Response 10

The week’s readings was wild. The first one was pretty eyeopening and very informative. The talk with from Liz Jackson was about the empathy and disability stigmas, and how designers can help. She talks about empathy, and how her and others like her struggle with it. She goes onto to explain a situating where she is at the dentist and the dentist poses a question,”If I see a blind woman crossing the street, do I help her and risk offending her, or do I let her cross the street and risk her getting hut?” That is a more dilemma, because you don’t know if the person needs help or not, and don’t want to cause problems or witness a problem that you could have changed. She then goes to talk about how the world sees the signs of a disabled persons, and says that that person is dibbled and needs help. That was pretty shaking to think about. She began to then talk about how as designers we are problem solvers, and that many designers see disabled people as a project or portfolio piece that is in need of fixing. I loved that analogy. She began talking about how disabled people hardly in positions of leadership, so it leads to misrepresentation and that disabled people are supposed to be thanking for the work for their behalf. She called this ‘design thanking.’ She then showed the example of A Nike ad that changed the way that I looked at it. Nike signed with the first every disabled athlete named Justin Gallegos, and she breaks it down piece by piece. The ad first starts off by stating,”Justin Gallegos suffers from Cerebral Palsy but dreams of braking the 3 hour barrier in the half marathon.” Soon after, an image of him smiling and happy is shown. She says,“Does this look like a man who is suffering to you?” Again moving forward, Nike continued to say that they were surprising him with this signing, while other sines with Nike is at a table with an audience. It is more professional, but it wasn’t professional for Justin, it was a ‘surprise.’ I though this was a very shaking thing to listen to. As a black man, I fully understand misrepresentation and not being treated as equal in the eyes of the media. She goes into talking about how designers can design for disabled people. We need to design for them, not for the beneficiaries. They are designing for the general audience to make the brand look better. These were not meant for disabled people.