 I am Caroline Bowman, director of Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, and I am thrilled to welcome you to the Cooper Hewitt Lab. Accessibility and inclusivity is an ongoing challenge across all aspects of life, and must be and is front and center as a priority for Cooper Hewitt America's Design Museum. Our recent mammoth renovation transformed Cooper Hewitt into a welcoming participatory experience with groundbreaking creative tech and a collection of over 210,000 design objects fully digitized. Today, accessibility and inclusion are one of Cooper Hewitt's five strategic pillars for today, tomorrow, and the years ahead. With hundreds of thousands of visitors yearly since the museum's reopening in 2014, we are embracing accessibility in its broadest sense to ensure that people of all abilities fully enjoy our offerings. We can't do it overnight, but it is a process we are entirely committed to. With the generous support of AARP and the Ford Foundation, and in partnership with New York City Mayor's Office for People with Disabilities, Cooper Hewitt Lab Design Access takes advantage of Cooper Hewitt as a dynamic design hub to activate the museum with stimulating conversations, hands-on design learning, and creative expression. The Lab is a multidisciplinary event and the first of its kind. If you haven't seen it, don't miss our current exhibition on the first floor, Access Possibility, featuring more than 70 products and services developed in the last decade with and by people with physical, cognitive, and sensory disabilities. From an all-terrain wheelchair for the developing world to wearable tech embedded into micro actuators to allow a person to feel music on their skin, Access Possibility emphasizes how design and technology are augmenting the potential for people to access the world in ways previously unimaginable. Terrific to team up tonight with Columbia University Digital Storytelling Lab to explore the all-important role of verbal descriptions in the museum experience. The design process has so much to offer as we strive to provide our visitors with multimodal means of understanding and appreciating exhibition content. We're thrilled to have people of all abilities here tonight to help us create new ways to communicate and expand our audiences. Thank you very much to Lance Wheeler, founding director of the Columbia University Schools of the Arts Digital Storytelling Lab. Lance is recognized as a pioneer for the way he mixes storytelling and technology. And thanks to Rachel Ginsberg, creative strategist and experienced designer, handling strategy and partnerships for Columbia University's Digital Storytelling Lab. Huge thanks also to Ellen Lupton, senior curator of contemporary design and co-curator of our upcoming exhibition, opening April 13th, The Senses, Design Beyond Vision. And huge thanks to Pamela Horn, director of cross-platform publishing and strategic partnerships and to Ruth Starr, Education Associate for working with Columbia University to put this evening together. And I'm very excited to hear that tasting chocolate will be part of our experience tonight. So enjoy and thank you for being with us tonight. Good evening. Welcome to our storytelling salon on verbal description. I'm Pamela Horn, director of cross-platform publishing, strategic partnerships at Cooper Hewitt. And I'm joined at the podium with Ellen Lupton, the museum senior curator of contemporary design. This is Cooper Hewitt's second event produced in collaboration with Columbia University's Digital Storytelling Lab. These events engage the public in hands-on exploration of design with the aim of helping the museum and our participants understand objects, artifacts, user experience and content in new dimensions. Tonight, we're asking you to help in generating accessible descriptive language that will enhance the understanding of design for all of Cooper Hewitt's audiences. Yeah, it's going to be super fun. So I want to start by telling you just a little bit about the exhibition that's opening in April, The Senses, Design Beyond Vision. You see here on the screen a young girl with a blonde ponytail. And what is she doing? She is touching a furry wall with both hands. And when our exhibition opens right here in this gallery in about a month and a half, visitors will be able to touch that furry wall. And when they do so, the sound of a stringed instrument will play. And when more people touch the wall, you will get more instruments in the manner of a rather chaotic, improvised symphony. So please come and touch the wall. The designer, Bruce Miriman, told us that the instant people encounter this furry wall, they want to touch it. So no instructions necessary. The fur is an invitation to experience and activate the piece. On a more serious note, I'm showing now on the screen an audio tactile map of buildings of the Smithsonian Institution on the Mall in Washington. And it's a digital screen that sits on a tabletop. And on top of the screen are three-dimensional models of Smithsonian buildings. And visitors can tap and double-tap these buildings to reveal audio content about those sites. It's designed by Steve Landau, founder of Touch Graphics, who is really the world's preeminent developer of tactile graphics. And he is actually working with us extensively on this exhibition, together with Sina, who you're going to hear from later, to create an entirely new interface for experiencing objects in a museum setting. Pretty cool. Pretty cool. So as Caroline mentioned, Cooper Hewitt is embarking on this journey, and it is a journey. So let me just back up a little bit, because I wanted to check in with the audience and actually read you the room. Ellen was talking about the room we're in, that these galleries will be housing the senses. These galleries that we're now in, the recently opened Barbara and Morton Mandel design gallery, is about 100 feet deep and about 60 feet wide, divided into smaller spaces by columns. The ceiling is about 10 feet high, and the walls are painted a rich charcoal gray. Some additional things that we've been working on is to develop an exhibition design that clearly