 Good afternoon, the full house. Good afternoon and welcome. I'm Pamela Horn, Director of Cross Platform Publishing and Strategic Partnerships at Cooper Hewitt's Smithsonian Design Museum. Welcome and thank you for joining us for our hosted event for the MAC Museum Access Consortium. Hopefully it's the first of many. Cooper Hewitt is committed to broadening its audiences and ensuring the museum is welcoming to all. We're thrilled to be able to use the galleries, museum resources, to raise awareness of accessible design innovation, inspire dialogue, and leverage Cooper Hewitt's role as a dynamic design hub to promote problem solving in support of inclusivity. Thanks to our partners AARP and the Ford Foundation, we are in our second week of Cooper Hewitt Lab Design Access, which is a free programming series taking place first two weeks of February in these galleries that usually house exhibitions. We're activating the space with learning and experimentation, interactive activities, workshops, discussions, and more for visitors of all ages to engage. We are presenting it in partnership with the mayor's office for people with disabilities. And some of our other collaborators include San Francisco-based Creative Growth Art Center, Columbia University Digital Storytelling Lab, which is coming up on Thursday. We're hosting a salon for verbal description. We had a Google hackathon, and we have our third in our series of three dance classes with Dance for PD with Mark Morris. And a real abilities film festival screening of Imagine tomorrow night. So if you would like to join in any of the other activities, please go to our website and see what the schedule is like. I do welcome you to take a look at the projects that are on our walls here. These were design access projects that were, these were the answer to a call for design access solutions from university design students across the country. They're fantastic, and we had them here to present on Friday. So one other note is we have a week long of family events that are designed around access coming up on the week of the 19th to the 24th in these galleries. In the spirit of our accessibility commitment, and this being an ongoing movement, we encourage you to submit your ideas for objects that you've found particularly inspiring or have used that could make the world more accessible. Please send them to designaccess at si.edu. We welcome your submission. And now I'd like to throw it over to Barbara, the moderator for your panel this afternoon. Thank you. So thank you very much, and I will second the welcome and second the suggestion that you do take the time and look at the poster on the wall in this gallery. Some of the design solutions are truly imaginative and wonderful, and I'm hoping that the prototype will be in production soon. I hope you enjoyed the tour, and we welcome you upstairs to the second part of this collaboration of New York's Museum Access Consortium and the Cooper Hewitt America's Design Museum. The Museum Access Consortium, better known as MAC, is dedicated to promoting and facilitating access to cultural institutions, museums, performance spaces, and experiences for all audience. We are a volunteer organization that develops professional trainings and workshops on best practices in the field. We welcome you to join our mailing list, and we welcome you, if you are interested in participating, to get in touch with MAC and join us as volunteers. This afternoon's discussion will focus on universal design and best practices in designing and developing exhibitions. It was inspired originally. Whoa, this is inspired? Yes, it was inspired originally. By the 25th anniversary of the Americans with Disability Act issue of Exhibitionist, the Journal of Name, which is the American Association of Museums Professional Network for Exhibition Designers and Developers. You can read this free online if you go to the AAM website and go to name. The articles dealt with bringing greater accessibility to museums and exhibitions across the country during the planning, development, design, education, interpretation, and evaluation stages, except for mine, which was a historical essay on the AAM and how it promoted and facilitated the acceptance of ADA compliance in the museum field. Today we will be hearing from exhibition developers, spatial and interactive designers, and museum educators. All have collaborated, although not necessarily with each other, on multiple projects that took on the challenge of universal design and accessibility. Each will speak briefly about his or her training in museum work and how and when universal design became part of the projects. We will then have a panel discussion and open up to questions from the audience. I just wanted to make sure that you could see the principles of universal design. So the first is equitable use. Design is useful and marketable to people with diverse abilities. Design accommodates a wide range of individual preferences and abilities. It's easy to understand regardless of the user's experience, knowledge, language skills, or current concentration level. Design communicates necessary information effectively to the user, regardless of ambient conditions or the user's sensory abilities. And it minimizes hazards and the adverse consequences of accidental or unintended actions. Used effectively and comfortably with a minimum of fatigue and provides appropriate size and space for approach, reach, manipulation, and use, regardless of the user's body size, poster, or mobility. So please keep those in mind as we listen to each of the speakers at first, introducing him or herself, talking about what kind of training they had in design, education, or their other original field, and when or whether universal design became a part of that training. So let's start alphabetically. Let's start anti-alphabetically with Paul or Selle of Pau. Yes. Hello. I suspect for many reasons I'll be an outlier on this panel, but I'm sure you'll bear with me. Here, I'll stand up. My background is not in design. My undergraduate degrees in anthropology and zoology and my master's degree is in science education. However, I have to say relevant to this conversation, Barbara asked when we became aware of universal design or accessibility in our work. And I have to say that like many things in life, it doesn't really have an impact on you until it relates to somebody that you know personally, often, or someone in your family. In this case, it was my mother who at the end of her life used a wheelchair. And I remember her coming to visit a museum that I worked at and instead of being able to come through the front door, they sent her around to the back to the loading dock. So imagine how you would feel if one of your parents or somebody in your family who had a disability instead of coming to visit your museum coming through the front door was shuttled through the loading dock. Honestly, that was my introduction towards the notion of access and universal design. It didn't make me feel good. It didn't make her feel good either. But I think from experiences like that, I know that as I've continued to design and develop and work on exhibit teams for now, 35 years later, I think about situations like that and how I don't want people who come to museums to feel like second-class citizens or to feel small when they just want to have a good time at a museum. I think that's my opening remark. Is this working? My name is Steve Landau and I'm the founder of Touch Graphics, which is a company that got started 20 years ago. I also am a bit of an outlier probably, although I guess if we're all outliers then... I don't know, but my... And it's also funny because in retrospect, we all sort of can create a kind of story for ourselves that makes sense only in retrospect. So I'm going to pull out of my past the following events that now I can point to and say that it all makes sense. But I remember when I was a little kid, my grandmother had a stroke and she was completely incapacitated and came to live with us. And she can only say one word, which was yes. And she would... I don't know why that is, but I guess it's something that happens with that particular kind of brain injury. But it was my job to teach her how to speak again somehow. And I really was very absorbed in that process, although I think much... She really didn't care and was sort of humoring me, I guess, thinking back about it. But then many, many years later, when I had to do the thing that everyone has to do, which is decide what they want to be when they grow up, I didn't really know. So I selected architecture because it seemed like something that would be fun and that I probably could do because it reminded me of the things that I liked to do as a child, which was making gadgets and things. So then I did go to architecture school and pursued that professionally for 10 years and then had a kind of a lucky event. And maybe that's something that we all should be paying attention to when those things happen. I have a phone call out of nowhere from a lady named Karen Gorgi. I don't know if anybody here knows who she