Felipe Sarmiento

Inclusive Design a Source of Innovation: A Case Study & Prototype on Soccer Spectatorship

Access to soccer content is achieved mostly through visual cues that convey spatial relations between the ball and players, supplemented by spoken and/or written commentary. Unfortunately, for nonvisual spectators who rely on spoken and written commentary alone, spatial information is lost. Fieldwork in Colombia was selected, designed, and executed in order to observe a unique tactile sign language system that is Co-Designed by actual soccer spectators – a sign language interpreter and a Deaf-Blind spectator. Two portable cameras (GoPro Hero3) were used to capture the live interpretation inside the stadium. Video analysis and field notes revealed how the loss of spatial relations between the ball and players is counteracted by employing a combination of props and gestures. Iterative prototyping through user testing was developed with the aim to design instructions that would teach any visual spectator how to interpret the game from visual to tactile modality. The mixture of ethnographic observations and user testing sessions exposed key properties needed to interpret the game of soccer without using visual or aural cues this work can guide designs towards new spectatorship experiences. http://openresearch.ocadu.ca/id/eprint/2323/