is accessible for all visitors, including people with sensory differences. Many museums do a pretty good job of making their facilities wheelchair accessible and meeting basic ADA requirements, but it's another matter for museums to create welcoming content and experiences in galleries and on their websites and campuses. But it's especially challenging to welcome visitors with visual impairments, because museums have long identified themselves around looking exclusively. So the tool we're exploring with you tonight is verbal description. A visitor with blindness or low vision can gain access to museums content if we describe the artifacts on display with clear direct language. Okay, so I'm going to lead us in a little exercise in visual description, and I'm curious if people can recognize a creature that I'm about to describe to you who just turned 200 years old. One, he has a flat top head. Two, he has a scar on his forehead. Three, he has a protruding brow and four bolts on his neck. Anybody got it? Frankenstein invented by the great Mary Shelley in 1818 and copyrighted by Universal Studios in 1931. How did they do that? They own the image of Frankenstein if he features those four elements. So don't go out and make any graffiti or tattoos or your own t-shirts with any creature with those four elements. So this really impressed me, and I thought if lawyers at Universal Studios can summarize Frankenstein in four copyrighted points, then museums should be able to do that about our objects. And we're going to challenge all of you tonight to write some really succinct and vivid summaries of objects. And how are we going to do it? So to explain a little more of what we're doing at Cooper Hue at Around Verbal Descriptions, we began already offering descriptive tours, exhibition tours, twice a week, and these tours involve our trained educators describing the spatial context of the exhibition, as well as objects on display, and we give visitors a chance to touch certain objects during these tours. Accessibility is a major strategic initiative, as Caroline mentioned, and a big priority at Cooper Hue. So we're also weaving into our bones as part of our workflow, curatorial and exhibition processes. This accessibility layer. When we begin to think about exhibition objects, we think about what can be touched and what we might be able to acquire in duplicate and how to make materials that are part of objects available for touch. We're now preparing to make verbal descriptions available to any visitor, any time, in our galleries and online. It's in its nascent stages. We are so proud and excited to be working with Sina Barum and his company, Prime Access Consulting, to develop an app that will integrate rich audio and text-based content with the physical labels in our gallery. Okay, and real fast, here's how it's going to work. Every label in the exhibition will have an object title and a unique number, and that object title will be in Braille, as well as in Latin text, and visitors can type in that unique number on their smartphone and access the full content of the exhibition label in audio and in text, including a visual description of the object. This takes a lot of work, a lot of talent, a lot of innovation, a lot of commitment on behalf of the museum, and it's going to take some help from you, because tonight what we want to do is experiment and have you help us develop some language for describing objects. So that's the workshop component of the evening. But first we're going to have some inspiring talks by Annie Leist and Sina Barum. On the screen is a painting by Annie Leist, and she's going to describe it in a bit more detail herself, so I'm going to give it my try, which is the painting is a soft rich blue with lighter and darker areas rendered in big painterly strokes. And the upper right corner is a black rectangle with a red hand in it. It's a pedestrian traffic signal that says, don't walk. But Annie explained to me that when she sees that red don't walk, it tells her that when it goes off, then it's safe to cross, because she can't really see the white walking man as well as the red hand, and this is just like an amazing interpretation and experience of urban space. So Annie is an artist. She is an advocate of accessibility in cultural institutions. She is currently the External Affairs and Disability Inclusion Associate at the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs. Following Annie, you'll see on the screen is a photo of Sina Barum at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh. Sina is a young man with dark hair and a trim beard. He's touching a tactile model of one of Andy Warhol's Brillo boxes. The model is white. It has a raised surface that models the lettering and graphics on Warhol sculpture. Sina helped develop this set of models as well as a wayfinding system at the Warhol Museum. Sina is a computer scientist, consultant, business owner, and researcher. He is the Director of Prime Access Consulting in Cary, North Carolina, which advises on website and digital accessibility and kind of a rock star. So, without further ado, we'll invite Annie to come up and talk to us for a bit. Thank you. Hello, beautiful. Hi, everybody. I'm really excited to be speaking with you guys tonight. I'm very excited about this workshop and this event. And I'm just going to spend the next five to seven minutes talking to you guys, giving you a little bit of a challenge and a little bit of an invitation, which I hope you will take up. So, many of us in this room are creative types. We're artists. We're designers. We're people who are creative in other ways. We are poets. We are developers. We are technologists. All of us are interested. If you're here, I would venture to say it's pretty safe that you're interested in coming up with creative solutions to interesting problems. And so, my challenge to you and my invitation to you is to think about what if creative people, in particular artists and designers, the people who make the interesting and beautiful things in our world, also took it a step further and went on to try to make those things as universal in terms of their