Reflection

Being the third time visiting Dialogue In The Dark really gives me a different take and experience as compared to the first few trips. I could still vividly remember during the very first session, I was quite nervous as I did not expect a pitch dark experience despite having my eyes fully opened. Out of the entire 1-hour tour, I had the deepest impression for dining in the dark. To order something and dining in the dark is not as easy as how I thought it was. After ordering with the help of the staff, there comes a moment whereby our food and drinks have arrived and everyone has difficulty identifying where is their ordered item and who ordered which item and who to pass it to.

After finally getting my hot milo, I had difficulties to even trying to figure out like where is the opening of the cover for drinking and where is the bin that they asked us to throw our finished food packaging etc. I felt that the experience we had in DID was really “nothing” as compared to what the visually-impaired had experienced in their everyday real-life situations since we are constantly able to rely on our “left or right walls” to guide us. The dining in the dark experience really struck me because it really makes me question myself that what if, I have no side walls to rely on? What if my surroundings are just empty spaces? What if I enter an unfamiliar terrain not knowing where is what? It’s going to be so much more frightening…

Now, the third time being here, being less afraid actually allows me to focus on many other details of the experience and better at understanding their needs. I realize I was very reliant on other types of guidance such as the guide’s voice or the sense of touch. I realize how descriptions and voicing out is important, such as what color is the item. Also, how we can better assist them in different areas.

I felt that role-playing research techniques allow us to put ourselves in the shoes of others. Despite not being able to fully mimic the real experience, but it allows us to have a certain degree of better understanding towards a certain special group of people. By using this technique, I felt that it allow us to notice minor details of the needs of these special groups of people, details that we might have never realized before. After experiencing such design techniques, designers can utilize their experiences and information gathered to create a better, relatable and much more impactful design.

Since design is all about communicating ideas, I felt that it is important for designers to experience things by ourselves and not just gathering information by the screen as we might miss out certain key aspect. Design needs to be relatable, understood and work out or be purposeful for our target audience. Some context could be for example having the need to design an installation exhibition to gain public awareness by wanting the public to experience what the special groups of people were experiencing (like how we went through the DID experience). Another example would be designing products that help these special groups of people (such as apps etc). Or perhaps designing posters and banners that catches the attention of the public to increase awareness etc. Special groups of people could include the elderlies, disabilities, mental illnesses, cognitive illnesses, physical illnesses or any other issues or people’s situations in general that we don’t experiences and require better understanding.

Overall, it was a meaningful and impactful trip!