is. You do? Karen runs a thing called the Computer Center for Visually Impaired People at Baruch College, which is part of CUNY. And she was involved with the very early process of figuring out how to make tactile maps using computers. And so she called me through some series of personal connections and asked me to come and speak to her. And I had never met a blind person before. I knew nothing about that field and decided to go just because I was curious and we really had a kind of a connection and I ended up going to work for her and quitting my profession, which was extremely difficult to do when you don't really have any training in something. So I ended up starting the company with her as a kind of collaborator. We got a bunch of grants from the education department and started making devices. And then I realized that this is kind of what I was always meant to do and then I just had taken a circuitous route. And so that was 20 years ago and since then we've been making a lot of things, not just for museums. Museums is one of our areas of focus but our main thing is how to use the sense of touch to deliver information in a universal format. So I first became aware of universal design in a way after I had already started working on tactile design because really there's a difference between assistive technology and universal design. I don't know if that's a topic that is of interest but assistive technology is really solving problems for specific user categories. So for example, people who are blind need to learn Braille. We were developing products that would automatically administer Braille lessons without the need of a human instructor. So that is really not universal design. However, what I started to realize was that products that are just tactile are really hard to market. You really have to add a lot of visual information. You have to add text. I'm holding up now one of our more recent projects which was a book we made for the Cabrillo National Monument in San Diego and you can see that it's very visual and we realized that when the visually impaired person came to this place they needed to be with their friends and family and to just give someone a book that no one else could see and understand was really inadequate and really was very counterproductive if our goal is to create inclusivity. So we started doing visuals on everything and then we started adding audio because audio also adds another level of interact of information that's accessible. So for me, universal design came about through this kind of backwards process starting with just thinking about what people with vision impairments need but then backing away from that and starting to think about what products could benefit from tactile information and audio and visual and large print and description all those things layered together to me is what universal design is really for. I'll go ahead and start. So my name is Edda Telavitzka. I'm a designer at Potion and Potion is a small studio. We are very at the top of Manhattan and we focus on transforming experiences through design and technology and is it on? Yes. Thank you. Is this one working? Yes. So it's interesting because a lot of our projects all of our projects are basically individual experiences that we have with each institution from museums to artists to particular companies, etc. So like they are very individual based and it's a very high collaboration process. As for my background, I studied design at FIT. I'm a trained graphic designer and when I came to Potion I started doing interaction design and then from there I as we worked more and more with museums the problem of accessibility and ADA standards came into life for me. That's kind of when I started learning about universal design how I'm continuing to learn in a universal design basically it's kind of never ending lesson here but I remember I have this vivid memory in my mind when I was small and I was still in Poland. I was so fascinated with Braille and always like everywhere in museum I would just touch it and just feel it but I would never learn it of course but it was such an interesting tactile experience for me even though I'm perfectly visually not how do I say it impaired but it was still something I always seeked out even from a small age but it's kind of coming back right now it's interesting Alright, last but not least I'm Sarah Litvin Very good Very good and I where am I as always a question well to start the story I was a week ago downstairs on the exhibit and I just want to tell a real quick story to call out how wonderful this exhibit is because there was a woman on the tour it was led by Eileen one of the docents here, is she here? No and there was a woman who as we went through there was the app that shows wheelchair accessible dining locations that's crowdsourced and she said oh my god my mom is a walker user I gotta get this and used her pen to grab it we went a little further and there was the radio that you just lift up to here and she said my dad has dementia this is unbelievable are they making these, can I get one? and then at the very end of the tour she said hang on I've got the direct quote because I wrote it down she said I wanted to see this exhibit but I didn't know I'd have a personal connection and to me I was like congratulations not to her to the designers of this exhibit because I think that's really the point so in any case thanks for all of that and congrats my story is ten years ago I got a job at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum in the education department and I was lucky enough to be at an institution that had already invested in making accessibility a cultural priority and so I had access training when I first started working there and in fact my supervisor and the person who had been her supervisor before she left were former co-chairs of the Museum Access Consortium and some of the early members so I really had my training on the job and soon thereafter her name was Danielle Linser and Cindy Vandenbosch because they've been such mentors and continue to be leaders in the city and in the fields but soon after Danielle left I had the responsibility for accessibility as the point person in the museum and just because of the way that staffing worked at that particular time I found myself not only the staff person responsible for doing accessibility training among all staff but also on the project teams for two major changes and moved to a new visitor center and the opening of the very first wheelchair accessible permanent tour so I actually got to collaborate with both Steve and some of Edidas colleagues on the project of shop life since then I've gone on to go to graduate school I'm currently a doctoral candidate in history but I've sort of pursued my museum work and exhibit design since then and so part of why I was so excited to be a part of this conversation is to share some of what I've learned about the differences between different processes at different organizations as I've been involved with this and sort of the experiences that I've had being in an exhibit that is about or intentionally the very first wheelchair accessible tour how do we do that when it's very foregrounded as a priority for it to be universal designed and a lot of those exhibits get a great amount of attention but then there are also every other tour every temporary exhibit that goes on in every single exhibit all over the country and those we don't talk about as much I want to share and talk and think and hopefully continue this conversation about those experiences and how we might continue to build universal design into them Great, thank you People are shaking their heads Can you hear me? Good, okay So I guess we are all outliers in some way I came through theater design and a lifetime commitment to civil rights and social inclusion and my first access work was related to AIDS because in the early years of AIDS and into the early years of the medications the disease mimicked many forms of other diseases and had many symptoms that would now be considered access related so there was a virus that could damage vision very quickly there was another virus which could impair touch and so those sort of almost instant disabilities got my attention and so I started to become more and more involved with access and accessibility in that period I also had the great fortune to be able to switch my careers into museum work which is of course what I had always wanted to do and so I brought the access focus with me as much as possible and then discovered MAC and have been very involved with MAC as well as the diversity coalition since then the universal design codification which is what I showed you before I find to be very helpful with a way of helping people to think of the responsibility of the institution to every possible individual who might want to participate in something that that institution is presenting many designers now architects as well as interactive who are in graduate school will be trained with those principles others of us who are older or were trained earlier just find them useful as a way of