Body, Objects, and Perception: Five Studies of Visually Impaired People’s Use of Technology

Defence of PhD thesis by Louise Lüchow.

Assessment Committee

  • Professor Mie Femø (Chair) (University of Copenhagen)
  • Professor Eric Laurier (University of Edinburgh)
  • Associate Professor Stuart Reeves (University of Nottingham)

Moderator of the defence

  • Associate Professor Søren Beck Nielsen (University of Copenhagen)

Copies of the thesis will be available for consultation at the following three places:

  • At the Information Desk of KUB South Campus, Karen Blixens Plads 7
  • In Reading Room East of the Royal Library (the Black Diamond), Søren Kierkegaards Plads 1
  • At the Department of Nordic Studies and Linguistics, Emil Holms Kanal 2

 

In today’s world, human interaction with objects is becoming increasingly sophisticated and collaborative. Objects, particularly those powered by advanced technologies, now possess the ability to influence and shape ongoing actions like never before. This burgeoning interplay between humans and objects elevates the relevance and necessity of research into these dynamics. Through five academic articles this dissertation studies the inherent relation between body, objects, and perception. From an interactional approach perception is considered as a practical achievement constituted by employing embodied actions, language, and material objects in situ, and as this research shows it can be conceived and distributed in collaboration with other sensing agents, human as well as non-human. Rooted in ethnomethodology and multimodal conversation analysis, based on video recordings of people with blindness and visual impairment (VIP) using new and AI-enabled technology in everyday social interaction, the dissertation presents novel insights on practices for technology use from a non-visual perspective. The five articles present different stages of technology use, focusing on how a smart speaker is explored and experienced through touch and verbal guidance from an instructor (Article 2); how VIP initially adapt to and collaborate with the technology to achieve the relevant sensorial information distributed by smart glasses (Article 1) and smartphones (Article 3 - 4), and how the affordance of a mainstream laptop is utilized in VIP’s recipient design towards seeing co-participants (Article 5). The analyses show how VIP’s everyday use of technology, involves a range of situationally conditional, yet identifiable and sequentially ordered actions. It also shows that to make the technology work as intended the user must adjust to and with the technology design as well as taking into consideration the complex interactional configuration the situated activity is embedded in. These empirical findings from studying visually impaired people’s technology use, enable both theoretical and practical discussions related to our relation to and with technology.