communication of their message as possible. What if the creative people in the world were the people who helped all kinds of people, regardless of ability or background or interest level, engage with the objects and the artworks that they make? So, I'm going to be speaking a lot about the idea of artists, but please be assured that when I say artist, I mean everyone who creates something to make the world a little bit better. So, the title of my presentation is Create. Then, dot, dot, dot, look. And this is a little exercise for the sighted folk in the room. My apologies to those of us who are like me and may not be able to see quite as well, but we're going to engage together in something that I really want to demonstrate to you that we'll sort of hopefully set the stage for why we're doing this in the first place. So, for all my sighted peeps out there, I want you to first look at what I'm about to show you. Is everybody ready? So, what I would like for y'all to do is just shout out to me some of the things you saw in that image that I just showed you. Four silhouettes, a wet sidewalk, rain, colors, reflections, primary colors, a red purse. What else? Light, movement, drawn stripes, broad strokes, walking light, anything else? Painting? We could go on and on, right? You only looked at that image for five seconds. I'm going to flip back to it for a second, and we got a whole lot out of this image for five seconds. This is a painting, and I'm not going to describe it fully. If anyone would like me, I'm going to do... There's a lot of images in this presentation, and I'm going to be describing particular elements of them, but if anyone would like a fuller description later, please come and find me, and I will also be creating a digital version of this PowerPoint that has descriptions built in. But this image, I think, got a pretty good description from the group here, but you only looked at that for five seconds, and imagine what you could get out of it if you looked at it for longer, and imagine going into a gallery or a museum and not even having that five seconds to take it in visually. That, to me, is one of the major purposes of verbal description. It's to enable people who do not necessarily have the benefit of walking into a gallery or moving into a gallery or moving through a museum experience and taking in with their eyes even that five seconds of information about a painting that has to do with a crosswalk and people walking through the mist and a little rainy day in New York City, perhaps, with the zebra crossing of the crosswalk, and yes, in fact, a red purse, right? And we even got into, we're going to be thinking a little bit about narrative tonight, we even got into a little bit of narrative, right? To me, one of the major purposes of description is to enable people who cannot see to be able to start to discern the narrative for themselves, right? So looking is a huge important part of that. But what comes next when you're creating a description? You have to determine certain things. You have to determine what's relevant. So what if the creative people of the world were writing the descriptions? What would they determine? Here's another rainy crosswalk painting. And, you know, it's time for me to confess that most of the examples that you're, in fact, okay, all of the examples do that. I will be showing our works of my own. I'm a painter, as an artist, as well as an accessibility advocate and as well as a civil servant in the great city of New York. So for me, what I think is so interesting about this work, I was obsessed with the little flecks of orange that I put in that had to do with, that are right along the shoulders of the main figure that you can see from behind that takes up about half of this painting. I really loved those. But are those the most important thing to the description? Maybe not. But a looking exercise, like turning off your brain and looking at an image just for a few seconds, even a few seconds longer than we did, might help you discern what's actually worth including in a description. What are those key visual elements, right? And when you're a creative person, you also kind of need to differentiate. There are a lot of similar objects in the world and in the museums of the world. So what makes one painting, and this is the painting that Ellen described beautifully, what makes one painting of a pedestrian don't walk symbol different from another painting of a pedestrian don't walk symbol in a field of sort of abstracted color, this one happens to be gold, different from another painting of a pedestrian don't walk symbol in a colored field, and this one happens to be green and the don't walk symbol is a little closer up. So as you can see, I have a mild obsession with the don't walk sign and they really are, this is a series I call Beacons and they really are Beacons for me in the urban world, but an important thing about description is to differentiate between these different objects. Is it the way they were created? Is it the color? Is it the paint strokes? Is it the size? What makes one object different from another? The other thing as an artist or as a creative person that you need to be aware of is translating. When you translate things from the visual world into the world of language, as a creative person, whether it's your own work or whether it's the work of somebody else, you might have access to a particular special set of knowledge or language that maybe not everyone who is as deeply involved in the art or the design world as you are would understand and maybe people who don't have as much vision literally as you do might also not be familiar with. For example, this is a painting that has a lot of vertical lines that are much more definite in colors of orange and brown, but there are also a lot of horizontal gestural strokes and those of us who might be visual and might be familiar with visual conventions that are often used in art or in imagery to communicate things might understand that those horizontal strokes communicate horizontal movement, but someone who has never seen that visual convention might not necessarily get that, so we