communicating the institution's responsibility and so that's how I get into it and as you actually a panel full of outliers can be a very good thing so I wanted to expand the conversation now that you've heard how we started to what the commitment to access and universal design means on a day to day basis in museum work so I'll start with Paul and I should have given his title when I introduced him because it's one of the great titles in the museum world he is the chief instigator I might live up to that I hope so it seems to me that museums miraculously find money for things they want to spend money on and just as miraculously can't find money for things they don't want to spend money on and that's my experience with museums and universal design and accessibility in a nutshell we talk a good game but talk as you might have heard is cheap what are you actually doing about those things and so I I sort of can't comprehend the number of times I've heard a museum director say something along the lines of well we don't get that many blind or vision impaired visitors so why do we have to do that or just change out the terminology so I'm I'm incredibly intolerant I mean I'm in some ways I'm a good creative partner but in some ways I'm a massive pain in the you know what because I think that museums when it serve their purposes like I said talk an incredibly good game if they're talking to a funder of course we are everything and slice bread and a cherry on top but when it comes to actually providing that access we often fall short and it's not just about money and it's just not about staff it's just the wherewithal to do that um that's easy for me to say up here um on a panel like this but I I I think one reason that I'm still in the museum business is that I have very high expectations for the museum business and I don't really want to accept these sort of mealy mouth excuses so we can we can we can talk about how to practically turn that sort of righteous anger into action which I'm happy to talk about a little bit but my basic premise is is still the same museums always find the money for things they want to spend money on and they miraculously don't have the money for things they don't really want to spend money on wow that was um I'm a little bit less um downbeat I got or actually I've seeing the museum world changing now for the better and I think that while Paul's conversations are obviously accurate and the product of a lot of knowledge of the way things really are at the same time well I had been noticing a real uptick in the number of museums that contact us to ask us about doing new projects which I it's the only real metric that I have for evaluating the state of the state of affairs but and obviously there's a lot of alternative explanations for our improved business outlook at the moment but I guess part of it is to do with the growing understanding in the museum community that the state of the status quo is really not supportable and as the population ages and as disability becomes more prevalent as a normal outcome of being old museums are starting to realize that it's not just a question of when they get around to it or if they're compelled by the government to comply with access standards they're starting to realize I think that it's good business and that it's also not impossible to do so I guess the change in the government in the last year has sort of put some of those projections into question because the department which was the which used to be the main motivator of museums around the United States to improve their accessibility I believe we can't rely on that as a continuing force although I have no real evidence for that but just seeing what's happening in the government we need to think that that would no longer be a priority at the same time there seems to be enough momentum in the field that more museums are reaching out to people who have proven solutions that can help them overcome this really shameful failure to ensure that public resources are equally available to everybody and if that requires a change in the marketplace to compel organizations to invest in these initiatives then that's okay as long as it happens but my personal experience is that it is continuing to grow and just seeing the number of people here today that are interested in this topic it's very encouraging so I'm a little bit less I'm a little bit more optimistic I come from a little bit different angle because our work at Potion focuses more on digital stuff so interactive touch-based, projection-based app-based on different devices basically so what I've been noticing is that over the years systems are becoming more accessible so for example the iOS devices have accessibility and a lot of apps that we do are built especially for these but just being prepared basically to accommodate for them so making sure that all text is live text to be read by the device to be accessible in those ways but what we are still struggling with is definitely the large interactives the large room scale touch surfaces touch tables that do not have their own system that's being prepared for the specific of having a readability feature having some way for the accessibility feature to be implemented and kind of what we are struggling with from the museum perspective not struggling with how the process works I'd say we collaborate with museums from all around the country and we base all of our research on that particular region the museums in and we really depend on the user groups the museums bring us to test for to basically tailor the experiences for so as long as these groups are early on introduced we can always accommodate for specific groups but I find that sometimes these groups these groups kind of are unafterthought for some institutions and then the experience already created and then the accessibility is like an add on which doesn't ever really come out great that's like the truth of it you have to like really think about it from the beginning from the standpoint of like creating an exhibition creating an interactive piece that yes these are the people that we are definitely tailoring the experience for and we want it accessible as long as we know that from the start it's always accommodable like dependent from like what we are doing if it's like super color based experience it's not going to be turned into an experience for the blind potentially but it's possible for all the other types if you are learning history if you're learning about biology if you're just want to consume the information read the information it's possible it's just the timing is really definitely the issue for us it's like being prepared having these resources to access to test with to really have a user group that is this is specialized for I think that's like our biggest trouble but I have to say like it's going to the bright side too because yes we are seeing that the technology improve be more accommodating kind of lift some of that stuff from being in the software that we write ourselves to like being basically handled by the operating system and basically that lifts a lot of value not value I'm saying that I'm trying to get at the point that like it's becoming less and less expensive to be able to accommodate for accessibility which is great because then more institutions can afford it and it can be so much more widespread so building off of what Edda was saying and pushing back a bit against Paul as well I think process is really what's key I think oftentimes on the museum side because now I've had the experience of being both being a museum person working with a designer and being a designer at the museum and I think everybody thinks the other person is the expert in accessibility I really do the museum people say well the designers are in charge of ADA they know the rules we're sure that they're going to follow them right and the designer says well I'm going to find out what's important for this project based on what I'm hearing from the museum person and so if the museum person says universal design is important this issue this population comes here we care then that's getting back to is it particular populations or is it trying to make it as accessible for everyone but somebody on both teams I think need to be the point person who are thinking about this all the way through and I think a part of that what's exciting about working on digital interactives and that's sort of where I've been focusing my attention is because pedagogy is built into interactive and digital exhibits like it's built into physical exhibits too but people don't have to ask those questions to create an information architecture in the way that they do when they're building something digital you can push back on me against this but this has been my what are you saying digital is better than physical I'm not saying anything's better I'm saying in terms of a place to start in thinking about the universal design of museum exhibitions I'm finding that it's more flexible and easier to start with a place where they already have if the pedagogy is terrible in a digital exhibit the whole thing