Protactile Research Network
Chapter 6: The Laminated Environment
In 2016, I conducted 12 months of anthropological fieldwork with DeafBlind students, staff, and community members at Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C., in order to understand how protactile principles were interpreted and applied given very different social and historical conditions. In Seattle, as the protactile movement was just beginning, the goal was to suspend sighted judgments about what was appropriate to make room for new practices and norms to emerge. This often meant finding ways for DeafBlind people to be together, away from sighted interpreters, friends, and family (Chapter 4). Despite the general success of those efforts, sighted standards of appropriateness had a way of resurfacing, throwing up obstacles at every turn: chairs that restrict the movements of the arms, tables too big to reach across or move, plexiglass separating customers and cashiers. At Gallaudet, the same sorts of problems were encountered; however, the response was different. In particular, things that would have been treated like annoying obstacles in Seattle were often treated like the outcome of someone’s bad decision. I would soon learn that this difference was directly related to “Deaf Space” design, which in 2016 was at the center of public discourse on campus.
Deaf Space, which started in 2005, is an architectural and infrastructural framework for designing buildings, walkways, furniture, systems for modulating light flow, educational technologies, and other structures that support culturally specific navigation and communication practices among Deaf people (Malzkuhn 2007; Bahan 2009; Sangaglang 2012; Hales 2013;Hansel Bauman 2014; Sirvage 2015, 2017; Behm 2019; cf. Kusters 2015). Just a few years after Deaf Space started gaining traction at Gallaudet, the protactile movement touched down (McMillen 2015). Many of the DeafBlind people I knew at Gallaudet were in direct contact with protactile leaders from Seattle and were quickly picking up protactile theory and practice. Deaf Space scholars saw potential in the protactile movement, and they invited people who were involved to work with architects, designers, and administrators to find ways of incorporating protactile perspectives into Deaf Space as the future of the university was re-imagined. The projects they were invited to weigh in on were part of large-scale urban development, which was transforming the area surrounding the university, now known as “NoMa,” or “North of Massachusetts Avenue” (MacCleery and Tar 2012). In the next section, I provide background on those projects, which is required to understand the dynamics that were in place when Deaf Space design and the protactile movement converged. While the Seattle DeafBlind community was able to successfully create an independent institution where the protactile movement could grow, most communities will be faced with the problem of taking up residence in someone else’s space (Kusters 2015). This chapter analyzes one such case, where “the laminated environment” became a model for co-existence.
6.1 Deaf Space
6.1.1 Urban Development
Urban development projects in the area surrounding the university were funded by a combination of federal and private funds. At the time, the District of Columbia was in federal financial receivership, and “the area represented a vastly underutilized land use asset that was spinning off tax revenues of only about $5 million per year.” Therefore, “for the federal government, it was a prime potential site for close-in federal office buildings” and increased tax revenue (MacCleery and Tar 2012). Federal interests dovetailed with those of large private real estate investment companies like JBG Smith, who, according to their 2016 website, specialize in “transit-oriented development” and “sub- market dynamics.” In the northeast quadrant of Washington, D.C., Gallaudet and the Deaf community surrounding it were one such “submarket.” Mean- while, the president of Gallaudet was working to ensure that the university would benefit from development, rather than fall victim to it.
At the time, Gallaudet was surrounded by a tall, brick wall, and the entryways were guarded by thick, iron gates. There was a security booth at the main gate where vehicles entering the campus had to stop to gain authorized entry. The overall dynamic between the campus and the surrounding com- munity was one of stark separation. Henry, the Director of Campus Design and Planning at the time, explained that as local government invested, and developers started moving in, Gallaudet wanted to ensure that they would benefit from the inevitable “explosion in commerce just outside of the gates.” However, breaking down long-standing (physical) barriers also seemed like it would create vulnerabilities. According to Henry, the president of the university started describing the campus as a “99-acre gift” given to the global Deaf community. Framed this way, he said, the stakes were clear, and people understood why the administration “didn’t want to sell [the campus] for parts (in fact, one might argue, it wasn’t theirs to sell).” This centered the discussion on protection and preservation rather than turning a quick profit. One especially vivid warning that was circulating involved an image: Droves of hearing people flood into campus from the quickly growing residential developments across the street. Once inside, their dogs poop and then they leave.
With unfavorable possibilities like this in mind, the idea of “zones” emerged and gained traction with administrators. Just outside of campus, Deaf and hearing people mix. One rung in, there would be a “buffer zone” where outsiders are welcome, but also have a clear sense that they are visiting a place that is not their own. As they go further into the center of campus, the environment becomes increasingly unwelcoming and impenetrable. Though the precise mechanisms (to my knowledge) had not been worked out, this vision fit with developer’s goals of turning NoMa into a “center of culture, creativity, and commerce.” The liminal outer zone was already becoming a reality in 2016 in places like Union Market, a gourmet food hall located across the street from Gal- laudet and a few blocks from the NoMa/Gallaudet Metro Station. Deaf and hearing patrons frequented the market, and many of the people who worked there knew enough ASL to get through a routine service encounter. Signed conversations were an integral part of the ambient environment, and hearing patrons had ample opportunity to make themselves understood in new ways. This turned Union Market into a place where people went not just for food, but for a distinctive cultural experience. The presence of Deaf people, their culture, and their practices therefore generated new forms of value for planners and developers (Behm 2019). “Deaf Space” design emerged out of this moment as an intellectual and practical project aimed at creating urban environments with the capacity to reinforce and preserve Deaf culture, while also participating in, and benefiting from, urban development.
6.1.2 Participation
How do people participate in urban development projects? At first it might seem obvious: They attend a focus group or respond to a survey. Deaf Space researchers asked people to do neither. They were interested in the habitual ways that Deaf people move through their environment as they carry out their everyday tasks. So instead of asking people what they did, or what their preferences were, they systematically analyzed video recordings of people walking around, talking, eating, and so forth, and combined those analyses with ethnographic inquiry to draw out patterns in behavior that the people they were studying were aware of peripherally, if at all. Many of these analyses targeted what linguistic anthropologists call “participation frameworks.”
Participation frameworks are configurations of roles that people take on in interacting with one another. They can be more or less abstract. For example, the roles of “speaker’’ and “addressee’’ are found everywhere language is used and are therefore relatively abstract. In contrast, more specific roles like artist and patron, or student and professor, are tied to particular situations and institutional contexts. The role of “speaker” is always embedded in some more specific role. We do not just speak, we speak in some capacity. However, those connections do not always snap immediately into place in the unfolding of an interaction. For example, if a person approaches me on the street and starts speaking, I know right away that they are a “speaker,” but a question may arise soon after: Who are they speaking as and what does that make me in this situation?
The problem of how roles like “speaker” and “addressee” come to be embedded in more specific roles like “tourist” and “local,” or “teacher” and “student” has been a significant source of debate among scholars of language. Erving Goffman (1981) famously started from the position that the roles of speaker and addressee can be decomposed into constituent roles like the person who authors an utterance, or the “author,” vs. a person who relays an utterance someone else has authored, or the “animator.” He argued that these roles are then “laminated” in interaction to form a coherent, composite role. Stephen Levinson (1998) later systematized this framework by breaking Goffman’s constituent roles down into an elaborate set of interrelated features, increasing the number of roles that could be derived.
Judith Irvine (1996) argued, however, that those who take this kind of “decompositional’’ approach to role structures have it backwards (pp. 133–134, also see Hanks 1990). Reifying a rigid set of roles or features makes it more difficult to identify roles that fall outside of that set:
"[O]ne might well suspect that the number of such participant roles (PRs) arrived at by the decompositional approach may prove endless. Certainly I can think of some not yet provided for in Levinson’s scheme, the most complex decompositional model to date. Consider, for instance, the person quoted against his or her will; the absent party named in an accusation (the “Fingeree”?); the role in a stage play as opposed to the actor playing it; the person a child is named after who may (if living) then have certain specified responsibilities toward the child—all these possibilities seem to me unrepresented in Levinson’s system. We will at least need some way to arrive at further distinctions. Will we end up having to propose “primary” PRs that are highly culture-specific?"