might have to be a little bit more explicit. This is also true when you're describing perspective. Someone who has never seen a bridge descending or a street like disappearing into the distance might not realize that that is often conventionally represented by creating angles and having that bridge or that street recede into a point in the horizon, so those kinds of things are really important to translate, so be thinking about that as you're developing your language tonight. Filtering, we all have filters and those of us who are artists and creative peoples, we need to think about what our filters are. Our filters necessarily come from our own experience. My particular filter in terms of the painting that's now on the screen is that I happen to know that it was inspired by a street corner near my studio at Sunset on a December or January very cold late afternoon and it's another Beacon's painting, so there is another Don't Walk symbol in there. But is that really relevant to the description? Also, I happen to think sunsets are beautiful and cold weather is terrible, but are those filters of my own personal experience relevant? We all have our experiences and our filters and also we all see the world differently. My way of seeing the world is different from your way and that's not just because I have extremely limited vision. If anyone remembers the experience of a couple years ago when there was a mild internet obsession for about 48 hours about what color a particular dress was, was it blue and black, or was it yellow and gold? This was an, and if you're not sure what I'm talking about, Google hashtag the dress, and you will find this, and endless scientific papers and dissertations may have been written about this since, but everyone sees the world differently, so it's important to understand what your filters are and recognize them, especially if you're a creative person and you see the world through those creative eyes. Evoke, here's where it gets fun to be a creative person. Now one of the things I often caution when I teach description to people in museums who are educators or who are people who are learning, or who are learning description so that they can lead tours is to be very careful about what you say about a particular object because what you want to do is give the person, sort of give the person who is blind or visually impaired the tools to draw their own conclusions, to engage with the object, whether it be an art object or a design object or a historical object, on their own terms to give them enough information so that they can make their own judgments, feel their own feelings and ask their own questions. But what I'm going to propose here is what might be fun for those of us who are creative and artistic is to use poetic language. Maybe not language that says this is a very dark, moody painting and there's obviously rain and it's a dark night and it's lonely, but then there's this one bright patch of an umbrella that's being caught by the headlight of a car lighting up half the painting in a brilliant turquoise color. Maybe we don't want to tell someone how to feel about that night, but maybe we can use poetic language. Think about the sound of the rain. Think about that intense bright turquoise in the dark, shadowy painting context. Think about the reflections that you can see. And as an artist, I happen to know, you know, I happen to know that I was in this moment and I could hear the rain on the streets and the cars going along the city streets with the rain. If you're describing your own creation, I think it's interesting to think about giving yourself a little bit of poetic license as long as you don't cross that line into telling someone how to feel about your own work. Finally, I want to encourage you to think about the collaborations involved. You're not only collaborating with museums and educators and the people who are helping facilitate these descriptions for particular purposes, and I know Sina's going to talk about a lot of the different types of descriptions that might be used for different purposes. You're collaborating with them, but you're also engaging in a collaboration with your audience, whether that be somebody who is blind or have low vision, who is hearing your description, or somebody else who might just be curious to hear what a verbal description can tell them about the artwork. We as creative people and as artists have, again, that privileged knowledge. And so, for example, it's important to understand how your privileged knowledge can support that collaboration, support the meeting of the minds and the communication between you, the creator, and the viewer or listener who is experiencing your work. A positive example might be that I happen to know that in this particular painting, which is also a rainy crosswalk at night, you're seeing some of my favorite themes here, I was really interested in experimenting with line as well as with fields of color and intense sort of brush strokes. So there are a lot of lines in this, and it does create a very specific way that this painting in some ways is different from some of my other work. On the other hand, I was also thinking a lot about silhouettes and how, to my perception, sometimes the silhouettes of people wind up looking more like holes in the environment than actual objects. Now, that's something I was thinking about a lot as an artist, but maybe that doesn't belong in the verbal description because maybe that's not actually here in the painting. Maybe it's not actually visible. So I would say use your creative, your privileged knowledge as an artist and as a creator and as a designer. But remember that you want people to come to their own conclusions about this. And maybe talking about the silhouette as a hole in the environment when it's not necessarily as visually indicated there is not the best thing. Maybe that's something for the label. Maybe that's something for the artist's statement. Maybe that's something for the artist's talk that you give. But maybe it's not something for the verbal description because you want the people that you're collaborating with, those viewers, to come