fails if the pedagogy is terrible in an exhibit on the walls then people still go through and maybe they don't spend as much time I'm just talking about pedagogy I'm not talking about physical access but to me I'm an educator that's how I come to everything is through universal design for learning and how do we actually think these ways so all of that being said to answer Barbara's question about how do we apply these principles there are really free ways of doing it if you're sensitive to it you can create color contrast like the one above me you can think about how it's free to make one choice of colors versus another choice of colors if you're buying furniture for an exhibition here I am with physical you can think about getting things that have armrests and things that don't have armrests to accommodate different needs and different body types so there are many different things that if you're already going to be spending a certain amount of money and you're sensitive to the fact that people come with all different abilities all different languages different shapes and sizes then ages then I think that that really can go a long way so for those of you who do not work in museums there are two things that have come up in these conversations that you may be confused by the first is process museum exhibitions take anywhere from one to three years to develop and that is the process time and I think people can debate when in a process you want to have the different elements but you need to know that there is a process the second thing is that we talked about as you may have noticed that we're talking about teams museums almost every museum at this point develops exhibitions by putting together a team of usually of some permanent staff members some designers and interactive designers and specialists from outside and they work together over those process years to create the exhibition and so it's there are periods in which you can integrate design and integrate audience requests and integrate cost questions over those years so there's like a continuing discussion when you're putting together an exhibition I actually spent most of my career at the New York Public Library for the performing arts which only did short term exhibitions so for us the period of development was long but the period in which the exhibition was up was actually very short and it was also an institution where of course literacy is the most precious thing in the world so we had there was a commitment to all different kinds of literacy so in some ways I had an outlier experience in exhibition development another thing that came up in the conversations here was digital and computers some of you are young some things in access especially in terms of graphics have become unbelievably easy because of computers you can change the color you can change the contrast color you can change the size of text almost automatically you still have to consider very seriously what size you want that text which font you want all of the decisions are the same but the process in making those choices come to life are different brailing is now much easier because of computerization so there are things in the process and there are things in the team development process that are both easier now and of course everything is a great deal more challenging one thing that came up in this conversation was audience so can you speak to audience how do you know what a museum's audience is how can you find out who potentially will go to an exhibition who potentially goes to that museum has can you talk about where evaluation fits into the process I can start if you want yeah is it working yes it's interesting because I started the camp groups, user groups testing that stuff so I can continue on so usually in the process when we get to kick off with the museum with the staff we kind of have this research and discovery period when we have all the conversations with the museum they share with us their statistics they kind of provide us what groups they are interested in supporting for this exhibition or for this particular interactive and that is when mostly we get the numbers basically like a profile of the audience and that's from where we create our personas our and kind of also meet with some test groups and later when we kind of prototype and develop further we test with these test groups to make basically the product better kind of that reminds me so all the way in 2005 when the iPad first got released when I was not at potion yet it was I think we had a project in 2006 basically was released like one year after the iPad but it was in development like two months after the iPad got launched so basically very fresh nobody yet knew what the iPad could handle nobody yet knew like what what gestures are like what do we even do right so it was interesting because then that's the time where we actually made a project with New York public library and it was the application app project and during this project it was basically kind of we digitalized this basically amazing collection of books and but one of their user groups was a non-visual readers because that's a very actually large group at New York public library that we could test with and there was an amazing experience because we could we learned through that process so much of like how to create those applications for them to use on the iPad and kind of how to format all of the data or the text to basically be read very intuitively by the device and kind of so that it sounded very correct because I don't know if you know how important it is to have hierarchy when you are designing to read text on the device for the accessibility feature because you have to remember to like okay this is my biggest heading this is my smaller heading this is my text and that's kind of the logical order of it to be read you cannot kind of mix things and match and then you the software thinks that you are switching between different paragraphs and different kind of text content and kind of makes a mess of things for the reader that is non-visual so kind of that whole experience was super learning experience for us and like without New York public library coming forward and this group we would have not known for example that was like such a big impact for them that was such an important feature I think this gets back to the issue of training and what happens when you are the point person on a museum team then people start asking you questions as if you can speak for every population and it's just a constant reminder that I have no idea let's get some people in here to ask and I think that's really the best and only way to promote and to continue building an accessibility and universally designed project the issue that I have learned because I'm still in the middle of this process being a part of various teams when exhibits are temporary exhibits the timeline is often truncated from 3 years to less than a year things are being done you know things are being nailed into the wall like 2 hours before the opening is going to happen so how in circumstances like that that's what I'm really curious about how in circumstances like this can we build in the time or can we somehow iteratively manage to bring in these user tests earlier on because it's a real issue I think in design processes who should be at the table and at what point do you bring in which groups and Sam's been going through this in any case in terms of curatorial and education staffs at what point do we bring the educators in of course as a pedagogue I'm saying they should be there from the start I understand very good reasons why others say not but I think users educators curators designers it's just a really interesting conversation and every different project has a different way of doing things what I'm interested in is to work together to ensure that this issue of it being a meaningful experience for whatever population would want to come there can come so to answer your question about audience I think the only way is to just bring people in earlier I agree and I agree we know that so why don't we do it it's we agreed and understood the people who are involved earliest in the process have the most impact on the end result whether that's a designer whether that's a test group whether that's a prototyping iterative group we know the words to say so why don't we do it as a regular process I can tell you as somebody who does a lot of prototyping and actually blesses about prototyping and gives workshops about prototyping to museums that it is back to the beginning of my statement which is if you want to make that an important part of your process you will and if you don't there is somehow not time to bring in that group there is somehow not time you can prototype with paper and tape literally any exhibit that we're talking about so the question is if we know what to do why doesn't it happen and that's to me the interesting question because that's a motivation question that's not a money question that's not a time question that's a willingness question and I think that bears on all of this I am actually very