Instead of going down that path, Irvine argues that the best approach is to abandon the project of mapping out, in advance, all possible roles, since this often transforms the process that gives rise to roles into a mere “rationale’’ for the typology. She argues that it is precisely “the process by which participation structures are constructed, imagined, and socially distributed’’ that should be foregrounded analytically.
If Deaf Space research were boiled down to its most fundamental activity, this might be it: constructing and imagining participation structures, and the complex ways they are laminated onto one another, such that patterns in how Deaf people participate in conversation can become central to how Gallaudet, as an institution, participates in urban development. Unlike linguistic anthro- pologists, though, Deaf Space designers had to take these analyses one step further, translating them into concrete guidelines for architects and develop- ers. This meant attending not only to participation structures, but also to how those structures interact with affordances in the environment.
After the completion of the first Deaf Space building, the Sorenson Lan- guage and Communication Center, or “SLCC,” researchers realized they had underestimated the complexity of this task. Sirvage (2017) gives the example of a large, circular bench built into the atrium of the SLCC. He explains that the bench was supposed to be a place where people gathered and conversed, and the atrium where the bench was located was supposed to be the “heart of campus,” but after it was built, it was clear that something had gone wrong. The atrium, he explained:
"was too large and empty. People tended to use it as a meeting place. One person would wait there until their friend came down to meet them and then they would leave together. If there were any conversations, they were generally short. They would greet one another, ask how things were going, and then after these brief exchanges, they would go elsewhere to continue their conversation. They never stayed long. Small groups were maybe a little more likely to stay, but even then, people would leave fairly quickly. The only events that lasted were large, formal events that were planned in advance. People would come for the event and then disperse. So the atrium in the SLCC was successful in certain respects, but it didn’t become the heart of campus like we had hoped."
It turned out that this problem derived from the fact that early Deaf Space research was based on “external visual observation,” and from that perspec- tive, it looked like Deaf people sit and stand in circles when they are in a group conversation. “The bench,” explains Sirvage, “was designed around that observation. It traces the contour of a group conversation” (p. 6). However, citing the work of Ben Bahan (2009), Sirvage notes that the:
"contour was calculated using an incorrect geometric formula. From the inside of a Deaf interaction—from the perspective of a person for whom such interactions feel natural—it becomes apparent that . . . [w]hat we thought was a circle is really flexible overlapping triangles."
When two Deaf people are conversing, they stand opposite one another. When a third person joins, all three participants re-configure their alignment so that two equidistant lines extend out toward each of the other participants. This ensures that all participants are comfortably and reciprocally within the visual field. When additional participants are added, “the underlying organization is still triangular, but more triangles are added, in an overlapping fashion” (Sirvage 2017: 6).
Once this structure had been uncovered, the task for the Deaf Space designer was to understand how to build affordances into the environment to support it. The bench in the atrium of the SLCC was a glaring example of what would happen if they got it wrong. The substitution of rigid surface structure, that could be seen from outside for dynamic underlying structure that could not was a mistake that was literally set in stone. In order to avoid making these mistakes again, Deaf Space design went in a more “imaginative” direction. This led to deeper insights about how Deaf ways of residing in the world were “distinctive,” and therefore valuable.
6.1.3 Imagination
In carefully analyzing videorecorded interactions, Deaf Space researcher Robert T. Sirvage didn’t just look at surface-level patterns of behavior. He looked at how those behaviors were actually responses to the environment, and the distinct ways it is legible to Deaf people. To communicate his findings, he asks (mostly hearing) Deaf Space architects, planners, and designers to imagine how Deaf people use their eyes to perceive the space behind them.
While hearing people integrate their vision and their hearing for 360 degrees of environmental access, Deaf people, he argues, can only see what is in front of them. He thinks that in order to accommodate that fact, they habitually read shadows on the sidewalk and reflections on glass, are attuned to vibration in the floor, and in crowded environments they will be found with their backs pressed against a wall. Sirvage says that in interaction, each Deaf person “takes responsibility” for the space behind the other person. If they don’t, they will be scolded and “[t]hat emotional response tells us that this way of structuring visual attention is not just a biological fact—it has become a cultural rule. . .”. He calls this “Deaf Dorsality” (2015: 4).
Sirvage concluded that a Deaf environment is an environment that minimizes dorsal exposure. Designs based on this insight were then pitched to investors as ways of making the area more architecturally interesting by contributing to a distinctive “Deaf esthetic.” For example, Frank, one of the architects I interviewed, described a saw-toothed storefront, where each panel would function like a rearview mirror. Deaf pedestrians walking down the sidewalk could easily glimpse the space behind their head, thereby minimizing dorsality.
Deaf Space depends on significant exposure for hearing architects to Deaf ways of being. This is provided by an expansive network of Deaf scholars, engineers, architects, community members, and university administrators who do the work of exposing. In an interview with one hearing member of the design team, for example, a Deaf supervisor was present and was actively teaching him how to work with interpreters, impressing upon him the importance of learning ASL, and pressing him on his tendency to avoid complex conversations with Deaf members of the design team and favor hearing colleagues instead. This kind of informal educational process, which unfolds in the context of sustained relationships, is essential for a project like Deaf Space. As anthropologist Keith Murphy (2004) has noted, the relations that obtain between the designer and the people they design for are multiply mediated by interactions between members of the design team, such that the object of design emerges, at the outset, in the shared space where co-engagements unfold.
Deaf Space theorists highlight the fact that “empathic” processes are involved, which can play out in face to face interaction, or from a distance. For example, Finnish architect Juhani Palasmaa, who has been influential for Deaf Space practitioners, argues, “Imagination is not a quasi-visual projection; we imagine through our entire embodied existence and through imagination we expand our realm of being” (p. 8). He describes this activity as a kind of intersubjective “tuning” to the eventual inhabitants of the
building. Palasmaa’s architect doesn’t just leave traces of her own activity, she imaginatively experiences the activity of others, and leaves structures for them to find that will support, enhance, or anticipate those activities. Those who occupy the building may or may not be aware of the efforts that led to their experience, and yet, their experience relies on a kind of displaced intersubjective attunement (Duranti 2010; Duranti and La Mattina 2022), which may operate across significant asymmetries (Hanks 2013) and be rooted in an imaginative mode of “sensory access” (Murphy 2015).
6.2 Being Protactile in Deaf Space
In order to understand the recent convergence of Deaf Space and the protac- tile movement, I interviewed Henry. The interview took place in his office, a large space in a castle-like building that looks out over the rooftops of the campus. He was seated at his desk surrounded by stacks of blueprints, books, and manuals, and behind him was a whiteboard covered in indecipherable markings. Henry told me he had been looking for ways to incorporate feedback from DeafBlind people into Deaf Space projects for years, but it never seemed to work out. Philip, a member of Henry’s staff, told me later that he had noticed the same thing.
Phillip explained that a few years earlier, in 2013, he tried to include a group of DeafBlind people in a project involving some curb-cuts on campus. As I mentioned in Chapter 1, curb-cuts are supposed to lead from the sidewalk out into the cross-walk, but because of the way they were angled, they sent people using canes into the middle of the intersection instead. He explained that every time he tried to have a conversation about it with them, confusion set in. “They understood the general problem,” he said, “but when we tried to get into the details of how it might be fixed, things deteriorated.” One time, he invited a DeafBlind student who was in a leadership role on campus, to talk with him about it. He said:
I was signing like I always did, and he had his hands on me (he was completely blind). I learned later that that was called “tactile reception of visual ASL”. I didn’t know that at the time. So I would say something and over and over again, the person would say, “OK, but where is that?” and then they would think for a while. Then they would say, “Where am I now?” I would point this way and then that way and we would walk toward the curb in question, and then the student would say, “Where am I now?” Again, I would point and explain and again they would become confused. I knew he was intelligent and in general a very competent person. I also knew that he got around on campus on his own, so I couldn’t understand what was going so wrong. I realized that the way I framed a discussion about space was flawed from the start. I thought that because he was a good student, got around on his own, he was involved in organizations, he was smart, that he could have an in-depth conversation with me about design. But I didn’t realize that there was this huge gap between his experience and the way we were talking about it. Later, when I learned about protactile, it was a huge revelation.
