Interview Documentation: Team Hue Values & Bill
Introduction
For our Intro to Physical Computing class’s final project, our group, the Durians, is working with Bill, an individual from Pittsburgh with Achromatopsia, to develop an assistive device that’s useful and relevant to his experience. To better understand his wants and needs, and get to know Bill better, we conducted an informational interview with Bill. It was conducted via zoom with the members of our group: Sapna, Harry, and Angie. Our goal for the meeting was to gain a better understanding of aspects of Bill’s daily routine, tasks or activities he enjoys doing, and spaces for an assistive device during these.
Meeting Agenda:
Given that Bill has participated in this project before and is the primary liaison for the other clients, we had a relatively straightforward interview plan and anticipated that the interview would run quickly with straightforward answers.
- Introductions: names & background
- Quick rundown of project and purpose
- Bill’s Disability description and history of the disability
- What he struggles with day to day & problems that he has come across as a result of his disability
- Specific instances of struggle with disability
- Something that he wanted to do when he was younger
- What he wants from this project
- What previous groups from this class have done for him
- Any specific requests for devices (since he knows the project pretty well)
- Next steps
Meeting summary and major takeaways:
About the Disability: From the interview, we learned a lot about Bill’s Disability. He has severe light sensitivity and took the meeting in the dark in his house. He expressed discomfort in rooms with bright ambient light, especially outdoors in sunlight or looking at a bright screen. He is also legally blind with 20/200 vision which makes facial recognition, and looking at text at distances difficult. Finally, He has Achromatopsia. Which is full color blindness.
These vision problems were birth conditions so he has lived with these all his life. He recalls challenges from growing up like wanting to be able to play baseball but not being able to see pitches clearly.
Bill seems to have the most day to day complications with issues pertaining to color. He told us that the previous IDEATE team built a clothing color identifier to help him select his wardrobe. He explicitly wanted to address an issue he has with cooking with color blindness.
Since he cant see colors, it is impossible for him to tell the doneness of meat. He would like something to help identify when meat is cooked through appropriately. Here is a quick sketch of a potential devices from the meeting:
Rough sketch of Meat Thermometer Device
As a quick aside from the project, Bill mentioned that one of the important things he wants us to take from this project is experience interacting with the disabled community. We hope that this experience, along with class visits to CLASS and interacting with other clients gives us this opportunity to experience a subset of the community that is often marginalized and overlooked.
Thoughts and Discussions
- The overall interview experience was smooth. Bill is well spoken and has plenty of experience with this project.
- The conversation was good. We got mostly all the basic information we needed to start our ideation. But we may need more specific information from Bill, for example, the specific value of screen/daylight he is sensitive to.
- Bill seemed pretty set on an idea of something that we could do that interacted specifically with his disability. In hindsight, we probably should have also focused on general assistive devices that could help with quality of life improvements, not just vision based devices.
- We intend on following up with him with alternate ideas that we came up with not related to color blindness.
- Our group had a team member shuffle, we will likely contact Bill again with the full team in order to catch everyone up