to their own experience. So I want to encourage you guys as creative people to take this on as a responsibility, right? But I also want to encourage you to take it on as an opportunity. If you're an artist, if you're a designer, really think about this opportunity as describing your own work, as broadening your audience, as communicating about your work in a different way, as a way to learn about your own work because a description is going to sort of encourage you to solidify, simplify, edit, examine your work for its real visual essentials and for the really concrete things that you want to share about it to someone who can't take those things in visually necessarily. So it's a wonderful learning opportunity as well as an opportunity to share what you do with a much broader audience and also to engage an audience, the audience that may already be able to see what you do in a brand new way, to direct them. And if you're describing work that isn't yours, you can take the same opportunity to bring your creative strengths to understanding that work in a new way, to seeing it in a new way and to learning about it and sharing it in a new way. So I look forward to seeing the results from tonight. I'm going to say thank you very much. And I am really looking forward to Sina's talk next and I look forward to engaging with all of you over the course of the evening. Thank you. How's everybody doing? All right, so that was also a trick just to see how many people are in the room because I happen to be blind, so thank you for that. But I didn't get a lot of enthusiasm, so we're going to try that again. How's everybody doing? There we go. So my name is Sina Baram and I run a company called Prime Access Consulting. But before we get into the subject of the talk, I just wanted to say two quick remarks. Thank you for all of the kind words. Thank you for Cooper Hewitt for everything you guys are doing with respect to accessibility and promulgating these practices throughout the institution, not just as a one-time project or as a one-off effort. That's really, that sustainability approach to inclusive design is incredibly important. And yeah, let's give them a hand of applause. That's absolutely appropriate. The other thing is that regarding the tactile replicas at the Warhol, I just wanted to give a shout out to David Whitewolf who developed the models. We wrote the guided descriptions for them and did some work on it. But I just wanted to make sure to give David a shout. And with respect to the app that was talked about earlier, Joshua Lerner deserves a shout out for that as well because he's the iOS developer on that. So a little bit about myself. Just to follow some best practices here, you're going to see on the bottom of these slides my Twitter handle. So I'll go ahead and spell that out really quick. It's S-I-N-A. And then my last name, B-A-H-R-A-M. So at Sina Baram. And so I'm really passionate about technology, about the heritage sector, so the cultural heritage sector, galleries, libraries, archives and museums. And helping anyone, whether large or small organizations, on using technology, not only to make the electronic and digital world accessible, but also to make the physical world accessible as well. I think that's really important. So why does inclusion matter? Why are we talking about this stuff? There's over a billion people with a B in the world with some form of disability. And 110 to 190 million of them have a severe impairment. This is as of 2011 from the World Health Organization. Now, we might be thinking that these numbers are going down because of medical technology. And some of that is true. We should keep that in mind that because of medical technology, babies are living to become adults that might have disabilities, sometimes multiple disabilities. So we should keep that in mind when thinking about the makeup of our audience. So there are two classic ways of thinking about disability. There's the medical model, which basically views disability as something to be fixed or cured. And that's fine. You have a broken arm, you go to the doctor, and that's ended and that's perfectly acceptable. But what happens when medical science has reached everything that it can do? Then we're left viewing the individual as disabled. And I don't think that's exactly the most productive path forward. So instead, there's the social model of disability, which basically informs us that it's the environment that is disabling, not the individual that is disabled. That's really, really important, right? It's the environment that's disabling, not the individual that's disabled. And the way we take that into account are ways of thinking about producing services, products, changes. So how do they change? Well, how do we make the environment less disabling? We can follow principles of universal design. Sometimes you'll hear me refer to this as inclusive design because I really like this core element of inclusion at all of the work that we do. And these are a broad spectrum of ideas that we can use during the design process, things like personas that involve users with disabilities, and different functional abilities, as well as other techniques throughout the entire life cycle of whatever we're making. So from design, testing, production, post-production, evaluation, and this way we can incorporate our consideration of all audiences throughout the process, weaving it into the fabric of not only the product or service that we're creating, but also the organization as a whole. So there are a couple of different forms of description and we've been talking a lot about description tonight and we will continue to do so. So what are those different types? Well, there's short description. Sometimes this is referred to as alt text. So if you go on a website and the developer has done their job right and the content creator has done their job right, you might have some alt text on an image. It's a short description. It's a textual equivalent of what the image is, pretty short, about a sentence or less. Longer form description. So this can come in different forms. It's very popular in STEM, science, technology, engineering, and