In order for DeafBlind people to exert influence over how the environment was structured, they had to be able to participate in conversations in which various aspects of the environment were referred to. In these moments, a chasm formed between protactile ways of residing in the world and Deaf ways of representing the world. The resources that ASL offered, and more specifically, the categories and relations supplied by its “deictic system,” were not up to the task.
6.2.1 “Where Am I Now?”
As I discuss in Chapter 5, a deictic system is a lexico-grammatical system used to direct the attention of others to objects in the immediate environment. In English, deictic expressions include words like this, that, here, and there. There is a tradition of analyzing expressions like these in relation to the speaker, who is positioned in time and space. This is an “ego-centric” approach, which is supposed to answer questions like, “Where am I now?” via the conventional oppositions encoded in the deictic system (discussion and review in Hanks 1990). In this view, for example, a speaker might choose this when referring to something close, or “proximal” to the speaker, and that when referring to something further away, or “distal,” with respect to the speaker. Linguists and anthropologists have pointed out, however, that culturally and historically specific patterns in how people interact with their environment, and draw the attention of others to it, can affect the internal organization of the language so that the language comes to anticipate certain aspects of the world as it is experienced by its speakers (Bühler 1934; Evans 2003; Edwards 2014; Cooperider et al. 2016; Sicoli 2016; Diessel and Coventry 2020; Forker 2020). This suggests that the values encoded in a given deictic system cannot be assumed, and there are many more possibilities than just “space” and “time” (Hanks 1990).
In 2016, the protactile deictic system was already emerging, and, as I discuss in Chapter 5, conventional values were encoded that would have been invaluable to Phillip and his interlocutor. Through routine use of the protactile deictic system in a particular setting, the environment takes on certain shared contours. Possible trajectories, locations, and objects cohere to form a world, within which coordinated actions like talking about the design of a curb-cut feel effortless or easy. As Philip’s observations suggest, without a functioning deictic system, a shared environment will not be revealed. However, the reverse is also true. Without a shared environment, the deictic system will be inoperable.
In a series of protactile workshops held at Gallaudet in 2016, Adrijana and Lee encountered this problem from the perspective of language acquisition. In a videorecorded instructional session focused on direction-giving, or “mapping,” Lee is talking with an undergraduate student who was living on campus. Lee asks for directions to various places nearby and at first it seems that the student can provide them. However, in discussing more detailed options for how to get from place to place, Lee discovers that the student doesn’t know basic things about the spatial layout of her surroundings. The student says, “Mapping is a challenge for me because it’s hard for me to visualize the things we’re talking about.” Lee and her student reflected on the fact that the protactile deictic system came with a protactile environment. One reinforced the other.
STUDENT: Mapping is really cool because I didn’t know that there are all of these short cuts on campus. I always end up taking the long way—like in the winter, the walk from the dorm to the gym is really cold. I had no idea that you could go through SAC and that there is a door in that building that is really close to the Field House. You don’t have to spend all that time in the cold. I wish I had known that before.
INSTRUCTOR: Yeah, so if you had been doing mapping all along it would make every-
thing easier, right? [Student agrees.] We need more people to learn mapping. That’s why you’re here learning it so you can teach other people. If everyone learned protactile mapping, you could walk up to anyone on campus and ask them for directions and they would be able to tell you in a way that makes sense, rather than pointing to a bunch of different directions in air space. When people start to do that, you can show them how to do it this way.
In subsequent months, DeafBlind people on campus started to acquire pro- tactile language, and in doing so, they were able to point out this, and draw attention to that. Each one of these moments might seem insignificant on its own, but in each referential act, ways of residing in the world and ways of representing the world are aligned, dis-aligned, or otherwise related, yielding a world where DeafBlind people can participate, navigate, negotiate, or just exist.
6.2.2 Affordances in Deaf Space
Some aspects of Deaf Space design already incorporate tactile affordances. One of the first things that came to my attention were “Deaf floors.” I learned from Henry, though, that from architectural and engineering perspectives, you can’t really talk about “floors” because they are attached to a complex assembly, all of which matters for Deaf Space. One day, he tried to explain it to me. He took out some blueprints, and after rolling them open on his desk he pointed to a place on the drawing and said, “These are trusses [T]hey
span from here to here and then from here to here, all the way across.” Then he pointed out the “underlayment” made of concrete, a “vapor barrier” made of plastic, and the space underneath the building, where there is soil. The soil, he explained, was originally made of clay, which expands when it gets wet, and “that,” he said, “can literally destroy a building.” To prevent expansion, the top two feet of soil had to be removed and replaced with gravel. On top of all of that trusses there is a 3/4-inch plywood deck, and on top of that there is a material called “gypcrete,” which is chalky like drywall, that adds mass to the floor and absorbs most of the sound that is propagated. The goal for Deaf Space is to balance this dampening effect with the transmission of vibrations that can be useful, for example vibrations caused by footfalls. He explained that if the floor let too much information through, it would distract from the information needed to “read” it effectively. “You want control,” he said. “So that floor that you’re asking me about really includes the whole assembly.”
According to Deaf Space guidelines, this assembly is used because it increases the “sensory reach” of the Deaf person standing on the floor by transmitting information that would otherwise be inaccessible, such as a person approaching from behind or a group of people walking past a closed office door. According to Sirvage (2015), Deaf people are attentive to this kind of environmental information and will make use of it wherever it is available. He says:
"If you want to understand what it feels like to be Deaf, you shouldn’t wear ear plugs; that would do very little to approximate our experience. What you should do is walk backwards and try to glean cues from your environment to be sure you are walking in a straight line. That way of attending to the environment is a habitual, completely ingrained part of our lives."
In particular, if a group of people is walking down the street, the person most peripheral to the interaction is expected to attend to environmental obstacles. The person speaking is prepared to receive warning signs from that person, as opposed to scanning the environment directly, himself. Designing buildings that anticipate this fact has led Deaf Studies scholars Ben Bahan and Dirksen Bauman to frame architecture as “the third person” in the interaction: “Just as the ‘third person’ in the group focuses on the path forward and its possible hazards while others focus more intently on the conversation, buildings can care for their occupants by providing environmental cues that enhance spatial awareness, safety, and ambient conditions that promote well-being” (italics in the original, cited in Bauman 2014: 388–389).
Protactile people found that Deaf floors also incorporated affordances for them. The dampened vibration they transmitted was something they already attended to, and they pushed designers to use it in other contexts as well, such as built-in benches. I could understand this because on multiple occasions I had enjoyed a particular bench in the hotel on Gallaudet’s campus. On top of the bench there are securely attached cushions made of a dense but forgiving material. They carried just enough vibration that you could feel someone sitting on the other end signing, but not so much that it distracted. One day, I was having a conversation on the bench with a member of our group, while two of the others were conversing a few feet down on the same bench. From where I was sitting, I could feel that they were there and that they were having a casual, rhythmic conversation—no urgency, anger, or long lulls were detected. If the bench had been made of concrete, or if the cushions had a different density, that information would have been lost. Deaf Space designers learned from this that materials and assemblies capable of transmitting and dampening vibrations caused by the ordinary activities of others can generate an ambient environment for protactile interaction.