positive about the museum business and the this topic that we're talking about but I'll say again I have higher expectations for the museum business sometimes than I think as for itself okay well first of all I think that we all agree that the goal is to continuously test with as many users as we can and we do that throughout the process as long as someone is making that possible because testing is a very involved procedure and it requires a lot of people and time which often is not available however I disagree well I'm just telling you my experience are asked to provide a price for a new exhibit and I know that if I include a budget for my own company running a test of the either a formative or summative evaluation then that will we'll never get the job the testing has to either be paid for by the institution or through a grant I don't know it's Ellen Giusti here I think I saw her come in earlier no actually Ellen is a person you might probably know her yeah so she's a person whose role is to do this kind of testing and she did a lot of it and I think there's a lot of visitor studies going on all the time so I don't think it's a question of irresponsibility on the part of museums they have a lot of pressures and I understand their concerns and then I will shut up I promise you like when somebody says to me that they can't do something for me for a project because they're too busy everyone in this room is busy but you still find the times to do the things that are important for you I just don't buy it I mean if we want to make it happen we will make it happen it is not about money it is not about time you need money, you need time I'm not stupid but we too willingly cede all of these well-meaning intentions to the ether they just don't happen they do happen because we I mean testing accessibility going on the museums that I work for so I don't really want to be labored at that point I would like to return though to an earlier topic about technology is that possible? because I think that what Adita was talking about with the innovation of tablets I'm actually extremely optimistic one reason is that I see museums lots of museums nowadays are installing these large touch tables like the one in the lobby here everyone I'm sure is familiar with that it's a large table that has images displayed on it and you can manipulate those images you can share them with other people you can save them send them to yourself for later and it's all connected with the interactive pen however that experience is completely inaccessible if you can't see the images but many museums are beginning to install these tables and one could make the argument well that's a really irresponsible decision on their part because these kinds of exhibits actually exacerbate barrier they increase the sort of barriers that disabled people have in museums however there are ways to work around that and to be creative about developing solutions and I brought along a very early sample of something that I think could begin to lessen the barrier presented by these large touch tables so this is a 3D printed model of the arts and industries building at the Smithsonian on the mall in Washington and this you can see that there's some black parts and some clear parts did with a process that can print in two different materials at the same time one of them the black is conducts electricity is an insulator then we put little discs on the bottom of the model which connect internally to the black surfaces on the roof of the building and when I place this model onto the touch table and then I touch different parts all these black things are now touch responsive so when I touch this piece in the middle it says cupola if I touch the skylight it announces what that is and that makes this object into something that is really universal because now I can place it anywhere I want on the table I can explore it, I can hear the description of it I can feel the shape of it and I can see it and so we're saying that we're very close to creating highly universal environments we're just quite not quite there yet but the advent of these large touch screen devices and their plummeting cost if you go to Walmart now you can buy an android smartphone for $25 that has everything it has wifi, it has a screen it has audio, it has touch and the other versions of those devices are tablets or monitors or these touch tables they're also plummeting in cost because they're being made in such large quantities so my thesis is that museums can begin to leverage some of these technologies which are not quite there yet but they're all beginning to arrive so for example at the new museum of the national museum of African American history and culture it has a very large thing called the interactive lunch counter and that is an exhibit that looks visually like the Woolworth's lunch counter that was so prominent in the civil rights movement it's so iconic but it's been turned into this interactive surface that everyone sits at their diner stools having lunch but really they're consuming images that are displayed on the screen so what we're trying to do now is to go into that museum and make models of things like the slave ship and the shackles that exist elsewhere in the museum but are behind glass because they're too fragile or they're too precious to be touched and we can take models these facsimiles and place them on the interactive lunch counter and all of a sudden it comes to life and begins itself and now we have a new kind of experience so I guess that I feel that I agree with Paul that we do have ways to go and that we're not there but I do think that people have a beginning to understand the need for this as a need that's called for by visitors that are either not coming or are coming but being annoyed and they are making steps so it might not be happening as quickly as we would all like but I believe that the awareness is there and I think exhibits like this one and the upcoming exhibit called Senses which is opening here in April are all evidence of this new sensitivity and awareness and I think it's a shame that the momentum that we had in government up till now was really pushing things in a good way and I wonder whether that's going to continue but I haven't I'm not quite as despondent so I don't know I hope that didn't take us off track I don't feel the need to be cheered up but do we have the audience participation part of the program and definitely take part I'll just add before we start that because I totally see that we before I said that yes we require user groups from the museum and from whatever project we are working on from whatever company like to share with us their audience for us to test with etc but over time so many of so much of what we've learned is now like our everyday practice especially like color contrast that's like solid like the first thing you are looking for now in design the sizes of text sizes of type that exactly became more like a standard in our case also like reachability especially when you are talking about like touch tables and like how far the audience on the wheelchair can access that is definitely always in our mind when we design around these things so it's not only I'd say about the audience it's about our own thinking and kind of being aware basically of what we are designing for and kind of being continuously cautious really quickly my name is James for what it's worth I was at the MoMA last week I'm actually a member and I was told at the door the Tony Bruecker exhibit I ran one of those chairs this exhibit is not designed for you you know it's designed for a manual chair in fact what really happened was I came over and kicked us out and then the visual associate right after said here's why you were kicked out and I said honestly I don't think about it I said what do I care why I was kicked out she said no no no in the future at some point you'll be welcome how do you handle that quirk of exhibits it's meant for one chair but not your chair you know every time I feel that museums have progressed we do one of these workshops and we get a complaint a perfectly valid complaint about a museum and I can't speak for MoMA of course I like to think that an institution would train its guards to facilitate every visitor that's sort of the basic role of a museum is to train its staff to facilitate the visitor I'm sorry I'm just at a loss like what was the issue is it because your wheelchair is the motor wheelchair is bigger than the standard size sorry really really quickly the exhibit had loose material on the ground as part of it it was a performance and interactive and they believed that an electric chair would drag that through the museum but a manual would not did you contact MoMA and ask about this we have someone from MoMA here I'm here from MoMA my name is Francesca and I am so here is an example of when a very big institution tries its best and it fails and I will say for me I'm very sorry that you had to experience something like that we try very hard to make sure that something like that doesn't happen because I understand that if something like that happens it