math because it allows us to use more words to describe something that's complex like a diagram or like a piece of art. And so longer form description is something that we've been, my company has been spending a lot of time thinking about and wanting to really encourage museums to pursue. So this is a tactile description. So this is the idea where you have a tactile replica of something or the something itself like a sculpture that is okay to be touched. And not only are you providing a long description, a visual description of the words that represent what's going on visually, but also that description is cognizant of the fact that someone is touching the thing being described. So there's instructions in that description about maybe what to do with your hands and what you're going to feel and what that means. And we're going to hear some examples of some of these. Lastly, there's audio description. So audio description is a secondary audio track. This is on videos, right? Do we have any Netflix users in the house, for example? Yeah. Okay. So if you guys go to Netflix, you go to language settings, language and subtitles. On most Netflix shows, you'll see an option that says English with audio description or English 5.1 with audio description. And they now have it in multiple languages as well. So there's a secondary audio track that comes in from time to time and describes visually what is going on so that somebody who's not able to see can still enjoy a movie, a TV show, etc. So we have a photo on the slide here and I'm going to break the rules of accessible presentation. I'm not going to describe this. And the reason that I'm not going to describe this is I'm going to have the computer so this is one of the descriptions that we'll be listening to tonight. So here we go. And again, this might not be... That's one possible description. That's from the... That was a little too fast and that's about a third of the speed. Some people listen to it at a tenth of the speed that others do and also the volume was a little low on it. We're going to listen to a slower one as a contrast for that in one second. In that description, one of the things that interesting to me is that there's a narrative element like Annie was talking about and there's this stylistic aspect to it as well, this poetry that she was referring to and I feel like these descriptions in and of themselves are wonderful creations that should be... that are not only making something accessible but themselves are entities that we should be thinking about. So what we have on the screen now is a lot of text and we're about to hear this read out at a much slower speed and then we're going to see the image that is being described. So flipping the order on you a little bit. So let's take a listen. Let's turn the volume up. And I'll go back and restart that. Okay. Okay. So there's a couple of interesting things about that one, but before I talk about it, let me reveal the photo. This is from... both of these descriptions were authored by the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, a wonderful group of people over there. I have really great admiration for those guys. Susan Chun, their Chief Content Officer and Ana Kairata Lavatelli have done a lot of work on authoring these types of descriptions along with other folks at the institution. And the way that they were authored is using a web application that we developed for them and other institutions called Coyote. And I'm not going to spend too much time talking about this, but it is an open source project and I'm happy to engage with you guys after the talk and tell you a little bit more about it. But it's a workflow tool at its core that allows everybody from the institution, not just one person, not just one field in a content management system somewhere, but it's an entire tool that facilitates the creation and synthesis of short descriptions, long descriptions, descriptions in other languages, multiple descriptions for a particular work. We noticed some words in the previous description of the Kerry James Marshall piece that speak to skin color, which really raises questions of institutional voice and how do we talk about those issues. And so Coyote has helped us surface a lot of these topics so that we're not treating description as this static process, but instead as this evolving practice that as a community we should get better at, study, and disseminate. So moving on to the Andy Warhol and the tactile replicas that Pam mentioned earlier, we see two hands exploring the famous Campbell soup can here on this slide. And we're going to listen to an incredible gentleman, JJ Hunt up in Toronto. We've been really, really fortunate to work with JJ on authoring a variety of visual descriptions and tactile descriptions. So this is a guided tactile description. So not only are you going to hear JJ talk about what's happening visually, you're going to hear him also give a few commands about things like what to do with your hands. So let's take a listen to that. This colour screen print depicts a large can of Campbell's cream of mushroom soup against a white backdrop. The top half of the can's label is red which is recessed and the lower half is white which is raised. Bridging the two halves at the centre of the label is a small, heavily textured gold emblem. More on that in a moment. Let's begin at the top of the piece you'll find the can's sealed lid represented by raised concentric arches inside an oval. Move your left hand to the left corner of the lid then slowly make your way down the straight edge of the can while sweeping your thumb back and forth. Right away, near the top of the label you will find a large uppercase letter C which features a long curving lead in stroke at its top and a small flourish at the bottom. This is the beginning of the manufacturer's brand name written in white, therefore raised, cursive. Explore the letters noting the thin shadow that falls to the lower right of the italic font. C A M P B E L L apostrophe S You might have noticed the unusual lowercase E which in this font resembles a backwards number three. And that's part of the