digital fabrication technologies in support of the visually impaired edoardo calia
TRANSCRIPT
Digital Fabrication
Technologies in support
of the visually impaired
Projects and prototypes from the
makers communityExpo Milano 2015, October 24, 2015
Digital Fabrication
• A set of processes and technologies that is
well known to large manufacturing
industries
• The technological progress of the past 10
years have made them available also to
SMEs and even individual users
• Democratisation of fabrication: everybody
can design and make. Almost anything.
How to Make (almost) Anything
The makers community
• Aggregated around a few principles:
– Knowledge sharing
– Open source (hw and sw)
– Trial and error
– Learning by doing
• Makers gather in FabLabs where they
share the use of machines and their
experiences
MakerFaires and more
A few projects / initiatives
• FingerReader (MIT, USA)
• Looqui (Torino, Italy)
• Dot (Korea)
• The Hack Disability context (Rome, Italy)
FingerReader (MIT)
Looqui (PoliTo, Italy)
• Deaf-Blind people communicate with each other using a tactile signs
• Looqui is a 3D-printed hand that repeats the movements of a remote user,
allowing deaf-blind people to communicate even if they are
far from each other
DOT (Korea)
• Startup created by a team of 4 university
students
• Issues they wanted to solve:
• 1% of books translated into Braille
• A Braille reader costs 2000$+
• 95% of blind people do not learn
Braille for these reasons
Hack Disabilities
• A 2 day hackaton organized in Rome last
May 16th and 17th 2015
• Teams and individuals were called to
design solutions / prototypes to make some
common services more easily available for
visually impaired (Transportation, Social
Networks, Entertainment, Domotics and
IoT, Push Notifications)
The FEARR team
• Designers and developers who met at the
event
• They won the first prize with their braille
keyboard connected to a smartphone
using an Arduino board
• Presented at the MakerFaire in Rome last
weekend (October 18-20 2015)
Conclusions
• Bottom up innovation has unexpected
potential
• The makers community exploits the power
of heterogeneous competences through
collaboration and knowledge sharing
• When paired with modern financial
paradigms like crowdfunding, prototypes
can actually test (and go to) the market!