Contrast this with Charlotte’s method for creating an ambient environment, discussed in Chapter 1. Nearly a decade earlier in Seattle, I described the details of the coffee shop we were in together using ASL. Just as many others did at the time, I assumed she could use those details to form an impression, based on memories of what coffee shops were like when she was still partially sighted. I was “providing access” to the environment via representations of it. This was necessary in part because of how the environ- ment had been designed, and who the designers imagined would be using it. As I explain in Chapter 1, all avenues to the tactile signs that could have given Charlotte an impression of the place were blocked off. She couldn’t get a sense of the coziness of the coffee shop by feeling the condensation on the insides of the windows because there were people sitting at tables, which were positioned under the windows. In order to touch the windows, she would have to lean over the people sitting at the tables, potentially knocking drinks into their laps or otherwise causing a disturbance. She also could have gotten a sense of the atmosphere by touching people’s jaws to see if they were eating and if so, how. She could have leaned in to feel the steam coming from their cups. However, the sighted people who designed the coffee shop never imagined that someone like Charlotte would be there.
In 2016 at Gallaudet, the approach was very different. First protactile structures of participation that incorporated relatively abstract roles like speaker, addressee, and non-addressed third party were observed and analyzed. Designers were subsequently advised to incorporate affordances for those patterns in interaction into floors, benches, hallways, and other structures in the environment. For protactile people, this promised to turn Gallaudet into a place that anticipated their existence and invited their participation.
This raises a more general question about what it means to “participate.” Recall that linguistic anthropologists have analyzed participation by identifying laminated role-structures and understanding how they relate to the participants who occupy them. Building on more recent approaches to participation that have foregrounded the “environmentally coupled” aspects of communication (Goodwin 2007), protactile design foregrounds the relation between the two and highlights the fact that in order to speak to one another (thereby taking on roles like “speaker”) the environment must first speak to us in ways that correspond across the collective. Wherever Deaf Space fulfilled this requirement for DeafBlind people, protactile practices flourished.
One such practice, which had no correlate in Seattle, was “protactile walking.” Many of the DeafBlind people I knew at Gallaudet were just begin- ning the process of becoming blind, and they were looking for activities that would facilitate that transition. They considered “protactile walking” to be one of those activities. Deaf sidewalks are wider than hearing sidewalks in order to support the structure of signed conversations. If you’re standing too close, you can’t see what the other person is saying. For protactile people, it turned out that those same sidewalks invited groups as large as four people to walk together. After participating in a few of these activities, I discussed them with a DeafBlind member of the group. We recalled the rhythmic coordination of canes and feet, the way it made us feel like a giant spider, and the catalyzing effect those experiences seemed to have on people who were just starting to go tactile.
There were other aspects of Deaf Space that did not support protactile interaction. Some of these conflicts were drawn out at a two-day meeting at Gallaudet called the “Tactile Mind Research Collaborative.” Protactile leaders from across the country were invited to the collaborative to discuss the creative and scientific potential of studying protactile practices with students, staff, and administrators. During those two days, the conversation was not about “access,” “inclusion,” or “rights.” It was about how one environment could be “laminated” onto another such that Deaf and DeafBlind people could co-exist.
6.2.3 The Laminated Environment
The protactile movement seemed to have implications for basic research across nearly every well-represented field at Gallaudet, such as linguistics, cognitive neuroscience, and Deaf studies. “Protactile design” was centered as a way of tying those intellectual strengths to institutional priorities in the context of urban development. John Lee Clark, in an unpublished essay written just after he attended the collaborative, laid out some basic issues that made being on campus not merely unpleasing, but perilous. He said that despite the excitement of the collaborative, “it was depressing to be on campus”:
"There were, for example, vast seas of concrete with no tactile landmarks or any- thing that would provide a sense of orientation and direction. It was also incredibly hard to find any people. I kept asking myself, “Where is everyone?” People seem to have been spread so far apart. It was also a shock to find how difficult it is to get food. [The restaurants and cafes] had glass things in front of the food, and maybe there were workers behind the food, but you couldn’t reach them to communicate. There weren’t any openings where I could walk around and find one of those workers to find out about food and give my order. The barriers there were absolute and complete, unless I took a chair and climbed over those glass things—I wish I’d thought of doing that when I was there!"
The first time I saw a DeafBlind person enter the food service area Clark describes, I was concerned. As a sighted person who had internalized protactile norms, I didn’t rush in to help, though (Chapter 1). Instead, I just watched. The DeafBlind person stomped their cane several times on the ground and then waited. After some more waiting and stomping, a sighted Deaf person nearby asked them what they needed and then made sure that they got it. I saw a similar series of events play out in the large, expansive lobby of the SLCC, and again in one of the “vast seas of concrete” in the center of campus.Being a good Deaf person at Gallaudet, it seemed, was a lot like being a good sighted person before the protactile movement in Seattle (Chapter 4). From a protactile perspective, those sighted interventions drove a wedge between DeafBlind people and their environment. This turned the environment into a description of itself, which, by virtue of passing through the common sense of the sighted mediator, rendered the campus unfamiliar, unknowable, and uninviting. Underlying this model is the insidious notion of “access.” Having an informal system that would give you access to restaurants might help you survive (for example locate and consume food), but it would not turn the campus into a place you would want to be.
In trying to find ways for Deaf and DeafBlind people to co-exist, one of the main conflicts that arose during the collaborative and elsewhere was between the “cool visual expansiveness” of Deaf Space and the “compact warmth” of protactile space. In John Lee Clark’s words:
"In Deaf Space, open spaces are valued—where people can look around and see things, who’s there, talk to someone across the space. Whereas I think the ideal in PT space is that we’re happiest when we’re like mice running around in a maze, in tunnels. I love walls. How do you put these two together?"
Henry discussed this tension as well in an interview. He said that these aspects of protactile environments make it an interesting case, from a design perspective, because, “it might be the one thing that is so incredibly particular that it starts to be exclusive.” After pausing to think about that for a moment, he picked up a marker, and turned around toward the white board behind him, and said, “But what’s beautiful about that is that one could imagine the built environment is a laminated space. If one of those layers was a DeafBlind layer, you might imagine lines and places” (he drew a rectangle, with little “bubbles” that jutted out from each side). This kind of structure, he said, would form “pathways with eddies,” where the pathways would be all about “trailability,” and the eddies would be protected spaces that are all about “touch” and “reach.”
Addressing this same conflict, Clark added that “where people walk and where their eyes go need not, and probably should not, be the same.” Path- ways through campus, he said, could easily be given crucial tactile struc- ture by adding a system of railings. Above hip-height, sight lines would be unchanged. For Clark, this would not just be a matter of effective navigation. It would also ensure that two people walking toward each other would converge and have the opportunity to meet, say hi, or ignore each other. Without common pathways, a Deaf person might realize that a DeafBlind person is present, but the reverse would almost certainly not be true. In subsequent design meetings, people returned again and again to surfaces and the proprioceptive information people pick up through their feet, as ways of laminating one environment onto another. In other words, visual expansiveness and tactile “trailability,” when laminated, would yield a shared “situation,” or “space of mutual monitoring possibility” (Goffman 1964). This would support the co-existence of Deaf and DeafBlind people.
I learned, as I continued my fieldwork, that this idea of the laminated environment can be extended beyond humans, too. For example, an architect who was working on a Deaf Space dorm at the time explained that toward the end of construction they ran into a problem with the birds. Deaf Space buildings, he explained, generally require more light. This is accomplished by using glass that is more transparent and including more windows. This is great for communication, but “it led to a situation where the birds kept flying into the glass and dying. In other words, it was not a ‘bird-safe design’ .” Unfortunately, you can’t correct the problem by adding a reflective layer to the windows because if you do, “the windows reflect the trees; the birds think they are flying into trees and kill themselves that way.” In the end, they went with bird houses because the theme for the dorm was “home away from home.” For birds, some windows afford death. For Deaf language-users, windows often afford heightened perceptibility in the visual channel. For DeafBlind people, windows might provide a surface that could be traced in navigating from one place to another, which unlike walls might also give off some thermal information about the external environment along the way. Intersecting patterns like these undergird the forms of imagination that architects, urban planners, and designers engage and thematize in Deaf Space, but they also became central to imagining how protactile people could take up residence in a space that was not their own.
