WHEN DESIGN FICTION MEETS GEOSPATIAL SCIENCES TO CREATE A MORE INCLUSIVE SMART CITY

Day02. Thurday, July 08, 17:00 EDT

This talk highlights the contributions of design fiction to the improvement of the spatial capability of hearing-impaired people. They review the findings of 2 workshops, representing interdisciplinary and intersectoral compositions of arts & sciences, that demonstrated considering the singularity of the human being as an actual acoustic material is an innovative opportunity to improve the role of universal design in smart cities projects.

Smart cities are especially suited for improving urban inclusion by combining digital transition and social innovation. To be smart, a city has to provide every citizen with urban spaces, public services, and common goods that are effectively affordable, whatever the citizen’s gender, culture, origin, race, or impairment. Based on two design workshops, the Vibropod and the pointe-aux-Livres, this talk aims at highlighting the contributions of design fiction to the improvement of the spatial capability of hearing impaired people.

This research draws its originality from both its conceptual framework, built on an interdisciplinary and intersectoral composition of arts and sciences, and its operational approach, based on the use of the DeafSpace markers and the TRIZ theory (Russian acronym for Inventive Problem Solving Theory) principles. The two design fiction workshops demonstrate that considering the singularity of the human being as an actual acoustic material constitutes an innovative opportunity to improve the role of universal design in a smart city project. By reversing the classic posture, and defining disability by looking at characteristics of the environment rather than as limits of the people themselves (their bodies or their senses), this research proposes an innovative way of addressing smart city inclusivity issues.

This talk shows how increasing spatial enablement and having better control of spatial skills can offer deaf people new skills to improve the use of technology in support of urban mobility, as well as give them tools for feeling safer in urban environments.

Andee-Anne Blacutt is a doctoral candidate in design and social innovation at Université Laval. The processes of sensory perception are at the center of her research and creation process. She has completed a Master‚ Arts Degree in Visual Arts based on a narrative visual and sound system of narrative motifs. Since 2001, Blacutt has presented projects that multiply the way human beings can be contextualized differently according to space and time. Theater, painting, design, television and music are among her creative domains. She is currently working on a project to improve the quality of mobility of people as a value to foster a model of interaction between art and science.

Engineer and geographer, Stéphane Roche is a full professor of geospatial sciences at Laval University. He explores the complexity of human societies‚ spatial organization, and digital transition issues. His current work mainly focuses on human, cultural and inclusive dimensions of smart cities.