Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
disparity by fomenting mutual respect. The Deaf participants' increased capacity
enabled them to come up with the ideas for SignSupport. Further, we have learned
to recognise, acknowledge and appreciate the expertise that Deaf people have with
respect to how they communicate and want to communicate in signed language. We
do this by pursuing the ideal of community-based co-design and engagement with
them, e.g. weekly visits and interpreted data collection, both formal and informal;
generative sessions; and incorporating ethnographic methods into technology
design and evaluation. One danger in particular for us now is that patterns of partici-
pation were originally established in weak mode, commencing with the text relay
prototypes. Perhaps, as evidenced by the recent suggestion to conduct data collec-
tion outside of third Sundays, DCCT staff and members have internalised a particu-
lar way to deal with us. Or perhaps that is a misunderstanding - that the Deaf
community wishes to separate their third Sunday from the ICT project. Perhaps the
case would be different if researchers possessed SASL fl uency. They have rather
suggested we engage larger groups of Deaf people to collect data and ideas on other
days considered more convenient and less intrusive to community goings-on.
Overall, we have seen, with the SignSupport project, that through the capacity
building, via formal training and also via exposure to our long-term series of
research interventions, the Deaf community has developed the capacity to better
help drive our research agenda. We hope that those experiences are what enabled the
research agenda resulting from generative sessions with key DCCT staff members,
aligning research projects to a strategic trajectory. We now endeavour to develop
SignSupport in a way that it can accommodate the needs defi ned by the Deaf
community to address multiple scenarios where the tool can provide even more
communication bridges for Deaf people in their everyday lives.
7
Conclusion
This section summarises the main themes of this chapter, what we have learnt and
how we have changed our practise and offers advice for researchers faced with
similar challenges. A danger of following a code of ethics without taking into con-
sideration additional sociocultural issues can entail that technical outputs of design
and research may not actually address the needs of Deaf people in developing
regions. We speak from experience and learned the hard way by working with a
Deaf community in a resource-limited environment for quite a number of years. It
was only when we started incorporating modifi cations to the standard traditional
approaches that we started making more genuinely accessible and impactful inno-
vative in-roads with respect to technical development. Therefore, in our opinion, the
approach to ethics can and does have direct ramifi cations for technical outputs. The
challenge is to adhere to ethics fundamentals while at the same time espousing a
context-awareness to address and/or handle ethical situations that arise beyond the
reach of traditional approaches, such as those that come from extensive, dynamic
and continual interventions as is common in action research projects.
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