenever there are deaf people there is

this idea of Deaf Space. Deaf people have sensibilities of adapting their world to their way of being. The campus took those ideas and poured them into the design of a new building called the Sorenson Language and Communication Center, but everyone calls it the SLCC. It was built in 2008, and they're also working on a new dorm. Hansel Bauman showed me around, and I saw that there are a lot of little innovations. Some that come to mind immediately like the type of doors.

If you're walking and signing a normal door will stop your conversation cold. You notice we just passed through two sliding doors. The sliding doors are purposely designed to allow people to continue, assign the conversation as they enter the building so you don't stop, open the door, start the conversation again. And then there are more subtle changes. One of the big ideas behind Deaf Space is avoiding eye strain. That's because when you communicate all day with your eyes, it's easy to get tired. So if you have bad lighting conditions, for example,

which is backlighting, glare, high contrast between dark spaces and light spaces, there are conditions in the environment which tend to visually vibrate. Like if you have horizontal blinds and light coming through the blinds, you'll start getting vibration. All of those annoyances in and of themselves may not be so bad, but taken together

over the time of the day, it's the beginning of eye strain. And eye strain really wears people out, basically. I've actually noticed that myself, like when I look at horizontal blinds and get that sort of eye vibration, and I thought I was just weird. I don't think you're weird, Tom. So the Sorenson building avoids those traps.

It has enormous windows and a lot of diffuse light to reduce shadows. While you have some direct light coming in, it's still kind of filled with this diffuse quality of light that there's really not a lot of shadows on the face. There's not a lot of distraction on surfaces behind us. And when we walked by a classroom, Hansel pointed inside at the color scheme. The color of the blue classroom, that's a color we've been experimenting with, is a good contrast to a range of skin tones. You can just so clearly see sign language in there, and that would be better when you say you can the next door.

Not all of the changes worked. In the building's design they decided to round off sharp corners. That's because if you can't hear footsteps from around the corner, a lot of times you won't know someone's coming at all and people bump into each other. So they rounded off these corners. Again, a lesson learned. We realized that people now hug that curved corner like a race car and you still kind of have that problem.

So our strategy now is to create glass corners that allow you to kind of see through the corner, but it still extend that period of time that you have before you get to the corner. The building is definitely pleasant to look at. The color scheme is nice, the lightest pleasing, but as someone who can hear, I probably would not have noticed a lot of these little changes if Hansel hadn't pointed them out. But after walking around with Hansel, the most striking thing about the building

was the level of thoughtfulness. Everything in the building seems to have a specific thought behind it. Chairs are on wheels so you can constantly rearrange them in circles, and they made benches out of wood because you can feel vibrations more easily through the wood. And they try to strategically place air conditioning units so they don't make as much noise. That's because it turns out that hearing aids can pick up that sound in a really jarring way.

And for Hansel, working on deaf space has meant becoming sensitive to a range of issues that he had never thought of before. I think the window that the deaf experience offers to architects is to provide us with a new kind of awareness around what's working and what's not working in a room. That we might accept every day is just kind of our condition and we're not aware of it. It's not in front of us in a way that we can name what's the

aggregation in the room or the environmental stressor. We don't have a way to recognize that, whereas I think it's part of every day deaf experience. That's why everyone involved in the deaf space Project says it is not just for Deaf people. Fundamentally, this is about universal design. Designed for the widest range of people possible with a variety of abilities, because not only is it more inclusive, it's demonstrably better design, regardless of need. When AXO and Smart Design collaborated on making a potato peeler for people with arthritis, they created a new peeler with an ergonomic, big, fat black handle that turned out to be better for everyone. Now you see that application everywhere.

Designing for the deaf may be more subtle, but if we mitigate eye strain and hearing aid interference from American listeners, there's no telling how much better everyone's life would be. how much better everyone's life would be. 99% Invisible was produced this week by Tom Drys Bach with a little help from me Roman Mars. We are a project of KALW 91.7 local public radio in San Francisco and the American Institute of Architects in San Francisco. The show is distributed by PRX, the public radio exchange, making public radio more public, more at PRX.org. Sam Greenspan is our charm city producer at large.

You can find the show and like the show on Facebook. I tweet at Roman Mars, but you can always just catch up with us on the website. It's 99%invisible.org. or. you