description. That description goes on and as you're touching it, this description is being delivered by the Andy Warhol Museum's app that has both visual descriptions recorded and textual so you can read it with a screen reader or listen to JJ read it to us in his dulcet tones or you can listen to the guided tactile description. I find that that really helps a great deal because when we talk about tactile replicas or letting someone touch something especially a representation of a line drawing or a painting or a sculpture you have to be really cognizant of the fact that it's not going to just be evident by touching. There's additional information in context that can really help that experience. So why do this stuff? Why is institutions as museums as creators, why should we do these things regarding inclusion? Reaching underserved communities allows us to build a lot of loyalty. People with disabilities have often felt excluded from the museum world and changing that set of state of affairs and including all persons with disabilities in our global discourse is incredibly important and something we need to do a better job of. We need to learn and we can learn from describing. I can't tell you the number of conversations I've had with curators and other staff at the museum and I've said I've studied this thing for five years but when I was asked to really, really describe it just visually describe it I picked up on things I haven't noticed before. Collaboration across departments is another benefit of this type of work. Breaking down silos is something that Cooper Hewitt is passionate about and this really helps image description projects and accessibility and inclusive design projects really help us break down those internal silos and force collaboration amongst which really can result in a wonderful product at the end of the day. And knowledge creation is part of the mission, right? And we've heard these descriptions, we've heard some beautiful ones already this evening that this is creation of knowledge and you guys are going to be participating in that very shortly here and that's really an important contribution that we shouldn't forget about. So before I conclude I'm going to show you a short little snippet. This is an interview with Andrew Yang who's an artist in Chicago and this is a he did a self an artist led touch tour where with contemporary art you see you can do this because the artists are not dead and so you can ask them to come and describe their work and this is his reaction to having done that with a group of blind and low vision visitors to the museum. Here we go. Because a lot of it was based on visual play when I was talking with visually disabled and blind people about the objects and touching those objects with them I got a very different experience of what those objects are and what their sensibility metaphorically and literally is because I was engaging with them so much in a visual way so it was an important modality for me to get in terms of a perspective on the work. Lastly I use this quote a lot for people who know me it really resonates with me and speaks to me a lot. This quote about people will forget what you said and people will forget what you did but people will never forget how you make them feel and what I like to do is help museums change the way the not only persons with disabilities feel but that all audiences feel when they walk through the doors when they engage with the website or a mobile app or a piece of artwork and help us all spread this feeling of inclusion so I encourage you guys to find ways of doing that in your own work This is my contact information I'll just leave this up here but please feel free to reach out if you have any questions on digital accessibility or inclusive design or just want to chat about how to make art accessible and things of that nature happy to talk with you and thank you so much for having me So we're going to start our activity and I'm going to invite Lance and Rachel to come and join me and you'll see that there's some chocolate on your table it may have been a beacon to you during this experience The chocolate is one of the things we invite you to describe if you so desire and are interested in chocolate This is Compartes chocolate which will be featured in our exhibition for its remarkable packaging all of which is originally illustrated to convey a feeling about how it tastes and the chocolate itself is designed as a product much of it is beautiful and strange in its texture when you unwrap it we invite you to experience it through any and all senses to taste it, touch it, smell it look at it if you like There are sheets on the table and we can also come around and provide you with a digital document if you would like that we have staff who are available to assist you We're hoping to collect your responses because we actually need these descriptions for our website of this chocolate so we're really grateful for you to take a little time to enjoy it and think of some words that evoke your response and I'm going to hand it off to Lance and Rachel now to help us out with that Hello can I have your attention excuse me for one second Hello everyone my name is Lance Weiler I am the director of the Columbia University digital storytelling lab and I'm going to be guiding you through this experience that we're going to be doing here so hopefully everybody's had a chance to maybe enjoy some of the chocolate that Ellen has provided what we are going to do is this is going to take place in three rounds three rounds this first round you'll see you'll see that you'll have a worksheet you'll want to be at a table if you're not at a table please find a seat at a table there is a sheet that is on the tables this is name of object okay so make sure that you have a sheet and you have a writing utensil for this first round you can pick an object that's at the table there's two objects in some cases at the table or more you can pick a object and you please investigate that object observe that object and fill out the sheet as an individual activity okay you're going to do that as an individual activity so if you need a sheet