changes your view of that institution perhaps for life and that's you know that's very hurtful so I what you've described is exactly right there is sugar cane in the artist's exhibition and we understood that it may we were afraid that wheelchairs would get stuck so what we ended up doing was working with the mayor's office for people with disabilities and borrowing a beach wheelchair as one option another option was to have educators who have been trained to describe what is in the exhibition so you would go into sort of the entryway as far as you could but then from there you would get a description of what you would be experiencing if you were able to go all the way so we did work with the curators we've worked with visitor engagement with security but again it's an institution of hundreds of people and that's not a good excuse but that's what I believe ended up happening in your situation so I'm truly sorry about that and I do hope that other people will come and be able to experience the Tanya Bergara exhibition because it is quite extraordinary and I'm happy to talk to you more about this after but I would like to further the question and if you want to say anything else about it but the question I think is excellent which is about artists intent right so here we have a situation where an artist has kind of created something that limits what what can be experienced it is not universally designed so how do we solve that problem right and we've tried sort of you know from the behind the scenes again with the curators I mean we've had examples of this all the time right we have a Klaus Oldenburg exhibition he did a mouse museum that was not physically accessible so instead we worked with the team at MoMA to film what was inside the museum so that on the screens outside there would be an understanding of what was on display inside so I guess I would just throw it out to the panel if you all have examples of you know good examples of where you've been able to solve this problem of keeping with the artists intent but also making their work accessible and I just give a shout out to Francesca because I brought graduate students from Bank Street there to learn about all the wonderful things that MoMA does in terms of accessibility so you know you get 99 things right and of course the one thing that you don't is the thing that we want to improve which still needs to be improved I think a lot of this has to do with the way someone feels when they come to your museum and when they leave your museum I and I just always make the analogy to a good restaurant experience you know if you've never been to a restaurant but you go there for the first time there are places that you go that you instantly feel like you are welcomed you feel like you are in the right place and as you go along you may not even be able to articulate why you feel so good about this particular place but you do and all those little things I mean what you just gave as the example with the mouse museum I think that is the way that even my curmudgeonly soul would say this is a great way to do this I mean you could say well Van Gogh and Picasso aren't accessible either so we'll just write them off of course you look at ways to describe that to do audio description to look at other ways of providing people access and I think it really is how you make people feel there's never this perfect even though we talk about universal design there is no that's perfectly universal in every possible way but people know how they feel after they've come to your place you know obviously this gentleman didn't feel that good about that interaction but I think having someone like Francesca and her team at MoMA I honestly think she'll take that to heart to people just to give it one other little piece of context from the museum world historic house museums I think often say we've got a Picasso, we've got a Monet we don't have to worry about it but in our case that piece of art is a structure and it doesn't mean that historic house museums are able to just say we're not accessible but I also think it's an interesting point because this whole concept of universal design equity and equality I mean we're all different and so this idea I do think also this whole conversation about participation of disabled people in the process but also getting disabled people to be aware of what's out there and what's so marketing and how you open up your museums to a new community is has to be looked at just like museums and theaters and any other cultural organizations looks at how they increase their audiences in general people are not just going to come just without the proper marketing and until I think any arts venue starts looking at disabled people as a constituency that they're interested in including we're going to have these issues where it's we look at accessibility from the point of view of the programs but we kind of stop with how we then let that information out to the communities I mean I think that there are places that I can go to there are places that I can't go to I think from my perspective if I'm informed and respected and told things I don't I expect to be told if I have to go through the back door and that that's what you think of accessibility what really pisses me off is when you say your venue is accessible and then I have to go through the back door without that then it's not my decision if it's my decision and I'm willing to go through the back door and I know that in advance that changes my perspective too I might not like it but at least I've been informed and at least I recognize that you've thought about it and I know I'm from New York and I know there are lots of places that are inaccessible but I just want to be informed and so we have to start taking the programs and bringing those out to the communities and letting them know that we want you to come and that you're important to us to come not that we've done all this work and we've made it accessible and now we're done and we expect you to come just because we've done all this work we have to start doing that next step and I think that's where we disconnect with getting the words out because then what happens is you spend all this time and energy and money on whatever accessibility or universal design work that you've done and then nobody shows up and then it's look at those disabled people we did all this work and we did all this spent all this money and nobody's coming so what did we do it for so we have to start being much more inclusive about the communities that we want in looking at that as well in terms of cultural and institutional education what is accessibility if we say it's accessible you smack a wheelchair sign on it right the idea that there's a range of universal symbols is something that I can't tell you how many people have been shocked to learn about and to be able to specify to which populations is this accessible and in what ways like you're saying for those of you who are new to MAC I do want to point out that our website does have a cultural calendar of events in New York area and so if you want to know what day there will be an ASL tour of a museum you can use the calendar for that so this question may not be precise enough but I'm looking for reflection from the panel on it's one thing if we have developed something from the beginning with that sense of universal design and accessibility and I'm wondering about when you're sort of backing your way into that so you have existing services you have existing access points and you're sort of that has not been considered and you're kind of working your way into that with existing programs with existing systems particularly in the digital realm and relatedly how sort of those sacred ideas of what our institutions provide sort of pushing back on some of that which if what we're used to is not universally accessible how we sort of expand that idea culturally within our sort of staff and that made sense there is a really good example we did this one project with the Canadian Museum of Human Rights where we did the exhibition on rights and courts and their museum is phenomenal with accessibility I have to say the exhibition itself that we worked on has how it looks like is basically there is this big round table in the center there are basically single individual stations where people vote on cases and overhead there are videos the case video study so that has audio, French and English written text and also interpreters talking basically signing both in English and in French the cases basically and so over time and we knew that basically from the beginning so we could basically design for yes there is going to be here is our room for our interpreter on the screen here is the room for our both French and English text here is our timed experience here is our progressive experience we have on each of the stations we have accessible pad also in our mobile phone plugin so basically if you are only auditory you can still participate if you are only visual you can totally participate like there is if you are on a wheelchair everything is wheelchair accessible there