6.3 Conclusion
In this chapter, I have extended the notion of “participation,” as it has been understood by linguistic anthropologists, to account for environments where Deaf and DeafBlind people were trying to co-exist. The first step in that process was for each group to exist in its own environment, which emerged out of the routine interaction between residence and representation. Only then could designers find ways of “laminating” one environment onto the other to generate new kinds of value for the institution. This approach contrasts starkly with attempts to provide access via representation alone. Questions remain about the sustainability of being protactile in Deaf Space (e.g. McMillen 2015). However, this chapter has captured a brief, imaginative moment in Gallaudet’s history, which, in my most optimistic moments, I hope someone might return to and make something of.
Deaf Space, which started in 2005, is an architectural and infrastructural framework for designing buildings, walkways, furniture, systems for modulating light flow, educational technologies, and other structures that support culturally specific navigation and communication practices among Deaf people (Malzkuhn 2007; Bahan 2009; Sangaglang 2012; Hales 2013;Hansel Bauman 2014; Sirvage 2015, 2017; Behm 2019; cf. Kusters 2015). Just a few years after Deaf Space started gaining traction at Gallaudet, the protactile movement touched down (McMillen 2015). Many of the DeafBlind people I knew at Gallaudet were in direct contact with protactile leaders from Seattle and were quickly picking up protactile theory and practice. Deaf Space scholars saw potential in the protactile movement, and they invited people who were involved to work with architects, designers, and administrators to find ways of incorporating protactile perspectives into Deaf Space as the future of the university was re-imagined. The projects they were invited to weigh in on were part of large-scale urban development, which was transforming the area surrounding the university, now known as “NoMa,” or “North of Massachusetts Avenue” (MacCleery and Tar 2012). In the next section, I provide background on those projects, which is required to understand the dynamics that were in place when Deaf Space design and the protactile movement converged. While the Seattle DeafBlind community was able to successfully create an independent institution where the protactile movement could grow, most communities will be faced with the problem of taking up residence in someone else’s space (Kusters 2015). This chapter analyzes one such case, where “the laminated environment” became a model for co-existence.
6.1 Deaf Space
6.1.1 Urban Development
Urban development projects in the area surrounding the university were funded by a combination of federal and private funds. At the time, the District of Columbia was in federal financial receivership, and “the area represented a vastly underutilized land use asset that was spinning off tax revenues of only about $5 million per year.” Therefore, “for the federal government, it was a prime potential site for close-in federal office buildings” and increased tax revenue (MacCleery and Tar 2012). Federal interests dovetailed with those of large private real estate investment companies like JBG Smith, who, according to their 2016 website, specialize in “transit-oriented development” and “sub- market dynamics.” In the northeast quadrant of Washington, D.C., Gallaudet and the Deaf community surrounding it were one such “submarket.” Mean- while, the president of Gallaudet was working to ensure that the university would benefit from development, rather than fall victim to it.
At the time, Gallaudet was surrounded by a tall, brick wall, and the entryways were guarded by thick, iron gates. There was a security booth at the main gate where vehicles entering the campus had to stop to gain authorized entry. The overall dynamic between the campus and the surrounding com- munity was one of stark separation. Henry, the Director of Campus Design and Planning at the time, explained that as local government invested, and developers started moving in, Gallaudet wanted to ensure that they would benefit from the inevitable “explosion in commerce just outside of the gates.” However, breaking down long-standing (physical) barriers also seemed like it would create vulnerabilities. According to Henry, the president of the university started describing the campus as a “99-acre gift” given to the global Deaf community. Framed this way, he said, the stakes were clear, and people understood why the administration “didn’t want to sell [the campus] for parts (in fact, one might argue, it wasn’t theirs to sell).” This centered the discussion on protection and preservation rather than turning a quick profit. One especially vivid warning that was circulating involved an image: Droves of hearing people flood into campus from the quickly growing residential developments across the street. Once inside, their dogs poop and then they leave.
With unfavorable possibilities like this in mind, the idea of “zones” emerged and gained traction with administrators. Just outside of campus, Deaf and hearing people mix. One rung in, there would be a “buffer zone” where outsiders are welcome, but also have a clear sense that they are visiting a place that is not their own. As they go further into the center of campus, the environment becomes increasingly unwelcoming and impenetrable. Though the precise mechanisms (to my knowledge) had not been worked out, this vision fit with developer’s goals of turning NoMa into a “center of culture, creativity, and commerce.” The liminal outer zone was already becoming a reality in 2016 in places like Union Market, a gourmet food hall located across the street from Gal- laudet and a few blocks from the NoMa/Gallaudet Metro Station. Deaf and hearing patrons frequented the market, and many of the people who worked there knew enough ASL to get through a routine service encounter. Signed conversations were an integral part of the ambient environment, and hearing patrons had ample opportunity to make themselves understood in new ways. This turned Union Market into a place where people went not just for food, but for a distinctive cultural experience. The presence of Deaf people, their culture, and their practices therefore generated new forms of value for planners and developers (Behm 2019). “Deaf Space” design emerged out of this moment as an intellectual and practical project aimed at creating urban environments with the capacity to reinforce and preserve Deaf culture, while also participating in, and benefiting from, urban development.
6.1.2 Participation
How do people participate in urban development projects? At first it might seem obvious: They attend a focus group or respond to a survey. Deaf Space researchers asked people to do neither. They were interested in the habitual ways that Deaf people move through their environment as they carry out their everyday tasks. So instead of asking people what they did, or what their preferences were, they systematically analyzed video recordings of people walking around, talking, eating, and so forth, and combined those analyses with ethnographic inquiry to draw out patterns in behavior that the people they were studying were aware of peripherally, if at all. Many of these analyses targeted what linguistic anthropologists call “participation frameworks.”
Participation frameworks are configurations of roles that people take on in interacting with one another. They can be more or less abstract. For example, the roles of “speaker’’ and “addressee’’ are found everywhere language is used and are therefore relatively abstract. In contrast, more specific roles like artist and patron, or student and professor, are tied to particular situations and institutional contexts. The role of “speaker” is always embedded in some more specific role. We do not just speak, we speak in some capacity. However, those connections do not always snap immediately into place in the unfolding of an interaction. For example, if a person approaches me on the street and starts speaking, I know right away that they are a “speaker,” but a question may arise soon after: Who are they speaking as and what does that make me in this situation?
The problem of how roles like “speaker” and “addressee” come to be embedded in more specific roles like “tourist” and “local,” or “teacher” and “student” has been a significant source of debate among scholars of language. Erving Goffman (1981) famously started from the position that the roles of speaker and addressee can be decomposed into constituent roles like the person who authors an utterance, or the “author,” vs. a person who relays an utterance someone else has authored, or the “animator.” He argued that these roles are then “laminated” in interaction to form a coherent, composite role. Stephen Levinson (1998) later systematized this framework by breaking Goffman’s constituent roles down into an elaborate set of interrelated features, increasing the number of roles that could be derived.
Judith Irvine (1996) argued, however, that those who take this kind of “decompositional’’ approach to role structures have it backwards (pp. 133–134, also see Hanks 1990). Reifying a rigid set of roles or features makes it more difficult to identify roles that fall outside of that set:
"[O]ne might well suspect that the number of such participant roles (PRs) arrived at by the decompositional approach may prove endless. Certainly I can think of some not yet provided for in Levinson’s scheme, the most complex decompositional model to date. Consider, for instance, the person quoted against his or her will; the absent party named in an accusation (the “Fingeree”?); the role in a stage play as opposed to the actor playing it; the person a child is named after who may (if living) then have certain specified responsibilities toward the child—all these possibilities seem to me unrepresented in Levinson’s system. We will at least need some way to arrive at further distinctions. Will we end up having to propose “primary” PRs that are highly culture-specific?"
Instead of going down that path, Irvine argues that the best approach is to abandon the project of mapping out, in advance, all possible roles, since this often transforms the process that gives rise to roles into a mere “rationale’’ for the typology. She argues that it is precisely “the process by which participation structures are constructed, imagined, and socially distributed’’ that should be foregrounded analytically.
