Being aware of ourselves

Introduction

This blog is about our senses.

Though we live in an apparently multi-sensory world and we have, as humans, a great breadth of senses and cognitive systems to process stimuli, there is a problem.

It's not an invisible problem.

It's the problem of the visual.

Visual addiction

Just to start with hyperbole, vision is the crack cocaine of our senses.

It's fast, it's exciting, it can be overwhelming in beauty and fear.

However, it is also one of our least trustworthy senses and can, with our brain, invent and dream realities that are not true.

Like a drug, visual addiction can drive a person to feed it to the exclusion of all other sensibilities. 

This is why there is a co-dependent visual relationship between designers and users. Both maker and consumer want MORE visual user experiences.

The problem of a visually obsessed world is that it undervalues other senses.

We are not sight

I work a lot with people with visual impairments and, in all the work I am contracted to do, there is the underlying idea of accessibility.

I have no issue with making information accessible.

I do sometimes worry though that there is a patronising sense that by being unable to see, people must experience the visual, even if the experience is neither particularly high quality nor cognitively sensible.

This comes from the concern that vision is primary and there is a failure in experiencing it.

I'd like to reverse that concern.

What about all the people who have vision but are living with degraded senses of touch, hearing, taste and smell?

You cannot hear

I don't mean that in a sense of disability or impairment - more that, with our exaggerated visual world, we have allowed the production of alternative sensory media and art to fall away.

In that falling away, the capacities of people to comprehend and appreciate have dropped too.

You can read more here: Cross Eyed UX.

What to do?

I'm just blogging here to raise awareness of this loss.

With wearable technology and more screen-based interactions, I think we need to think about the long term effects of visual addiciton and how it affects the whole family of our senses.

There are alternatives, I wrote about some here in terms of Quantification and Wearable Technology.

We all need to be mindful of how we are the combination of many senses and it is the spread of senses that builds the broadest sense of our humanity.