are seats if you have to sit down if you have some kind of injury so I think here basically in the United States we just have to kind of spread because there are places that basically take it to heart and basically design for all from the beginning and there are places that don't really take them into as much of a consideration but to your point about like backing going back and trying to make some of these things accessible it is not easy because sometimes things have to be written sometimes things have to be assigned different hierarchy sometimes things or like if there is no operating system that even reads the information back to you that thing has to be written it has to be in different languages again it has to be enabled etc it is not that easy but also it is not the end of the world to backtrack a little bit and see how that much carries you forward and then in the future just plan from the beginning because like there are some things you cannot just drastically change when you are coming back I just two things one is probably the strongest mediating factor in museums are human staff on the floor they can cover a multitude of design sins and also help mediate situations that might be uncomfortable or not easily understood so there is this so in a way it is easy but it is not cheap because museums seem unwilling to put staff people on the floor to discuss money but in a situation like that that is one thing I would say also this gives me an opportunity to just tell my favorite digital joke which is that mothers are the original 3D printers I want to address something that I have not heard that I think might help in dealing with the powers that be in terms of finance if you say that visual is good and the audio is good but the visual plus audio is good for everyone in other words things that make an exhibit accessible is also good for people who do not need special accessibility but can enhance their experience you don't want them to just be at the museum to say okay I had a good time today you want to take something away and by multiplying the amount of multi sensory activity that goes on in an exhibit you have done that much more in making your exhibit meaningful and therefore that is the selling point and why you have to have all of these things because it's good for everybody as an educator I discovered with my limited vision that if I blew up the New York Times 130% so I could see it sitting there on a table of a student or groups of students which I usually work with those kids who said they couldn't read the New York Times because it was too hard or when you blew it up 130% guess what they could read the New York Times I just want to share one little story connected to that because I agree with you a thousand percent and I had an experience where I learned how sometimes things like contrast or font size work, design trends are working with accessible and universal design trends but I came up against a designer who said can we have an icon and say the words because it was just the words but design principles and people say why would you have all this extraneous information we want just one and I was like well shoot your principle is an exact conflict with my principle so where do we go from there just to give you a sense of some of those conversations that happened behind the scenes we needed to try to figure it out and I lost eventually but that's one thing that happened I just want to go on more with the visual audio I don't hear very well and I've been given all this stuff I can't see half of you because the lighting isn't good and I don't know if it affects other people but I like to be able to read lips and because of the backlighting when you said people are shaking their heads I didn't know you were speaking I couldn't see you well enough my vision is not that good just something to think about and how could I have expressed that earlier I didn't want to interrupt the program so a lot of us don't always feel confident to be able to stop people and tell them we're having problems and it probably would have affected everybody if they could see you better a few of you are in the light but that's not well thought out I should point out before we hear from Ruth and this woman over here also I can't look into light I can't look into bright light and when we had our last workshop which was in conjunction with some theater organizations at the alliance of resident theaters it was in a theater and therefore there was theater lighting and when I was reporting out on discussions I had turned away from the audience so that I wasn't staring into the lights so I'm very sorry that that meant that you couldn't read my lips but there are frequently conflicts in the cures for access problems also honestly it might have been a net plus that you couldn't see me that well sorry sorry my name is Ruth and I'm profoundly hard of hearing I'm on the max steering committee and I'm on the board of New York City HLAA I just want to give a shout out for Francesca because I was a member of the advisory committee the disability advisory committee that she put together 30 plus years ago and what I would like and I worked with Sarah at the tenement museum and I'm still going down there to help out what I would like to suggest to all the cultural and museum groups is that they put together a standing committee of people with various disabilities who can come in and help you I don't remember how often we met Francesca but we met quite often and we were giving her feedback it was people with all disabilities and it was really a very effective way of getting feedback on what the museum needed to do I just want to follow up what she said and you have every right not to have light shining in your eyes but I think if any one of us with hearing loss had been here we would have simply suggested that you move the table this way so that we don't have all those bright windows behind you because that's what really and that's a very very simple correction the person who understands the problem they're in the design stage this is a fantastic exhibit and this is a really interesting panel discussion it's such a simple thing that you just don't think about unless you're the person experiencing it and forgive us because this is a new learning curve for us and what I learned in our program on Friday morning about designing accessible presentations and symposiums was that we should have stopped first and done a check-in and right after I gave my remarks I realized that I did not do that so there's always next time thank you hi my name is Uliko Tengo I'm legally blind and I do love to go to museums of my greatest hobbies I'm fortunate enough to travel the world a lot and I visit museums on my own with my visual impairment I write about that in a blog so if you want first-hand experiences just read my blog I write about how I access museums how I am able to experience the art there and I think it's interesting for everyone I try to get the information out to my fellow visually impaired colleagues and but coming back to the universal design what I find in most of the museums not all of them but most of them which is really bothering me most in all those great museums is the labels so coming to your design and font size and everything the museum seems to have their own guidelines to do the labels they're mostly hard to find and very hard to read and this is a very easy very cheap first step for a really good exhibition for visually impaired people and not only visually impaired but all the people who get older and get their visual impairment everyone wants to read what's on the label so you're welcome to contact me if you want to read my blog what's your blog? my blog is called zoom in museums see like zebra o o m zoom in like to zoom in and out zoom in museums no zoom in museums and dot com thank you I thank you to the Cooper Hewitt for this wonderful discussion I just wanted to underscore on the comment that was made about honest advertising and inclusive advertising of a museum exhibit this is a a challenge of our time in finding the language to address a public that has different degrees of sensitivities and understanding as we're all learning during this time I just wanted to mention that the same challenge exists for for instance blind users who are shopping online and there's a beautiful jacket in the exhibit downstairs accessibility that has a variety of ways of putting it on side velcro openings wide and zipper and so on and if someone were looking for that online we need to develop descriptions that include any anything in that object that satisfies a need that has often been not considered until now so developing languages is a challenge that is faced in many areas I just wanted to share that just to quickly go to that point because that's super important for web when just a quick tip from potion when you have a hover state with text description to have that text description describe as much as you can of the images or of the buttons really helps a lot for the visually impaired exactly for this problem to describe the object we talked a lot about