If Deaf Space research were boiled down to its most fundamental activity, this might be it: constructing and imagining participation structures, and the complex ways they are laminated onto one another, such that patterns in how Deaf people participate in conversation can become central to how Gallaudet, as an institution, participates in urban development. Unlike linguistic anthro- pologists, though, Deaf Space designers had to take these analyses one step further, translating them into concrete guidelines for architects and develop- ers. This meant attending not only to participation structures, but also to how those structures interact with affordances in the environment.
After the completion of the first Deaf Space building, the Sorenson Lan- guage and Communication Center, or “SLCC,” researchers realized they had underestimated the complexity of this task. Sirvage (2017) gives the example of a large, circular bench built into the atrium of the SLCC. He explains that the bench was supposed to be a place where people gathered and conversed, and the atrium where the bench was located was supposed to be the “heart of campus,” but after it was built, it was clear that something had gone wrong. The atrium, he explained:
"was too large and empty. People tended to use it as a meeting place. One person would wait there until their friend came down to meet them and then they would leave together. If there were any conversations, they were generally short. They would greet one another, ask how things were going, and then after these brief exchanges, they would go elsewhere to continue their conversation. They never stayed long. Small groups were maybe a little more likely to stay, but even then, people would leave fairly quickly. The only events that lasted were large, formal events that were planned in advance. People would come for the event and then disperse. So the atrium in the SLCC was successful in certain respects, but it didn’t become the heart of campus like we had hoped."
It turned out that this problem derived from the fact that early Deaf Space research was based on “external visual observation,” and from that perspec- tive, it looked like Deaf people sit and stand in circles when they are in a group conversation. “The bench,” explains Sirvage, “was designed around that observation. It traces the contour of a group conversation” (p. 6). However, citing the work of Ben Bahan (2009), Sirvage notes that the:
"contour was calculated using an incorrect geometric formula. From the inside of a Deaf interaction—from the perspective of a person for whom such interactions feel natural—it becomes apparent that . . . [w]hat we thought was a circle is really flexible overlapping triangles."
When two Deaf people are conversing, they stand opposite one another. When a third person joins, all three participants re-configure their alignment so that two equidistant lines extend out toward each of the other participants. This ensures that all participants are comfortably and reciprocally within the visual field. When additional participants are added, “the underlying organization is still triangular, but more triangles are added, in an overlapping fashion” (Sirvage 2017: 6).
Once this structure had been uncovered, the task for the Deaf Space designer was to understand how to build affordances into the environment to support it. The bench in the atrium of the SLCC was a glaring example of what would happen if they got it wrong. The substitution of rigid surface structure, that could be seen from outside for dynamic underlying structure that could not was a mistake that was literally set in stone. In order to avoid making these mistakes again, Deaf Space design went in a more “imaginative” direction. This led to deeper insights about how Deaf ways of residing in the world were “distinctive,” and therefore valuable.
6.1.3 Imagination
In carefully analyzing videorecorded interactions, Deaf Space researcher Robert T. Sirvage didn’t just look at surface-level patterns of behavior. He looked at how those behaviors were actually responses to the environment, and the distinct ways it is legible to Deaf people. To communicate his findings, he asks (mostly hearing) Deaf Space architects, planners, and designers to imagine how Deaf people use their eyes to perceive the space behind them.
While hearing people integrate their vision and their hearing for 360 degrees of environmental access, Deaf people, he argues, can only see what is in front of them. He thinks that in order to accommodate that fact, they habitually read shadows on the sidewalk and reflections on glass, are attuned to vibration in the floor, and in crowded environments they will be found with their backs pressed against a wall. Sirvage says that in interaction, each Deaf person “takes responsibility” for the space behind the other person. If they don’t, they will be scolded and “[t]hat emotional response tells us that this way of structuring visual attention is not just a biological fact—it has become a cultural rule. . .”. He calls this “Deaf Dorsality” (2015: 4).
Sirvage concluded that a Deaf environment is an environment that minimizes dorsal exposure. Designs based on this insight were then pitched to investors as ways of making the area more architecturally interesting by contributing to a distinctive “Deaf esthetic.” For example, Frank, one of the architects I interviewed, described a saw-toothed storefront, where each panel would function like a rearview mirror. Deaf pedestrians walking down the sidewalk could easily glimpse the space behind their head, thereby minimizing dorsality.
Deaf Space depends on significant exposure for hearing architects to Deaf ways of being. This is provided by an expansive network of Deaf scholars, engineers, architects, community members, and university administrators who do the work of exposing. In an interview with one hearing member of the design team, for example, a Deaf supervisor was present and was actively teaching him how to work with interpreters, impressing upon him the importance of learning ASL, and pressing him on his tendency to avoid complex conversations with Deaf members of the design team and favor hearing colleagues instead. This kind of informal educational process, which unfolds in the context of sustained relationships, is essential for a project like Deaf Space. As anthropologist Keith Murphy (2004) has noted, the relations that obtain between the designer and the people they design for are multiply mediated by interactions between members of the design team, such that the object of design emerges, at the outset, in the shared space where co-engagements unfold.
Deaf Space theorists highlight the fact that “empathic” processes are involved, which can play out in face to face interaction, or from a distance. For example, Finnish architect Juhani Palasmaa, who has been influential for Deaf Space practitioners, argues, “Imagination is not a quasi-visual projection; we imagine through our entire embodied existence and through imagination we expand our realm of being” (p. 8). He describes this activity as a kind of intersubjective “tuning” to the eventual inhabitants of the
building. Palasmaa’s architect doesn’t just leave traces of her own activity, she imaginatively experiences the activity of others, and leaves structures for them to find that will support, enhance, or anticipate those activities. Those who occupy the building may or may not be aware of the efforts that led to their experience, and yet, their experience relies on a kind of displaced intersubjective attunement (Duranti 2010; Duranti and La Mattina 2022), which may operate across significant asymmetries (Hanks 2013) and be rooted in an imaginative mode of “sensory access” (Murphy 2015).
6.2 Being Protactile in Deaf Space
In order to understand the recent convergence of Deaf Space and the protac- tile movement, I interviewed Henry. The interview took place in his office, a large space in a castle-like building that looks out over the rooftops of the campus. He was seated at his desk surrounded by stacks of blueprints, books, and manuals, and behind him was a whiteboard covered in indecipherable markings. Henry told me he had been looking for ways to incorporate feedback from DeafBlind people into Deaf Space projects for years, but it never seemed to work out. Philip, a member of Henry’s staff, told me later that he had noticed the same thing.
Phillip explained that a few years earlier, in 2013, he tried to include a group of DeafBlind people in a project involving some curb-cuts on campus. As I mentioned in Chapter 1, curb-cuts are supposed to lead from the sidewalk out into the cross-walk, but because of the way they were angled, they sent people using canes into the middle of the intersection instead. He explained that every time he tried to have a conversation about it with them, confusion set in. “They understood the general problem,” he said, “but when we tried to get into the details of how it might be fixed, things deteriorated.” One time, he invited a DeafBlind student who was in a leadership role on campus, to talk with him about it. He said:
I was signing like I always did, and he had his hands on me (he was completely blind). I learned later that that was called “tactile reception of visual ASL”. I didn’t know that at the time. So I would say something and over and over again, the person would say, “OK, but where is that?” and then they would think for a while. Then they would say, “Where am I now?” I would point this way and then that way and we would walk toward the curb in question, and then the student would say, “Where am I now?” Again, I would point and explain and again they would become confused. I knew he was intelligent and in general a very competent person. I also knew that he got around on campus on his own, so I couldn’t understand what was going so wrong. I realized that the way I framed a discussion about space was flawed from the start. I thought that because he was a good student, got around on his own, he was involved in organizations, he was smart, that he could have an in-depth conversation with me about design. But I didn’t realize that there was this huge gap between his experience and the way we were talking about it. Later, when I learned about protactile, it was a huge revelation.
