Interpretation via pie

By Amanda Halvorsen
The angle I chose for this project was to primarily to create awareness, and to inform a passive and slightly ignorant audience of disabilities and impairments within the university environment.

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I looked at statistics within New Zealand and Otago, there is a good website for doing this called Disabilities News and publications. I ended up taking the statistics from the Disabilities office. According to the statistics held at the Disabilities office in 2007, 834 students have a disability that affects their study it also shows that many people have more than one impairment. Also the different types of disabilities students have at Otago University.

A universal design opportunity

By Jeremy Star
As part of this project I have written a submission regarding the mapping of the University of Otago campus. I was prompted to do this when I discovered a series of maps on the Disability Information and Support website, showing accessible buildings, accessible amenities and mobility parking. These maps were last updated in December 2000 and there is a lot of room for improvement.

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An ‘inclusive’ university

By Jessica de Court
A crucial aspect of my research included stumbling across a table on the shifting beliefs about disability. The general idea was about how we now view disabilities in society with a rights-based approach rather than paternalistic.

Subtlety and communication

By Jeremy Star
An interesting consideration which emerged during this project was how much information was necessary to convey the message. This was relevant in one of my images showing a stack of books deliberately arranged.

The books in the image are arranged to create steps on one side and a ramp on the other. The books themselves represent knowledge and the arrangement of them shows that knowledge is accessible to disabled people. The steps and ramp lead to the same place, showing that there is more than one pathway to achieving academic success. I identified this as one of the main objectives of the University of Otago Disability Information and Services who the images were created for.
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Which words

By Jeremy Star
During this project I became increasingly aware of the importance of the connotations of certain words. One of my three images in particular raised interesting questions.
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The image showed the hand of a dog reaching towards a human hand, and originally included the phrase, “follow my lead”. This raised the question of the appropriateness of the word “follow”. Guide dogs allow someone who has lost their sight freedom and independence. The word “follow” produced connotations of someone being led around and not in total control. In the end I opted for the phrase, “take my lead”.

See me, for me not my wheels

Amanda Halvorsen
The concept ‘See me for me, not my wheels’ confronts pre-existing judgments often made by some people against people with disability. It aims to promote better understanding of the individuality of people with disability, rather than their disability defining who they are.

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This causes people to pause and actually think about how they perceive people with disability. We tend to see someone in a wheelchair, for example, and allow their disability to colour our perception of them as a person. It is presented in a way that creates empathy instead of avoidance of difference.

Disability week: overrated?

Jessica de Court
Would an annual disability week at the University actually make a difference to those affected by one? I was initially interested in pursuing the possibility of this in my project, until I came across the NZ blog site walking.is.overrated, run by a man with cerebral palsy. Their debate on this topic struck a real chord with me, especially the comment; “My thinking is that one week a year is good for those who wish to do something because it gives them an outlet and at the end of it they can say “didn’t we do well” and the disabled are forgotten about for the rest of the year”. <