process in museum exhibitions but I didn't hear any of the panelists say anything about curators and I was wondering if you had any opinions about what their responsibility involvement any of that is in developing accessible exhibitions I have tons of opinions about curators I'm a curator although as you probably noticed I am someone who is concerned with access the artifacts that we exhibit I mean the exhibition downstairs is an exhibition about access and all of the artifacts are about access this is not true of many exhibitions and many of the artifacts that I have exhibited have been almost completely inaccessible to those who cannot read them this can be literally read as in understand the language or sometimes the written out music or it can be read as in visually understand we try to use as many different modalities as possible which is easy for me because I work in the performing arts as a subject matter the artifacts which tend to be curators original focus create their own problems present their own problems just as historic buildings present their own problems this institution of course is one that is in that considers its building an artifact and has done memorable work to interpret that artifact it is also one that frequently has collected and exhibits materials artifacts which are meant to be used if you get downstairs you can see an amazing exhibition of what are basically tea sets they are meant to be picked up they are meant to be used and most people who use this exhibition will have a visual possibly auditory and tactile memory of what it means to use that particular object not obviously the silver one but what it means to use a tea kettle what it means to use a cup and saucer however there are people in the audience or whose tactile memory of a teacup is breaking a teacup or spilling tea out of a teapot and that's the kind of challenge that access causes for curators as well as the challenges that access can cause for design and interpretation not an excuse just letting you know that curators do feel a challenge here I have a suggestion for a future Mac workshop a hands on workshop making the inaccessible accessible the question you asked earlier about how you back into things or historic houses where we don't want people to physically access these unique cultural artifacts but you still want them to understand them if they've never had the experience with those things before I think that would be an awesome workshop Hi so I know that when we're talking about making our cultural institutions more accessible we always are asking who's not in the room and so from a cursory glance around this room I notice a preponderance of white people and I'm wondering where the conversation is talking about intersecting access for ability with access for people of other identities somebody was saying before how do we let people know that things are happening and they are welcome really welcome I'm not saying anything derogatory about the intent of this workshop but your point is well taken but also I could say the same thing when I teach classes at FIT or Bank Street or go to AAM most of the time Thank you. Hi I'm Linda Kaplan from American History Workshop and I want to say first Paul I think that's a great idea about doing a hands on workshop how we can back into these well no that's true but the question before you was about curators and I work with a lot of primarily in history museums and I think it is incumbent upon the curator to bring the toolbox of accessibility that we have because if the curator doesn't do it you know the exhibit designer doesn't necessarily have an invested interest in doing it and the education department that often has the people who work on accessibility as was mentioned earlier are not often brought to the table until way after the exhibit is designed so I think curators play a big role in making sure that accessibility in many different ways is on the table I just want to second what Linda said maybe I don't know if it's different for the history museum world if it's different in other areas I'd be curious to know but I think that was kind of the point I was trying to get at in terms of the curators thinking that the designers are going to bring that but the designers if they don't hear that this is a priority and what specifically this meaning universal design is in what way that is integral to the concept of the exhibit it ain't going to happen what happens with architects ever since the ADA I remember when I was an architect and they introduced the ADA and we were all pulling our hair around and saying how in the world are we ever going to get our minds around this we have to make toilet stalls how many inches wide and there has to be turning radiuses we couldn't believe it it was like this is just government overreach on a massive intrusive scale we must resist and now 20 years later it's just second nature and of course we do these things we don't think twice about it and we also put up signs that have braille room numbers and do many other things that are stipulated under that rule and I think these changes don't happen immediately but they do happen over time and I do feel that curators are becoming more aware of the need to ensure equity in who can use these exhibits so again I see change happening incrementally and I do think that it's not an impossible problem and it is being addressed in a slow way it's frustratingly slow however geologically slow the only curator in the world who cares about access even if I am a curator with an education degree from Bank Street it's it is one of the reasons that the museum field uses team approach to exhibition development is so that the training and the focus of the various staff members can be brought together from as early as possible in the project's lifetime also to add to that it's like I mean, me because I'm representing potion right now it's like we work with so many different clients and only maybe half of them are museums so it's like very hard for us to understand the needs of museums or other clients because of course the clients that are more corporate they don't necessarily have to follow ADA and it's only like our just being cautious saying like maybe how about we put the reach a bit lower so someone on the wheelchair can access this screen but they don't have for example a team of basically accessibility challenged users to help us with determining what could be a challenge here so like us coming from this kind of perspective where we focus on creating these interactive experiences we really need to have some kind of guidance so kind of that's from museum side is always very important it doesn't seem like the curator has a job to do the designer has a job to do is there such a thing as a disabilities coordinator on the staff of most museums and could that person be in the early planning for new exhibits there are disability coordinators various job titles in many museums in New York the Smithsonian institution has one per museum as well as one I think just with the design team so yes the answer is yes Mac is almost entirely made up of people who are professionally committed to access and the members of the steering committee many of whom are here today many of whom met you at the door are frequently that person in the museum it's a great field if anyone is looking for a museum specialty it will you'll get to meet all these people and work with all of these different institutions and figure out how access needs to be integrated into every museum project it's interesting that you said the curator has their job and the designer has their job and stuff I'm working on an installation and an opening of a museum right now and the graphics person was installing this graphic of a big Leonardo da Vinci set of copies of his notebook and the graphics person said oh I think they printed this wrong it's all written backwards which was a great learning opportunity right there because Leonardo da Vinci wrote in mirror writing but the thing is my point is the graphics person wasn't just there to put this graphic on the wall he was actually paying attention and wanted to like say before we put this thing on the wall is this right and so totally we all have our jobs but maybe there's like bigger shared understanding of where our jobs fit into this bigger picture I mean I just love that the guy was like oh no there's a problem the graphics person was like okay well here's a but like I'm glad he said that I'm super glad he said that he was paying attention to not just slapping the thing on the wall thank you all for coming and please sign up for the Mac mailing list as well as the Koopa Hewitt mailing list if you have a chance please do look at the projects that are in this gallery they are really fascinating and I hope very much that some of them will be prototyped and on the market soon the museum is open for another hour yes and please take advantage if you have not seen our exhibitions please please do go ahead and Mac would like to thank the Koopa Hewitt so much for this great collaboration thank you this was a wonderful opportunity thank you