just raise your hand we'll bring it to you and we're going to give you about seven minutes to do this so you'll have about seven minutes to investigate an object that's on the table by filling out this sheet okay no no this sheet is for the objects it's not for the chocolate this sheet that says name of object so you can use it for the chocolate if you like if you want to use it for the chocolate you can but these sheets are for the object exactly so I think that's a really good way and then you discern between low vision that can have a sense of seeing it and no visual come in and out and it closes again like the things in your heart the blood flows in and out sorry maybe that's why there's a filter inside when you groove the air just goes in and out from there can I have your attention please we have two more things that we're going to do okay the one is I wanted to see if anybody at any of the tables would be willing to share a description that they did for an object with the group is there any table that would be willing to volunteer and read off the description and so maybe we can start by reading the description first and then you can reveal the object okay so who would like to go okay we oh we can't do this so our description was it is a flat flexible hexagon shaped about the size of the palm of the hand made of a silicone composed of 24 glowing small triangles resembling a grid a soft white transparent light that is malleable to the touch with two sides the back houses a battery pack what is the object does it have a backside Tina wants to know oh is it a do not walk sign is there somebody else that would like to share a description any other tables anybody else like to share a description of an object don't be shy okay so we have a clear triangular rubber mask that has a long rubber adjustable cord attached to a green knob on the right side of the object while you're wearing it the orange knob on the left side there's an orange knob on the left side which is almost as twice as large as the green knob it's soft and squishy and can be kind of deformed the knobs are harder and plastic and can be removed there's not much sound to the rubber but when you tap the plastic it's hollow when you do open up the knobs the orange one exposes a filter it's clearly meant to be worn and yeah fits over your mouth and nose can we see somebody model that go ahead yeah a changeable filter you wrap it around your head it's called the wooby thank you very much we did discover that it seems to be designed for children because it is not large enough to fit an adult's head so for children thank you for that is there anybody else we have time for one more okay this was a independent could you stand up would you mind standing up absolutely okay it is dark brown the color of soil is printed with small triangles formulating larger triangles a variety of silver and gold dust or pigment is sporadically sprinkled causing the entire rectangle to shimmer differently in every area forming different sections with character of their own it is covered by a metallic gold wrapper that crinkles at every touch almost replicating the sound of raindrops leaves during a rainstorm a pitter pat the wrapper is a color of gold some sections elevate slightly catching the light so what is it yeah it was the chocolate I was kind of trying to work from the inside out there's a lot there very nice thank you so the last step that we have is there are index cards on each of the tables if everybody could take one index card please as was mentioned earlier this is an ongoing effort so this is the first of what will be many so it helps in terms of collecting insight from you so the card will be used as follows one side of the card has a question that I will give you in a moment and then you'll do the other side of the card there's some folks that need a card Rachel do you have cards there's some people that need cards okay so on one side of the card you'll answer one question and on the other side of the card you'll answer the other so the one question is what was something that surprised you and you learned that was new what was something that surprised you and you learned that was new on one side of the card what was something that surprised you and that you learned that was new tonight yes during this session I mean you can if you want to do it about something else too you're welcome to now I'm just kidding I'm just kidding let's keep it to this evening so that's the one side okay then the question on the other side is the following sure the question for the first side is what surprised you and that you learned that was new for you and then on the other side of the card the question is follows what else should the museum learn about this topic what else should the museum learn about this topic the topic of if anybody needs assistance writing their responses or wants to come around and record it for you just let me know yes the second question is as follows what else should the museum learn about the topic that we were exploring this evening okay what else should the museum learn about this topic okay can I have your attention please first of all we'd like to thank you for participating one of the things thank you round of applause for everybody for participating thank you very much one of the things that we do at the Columbia University School of the Arts Digital Storytelling Lab is we are very much about inclusive design and the power of story as a way to understand the world around us and I think what is important to note is as was mentioned earlier it's not the person that's disabled it's the environment that is disabling efforts like this to bring people together to be part of a collaborative effort to help in terms of descriptions here can be translated into other fields and so these types of designing with and for are really important and the inclusivity is important so we want to thank you for taking the time and we'll let you know and update you about future activities here and I know that it opens in a month and a half yes is that correct April what April 13th so thank you everyone thank you for coming in this room April 13th