In order for DeafBlind people to exert influence over how the environment was structured, they had to be able to participate in conversations in which various aspects of the environment were referred to. In these moments, a chasm formed between protactile ways of residing in the world and Deaf ways of representing the world. The resources that ASL offered, and more specifically, the categories and relations supplied by its “deictic system,” were not up to the task.
6.2.1 “Where Am I Now?”
As I discuss in Chapter 5, a deictic system is a lexico-grammatical system used to direct the attention of others to objects in the immediate environment. In English, deictic expressions include words like this, that, here, and there. There is a tradition of analyzing expressions like these in relation to the speaker, who is positioned in time and space. This is an “ego-centric” approach, which is supposed to answer questions like, “Where am I now?” via the conventional oppositions encoded in the deictic system (discussion and review in Hanks 1990). In this view, for example, a speaker might choose this when referring to something close, or “proximal” to the speaker, and that when referring to something further away, or “distal,” with respect to the speaker. Linguists and anthropologists have pointed out, however, that culturally and historically specific patterns in how people interact with their environment, and draw the attention of others to it, can affect the internal organization of the language so that the language comes to anticipate certain aspects of the world as it is experienced by its speakers (Bühler 1934; Evans 2003; Edwards 2014; Cooperider et al. 2016; Sicoli 2016; Diessel and Coventry 2020; Forker 2020). This suggests that the values encoded in a given deictic system cannot be assumed, and there are many more possibilities than just “space” and “time” (Hanks 1990).
In 2016, the protactile deictic system was already emerging, and, as I discuss in Chapter 5, conventional values were encoded that would have been invaluable to Phillip and his interlocutor. Through routine use of the protactile deictic system in a particular setting, the environment takes on certain shared contours. Possible trajectories, locations, and objects cohere to form a world, within which coordinated actions like talking about the design of a curb-cut feel effortless or easy. As Philip’s observations suggest, without a functioning deictic system, a shared environment will not be revealed. However, the reverse is also true. Without a shared environment, the deictic system will be inoperable.
In a series of protactile workshops held at Gallaudet in 2016, Adrijana and Lee encountered this problem from the perspective of language acquisition. In a videorecorded instructional session focused on direction-giving, or “mapping,” Lee is talking with an undergraduate student who was living on campus. Lee asks for directions to various places nearby and at first it seems that the student can provide them. However, in discussing more detailed options for how to get from place to place, Lee discovers that the student doesn’t know basic things about the spatial layout of her surroundings. The student says, “Mapping is a challenge for me because it’s hard for me to visualize the things we’re talking about.” Lee and her student reflected on the fact that the protactile deictic system came with a protactile environment. One reinforced the other.
STUDENT: Mapping is really cool because I didn’t know that there are all of these short cuts on campus. I always end up taking the long way—like in the winter, the walk from the dorm to the gym is really cold. I had no idea that you could go through SAC and that there is a door in that building that is really close to the Field House. You don’t have to spend all that time in the cold. I wish I had known that before.
INSTRUCTOR: Yeah, so if you had been doing mapping all along it would make every-
thing easier, right? [Student agrees.] We need more people to learn mapping. That’s why you’re here learning it so you can teach other people. If everyone learned protactile mapping, you could walk up to anyone on campus and ask them for directions and they would be able to tell you in a way that makes sense, rather than pointing to a bunch of different directions in air space. When people start to do that, you can show them how to do it this way.
In subsequent months, DeafBlind people on campus started to acquire pro- tactile language, and in doing so, they were able to point out this, and draw attention to that. Each one of these moments might seem insignificant on its own, but in each referential act, ways of residing in the world and ways of representing the world are aligned, dis-aligned, or otherwise related, yielding a world where DeafBlind people can participate, navigate, negotiate, or just exist.
6.2.2 Affordances in Deaf Space
Some aspects of Deaf Space design already incorporate tactile affordances. One of the first things that came to my attention were “Deaf floors.” I learned from Henry, though, that from architectural and engineering perspectives, you can’t really talk about “floors” because they are attached to a complex assembly, all of which matters for Deaf Space. One day, he tried to explain it to me. He took out some blueprints, and after rolling them open on his desk he pointed to a place on the drawing and said, “These are trusses [T]hey
span from here to here and then from here to here, all the way across.” Then he pointed out the “underlayment” made of concrete, a “vapor barrier” made of plastic, and the space underneath the building, where there is soil. The soil, he explained, was originally made of clay, which expands when it gets wet, and “that,” he said, “can literally destroy a building.” To prevent expansion, the top two feet of soil had to be removed and replaced with gravel. On top of all of that trusses there is a 3/4-inch plywood deck, and on top of that there is a material called “gypcrete,” which is chalky like drywall, that adds mass to the floor and absorbs most of the sound that is propagated. The goal for Deaf Space is to balance this dampening effect with the transmission of vibrations that can be useful, for example vibrations caused by footfalls. He explained that if the floor let too much information through, it would distract from the information needed to “read” it effectively. “You want control,” he said. “So that floor that you’re asking me about really includes the whole assembly.”
According to Deaf Space guidelines, this assembly is used because it increases the “sensory reach” of the Deaf person standing on the floor by transmitting information that would otherwise be inaccessible, such as a person approaching from behind or a group of people walking past a closed office door. According to Sirvage (2015), Deaf people are attentive to this kind of environmental information and will make use of it wherever it is available. He says:
"If you want to understand what it feels like to be Deaf, you shouldn’t wear ear plugs; that would do very little to approximate our experience. What you should do is walk backwards and try to glean cues from your environment to be sure you are walking in a straight line. That way of attending to the environment is a habitual, completely ingrained part of our lives."
In particular, if a group of people is walking down the street, the person most peripheral to the interaction is expected to attend to environmental obstacles. The person speaking is prepared to receive warning signs from that person, as opposed to scanning the environment directly, himself. Designing buildings that anticipate this fact has led Deaf Studies scholars Ben Bahan and Dirksen Bauman to frame architecture as “the third person” in the interaction: “Just as the ‘third person’ in the group focuses on the path forward and its possible hazards while others focus more intently on the conversation, buildings can care for their occupants by providing environmental cues that enhance spatial awareness, safety, and ambient conditions that promote well-being” (italics in the original, cited in Bauman 2014: 388–389).
Protactile people found that Deaf floors also incorporated affordances for them. The dampened vibration they transmitted was something they already attended to, and they pushed designers to use it in other contexts as well, such as built-in benches. I could understand this because on multiple occasions I had enjoyed a particular bench in the hotel on Gallaudet’s campus. On top of the bench there are securely attached cushions made of a dense but forgiving material. They carried just enough vibration that you could feel someone sitting on the other end signing, but not so much that it distracted. One day, I was having a conversation on the bench with a member of our group, while two of the others were conversing a few feet down on the same bench. From where I was sitting, I could feel that they were there and that they were having a casual, rhythmic conversation—no urgency, anger, or long lulls were detected. If the bench had been made of concrete, or if the cushions had a different density, that information would have been lost. Deaf Space designers learned from this that materials and assemblies capable of transmitting and dampening vibrations caused by the ordinary activities of others can generate an ambient environment for protactile interaction.
Contrast this with Charlotte’s method for creating an ambient environment, discussed in Chapter 1. Nearly a decade earlier in Seattle, I described the details of the coffee shop we were in together using ASL. Just as many others did at the time, I assumed she could use those details to form an impression, based on memories of what coffee shops were like when she was still partially sighted. I was “providing access” to the environment via representations of it. This was necessary in part because of how the environ- ment had been designed, and who the designers imagined would be using it. As I explain in Chapter 1, all avenues to the tactile signs that could have given Charlotte an impression of the place were blocked off. She couldn’t get a sense of the coziness of the coffee shop by feeling the condensation on the insides of the windows because there were people sitting at tables, which were positioned under the windows. In order to touch the windows, she would have to lean over the people sitting at the tables, potentially knocking drinks into their laps or otherwise causing a disturbance. She also could have gotten a sense of the atmosphere by touching people’s jaws to see if they were eating and if so, how. She could have leaned in to feel the steam coming from their cups. However, the sighted people who designed the coffee shop never imagined that someone like Charlotte would be there.
