In other words - why is the artifactual world constructed only for
right-handed people? After half a lifetime of struggling with scissors,
restringing guitars backwards (at least it kept pushy people from
borrowing them and breaking half the strings), muttering at my computer
keyboard because it has the number pad on the *right* side, and my
electronic keyboard because the high end for all the complicated melodic
stuff is on the *right* side - I would like to second, third and fourth
the motion that all technologies deprive some people while expediting
others. Anyone who's left-handed has figured this out well before the
age of five. And then you start school and they start teaching you how
to write backwards - from left to right.
This is no laughing matter - I've seen it in grad school as both student
and teacher (to under-grads) in terms of teaching/learning practices. As
someone with no auditory memory for speech at all (music is another
matter) and who writes upside down, taking class-notes is a struggle for
me and I prefer to rely on reading (if I've seen it in print it usually
sticks like glue), while as an instructor I was constantly confronted
with students emitting agonized cries of, "What do you mean, *read* it
for the test? Aren't you going to lecture about it in class?"
When someone solemnly tells me, "Research proves that *this* is the way
people learn X," my immediate response wants to be, "People? Which
people? What percent actually do it this way and what percent what other
ways?" Diversity isn't just a matter of culture, gender, etc. If our
outsides reflected the diversity of ways in which our nervous systems
operate, the human race would be even far more visually interesting than
it already is. One person's affordance is another one's handicap.
Rachel Heckert
PS Eva - as a fellow (relative) shortie, I'm sitting in a chair which
has had three inches hacked off the legs so my feet *will* rest flat on
the floor. If you can change it, do it!
>snip
>I also think that what Bill Barowy and Nate Schmolze got out of the pole
vaulting >example, how cultural tools have "winners and losers" is what
has kept me, through >everyday experience, from believing that artifacts
are universally designed to be >convenient and efficient. Affordances and
constraints of a tool are always relative to >particular users, and as a
small person I've been on the losing side with furniture etc. >for most
of my life. Well, for example, chairs may be convenient for some kind of
>standard person, but I can rarely rest my feet properly on the floor.
>snip
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