In 2016 at Gallaudet, the approach was very different. First protactile structures of participation that incorporated relatively abstract roles like speaker, addressee, and non-addressed third party were observed and analyzed. Designers were subsequently advised to incorporate affordances for those patterns in interaction into floors, benches, hallways, and other structures in the environment. For protactile people, this promised to turn Gallaudet into a place that anticipated their existence and invited their participation.
This raises a more general question about what it means to “participate.” Recall that linguistic anthropologists have analyzed participation by identifying laminated role-structures and understanding how they relate to the participants who occupy them. Building on more recent approaches to participation that have foregrounded the “environmentally coupled” aspects of communication (Goodwin 2007), protactile design foregrounds the relation between the two and highlights the fact that in order to speak to one another (thereby taking on roles like “speaker”) the environment must first speak to us in ways that correspond across the collective. Wherever Deaf Space fulfilled this requirement for DeafBlind people, protactile practices flourished.
One such practice, which had no correlate in Seattle, was “protactile walking.” Many of the DeafBlind people I knew at Gallaudet were just begin- ning the process of becoming blind, and they were looking for activities that would facilitate that transition. They considered “protactile walking” to be one of those activities. Deaf sidewalks are wider than hearing sidewalks in order to support the structure of signed conversations. If you’re standing too close, you can’t see what the other person is saying. For protactile people, it turned out that those same sidewalks invited groups as large as four people to walk together. After participating in a few of these activities, I discussed them with a DeafBlind member of the group. We recalled the rhythmic coordination of canes and feet, the way it made us feel like a giant spider, and the catalyzing effect those experiences seemed to have on people who were just starting to go tactile.
There were other aspects of Deaf Space that did not support protactile interaction. Some of these conflicts were drawn out at a two-day meeting at Gallaudet called the “Tactile Mind Research Collaborative.” Protactile leaders from across the country were invited to the collaborative to discuss the creative and scientific potential of studying protactile practices with students, staff, and administrators. During those two days, the conversation was not about “access,” “inclusion,” or “rights.” It was about how one environment could be “laminated” onto another such that Deaf and DeafBlind people could co-exist.
6.2.3 The Laminated Environment
The protactile movement seemed to have implications for basic research across nearly every well-represented field at Gallaudet, such as linguistics, cognitive neuroscience, and Deaf studies. “Protactile design” was centered as a way of tying those intellectual strengths to institutional priorities in the context of urban development. John Lee Clark, in an unpublished essay written just after he attended the collaborative, laid out some basic issues that made being on campus not merely unpleasing, but perilous. He said that despite the excitement of the collaborative, “it was depressing to be on campus”:
"There were, for example, vast seas of concrete with no tactile landmarks or any- thing that would provide a sense of orientation and direction. It was also incredibly hard to find any people. I kept asking myself, “Where is everyone?” People seem to have been spread so far apart. It was also a shock to find how difficult it is to get food. [The restaurants and cafes] had glass things in front of the food, and maybe there were workers behind the food, but you couldn’t reach them to communicate. There weren’t any openings where I could walk around and find one of those workers to find out about food and give my order. The barriers there were absolute and complete, unless I took a chair and climbed over those glass things—I wish I’d thought of doing that when I was there!"
The first time I saw a DeafBlind person enter the food service area Clark describes, I was concerned. As a sighted person who had internalized protactile norms, I didn’t rush in to help, though (Chapter 1). Instead, I just watched. The DeafBlind person stomped their cane several times on the ground and then waited. After some more waiting and stomping, a sighted Deaf person nearby asked them what they needed and then made sure that they got it. I saw a similar series of events play out in the large, expansive lobby of the SLCC, and again in one of the “vast seas of concrete” in the center of campus.Being a good Deaf person at Gallaudet, it seemed, was a lot like being a good sighted person before the protactile movement in Seattle (Chapter 4). From a protactile perspective, those sighted interventions drove a wedge between DeafBlind people and their environment. This turned the environment into a description of itself, which, by virtue of passing through the common sense of the sighted mediator, rendered the campus unfamiliar, unknowable, and uninviting. Underlying this model is the insidious notion of “access.” Having an informal system that would give you access to restaurants might help you survive (for example locate and consume food), but it would not turn the campus into a place you would want to be.
In trying to find ways for Deaf and DeafBlind people to co-exist, one of the main conflicts that arose during the collaborative and elsewhere was between the “cool visual expansiveness” of Deaf Space and the “compact warmth” of protactile space. In John Lee Clark’s words:
"In Deaf Space, open spaces are valued—where people can look around and see things, who’s there, talk to someone across the space. Whereas I think the ideal in PT space is that we’re happiest when we’re like mice running around in a maze, in tunnels. I love walls. How do you put these two together?"
Henry discussed this tension as well in an interview. He said that these aspects of protactile environments make it an interesting case, from a design perspective, because, “it might be the one thing that is so incredibly particular that it starts to be exclusive.” After pausing to think about that for a moment, he picked up a marker, and turned around toward the white board behind him, and said, “But what’s beautiful about that is that one could imagine the built environment is a laminated space. If one of those layers was a DeafBlind layer, you might imagine lines and places” (he drew a rectangle, with little “bubbles” that jutted out from each side). This kind of structure, he said, would form “pathways with eddies,” where the pathways would be all about “trailability,” and the eddies would be protected spaces that are all about “touch” and “reach.”
Addressing this same conflict, Clark added that “where people walk and where their eyes go need not, and probably should not, be the same.” Path- ways through campus, he said, could easily be given crucial tactile struc- ture by adding a system of railings. Above hip-height, sight lines would be unchanged. For Clark, this would not just be a matter of effective navigation. It would also ensure that two people walking toward each other would converge and have the opportunity to meet, say hi, or ignore each other. Without common pathways, a Deaf person might realize that a DeafBlind person is present, but the reverse would almost certainly not be true. In subsequent design meetings, people returned again and again to surfaces and the proprioceptive information people pick up through their feet, as ways of laminating one environment onto another. In other words, visual expansiveness and tactile “trailability,” when laminated, would yield a shared “situation,” or “space of mutual monitoring possibility” (Goffman 1964). This would support the co-existence of Deaf and DeafBlind people.
I learned, as I continued my fieldwork, that this idea of the laminated environment can be extended beyond humans, too. For example, an architect who was working on a Deaf Space dorm at the time explained that toward the end of construction they ran into a problem with the birds. Deaf Space buildings, he explained, generally require more light. This is accomplished by using glass that is more transparent and including more windows. This is great for communication, but “it led to a situation where the birds kept flying into the glass and dying. In other words, it was not a ‘bird-safe design’ .” Unfortunately, you can’t correct the problem by adding a reflective layer to the windows because if you do, “the windows reflect the trees; the birds think they are flying into trees and kill themselves that way.” In the end, they went with bird houses because the theme for the dorm was “home away from home.” For birds, some windows afford death. For Deaf language-users, windows often afford heightened perceptibility in the visual channel. For DeafBlind people, windows might provide a surface that could be traced in navigating from one place to another, which unlike walls might also give off some thermal information about the external environment along the way. Intersecting patterns like these undergird the forms of imagination that architects, urban planners, and designers engage and thematize in Deaf Space, but they also became central to imagining how protactile people could take up residence in a space that was not their own.
6.3 Conclusion
In this chapter, I have extended the notion of “participation,” as it has been understood by linguistic anthropologists, to account for environments where Deaf and DeafBlind people were trying to co-exist. The first step in that process was for each group to exist in its own environment, which emerged out of the routine interaction between residence and representation. Only then could designers find ways of “laminating” one environment onto the other to generate new kinds of value for the institution. This approach contrasts starkly with attempts to provide access via representation alone. Questions remain about the sustainability of being protactile in Deaf Space (e.g. McMillen 2015). However, this chapter has captured a brief, imaginative moment in Gallaudet’s history, which, in my most optimistic moments, I hope someone might return to and make something of.
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