In the Light of a Clear Blue Wall by Saturated Space

In the LIGHT of a Clear Blue Wall How sign language proposes a link between skin tone, paint, and environmental conditioning.

Neil FLanagan March 25th, 2016 Saturated SPace

Maintaining that attention all day strains eyes. A good background helps. Like well set type, the best settings for reading sign balance contrast with comfort. Glare is a blight for ASL users: overlit spaces quickly fatigue eyes. Hand gestures get muddled in the intimate shadows of bar lighting. Patterned wallpaper can practically be camouflage. White walls are a particular villain. The glare they produce washes out hands and strains eyes. Cruelly, they’re the default. Sign readers need to see the hands, their location on the body, how they move, and the signer’s facial expression. For the Deaf, it’s hardly a new idea to think about the legibility of these areas. Signers may choose to wear subdued clothing if they’re expecting to be in front of a group. Hired interpreters wear mute colors that contrast with skin, to focus attention on their words.

SLATE blue covers many walls

at Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C. Sometimes, it’s the whole wall. Other times, the blue paint runs in a band from a shorter woman’s waist to the higher reaches of a tall man’s hands. In a few classrooms, the student desks are surrounded uniformly in this desaturated eggshell blue. For new visitors, the color can be overwhelming, but it works very well for Gallaudet’s students. The school describes itself as the only university for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing. Even if students wanted to speak and be understood by ear it’s unlikely. On campus, people generally communicate in American Sign Language, a parlance of moving and watching. The kids who fill these classrooms look at each other, constantly, carefully for hours in a day. While a hearing student might look at notes, or gaze out a window while still listening, Deaf students can’t. Besides, as any Deaf person will tell you, that would just be so rude.

This mid-tone blue breaks with that Deaf convention as much as with a building manager’s default white. It’s typical of the small but incisive changes that have come out of a project called DeafSpace, a design research project to tune buildings to the specific needs and tastes of Deaf people. The idea of designing environments around how Deaf people use space is new, or at least newly revived. Very few works buildings have ever been built to suit Deaf people. For about 100 years, the idea that environments required any special conditioning for the deaf would be seen as not just irrelevant, but specifically bad. The inability to hear and talk excluded deaf people from most societies as a matter of function. In cultures that were overwhelmingly illiterate and oral, there was no sense the hearing had an obligation to make deaf lives any easier. The very limited evidence about deaf lives indicates a marginal and undesirable position. IMAGE ATTRIBUTION AND BIBLIOGRAPHY AT THE END

TOP: LIVING AND LEARNING RESIDENCE HALL 6 MULTIFUNCTION SPACE. ABOVE: SORENSON CENTER ATRIUM

In the second half of the 19th century, benighted reformers, most prominently Alexander Graham Bell, pushed to educate audiologically deaf people in the spoken language of their area. With enough lip reading, practiced vocalization, and writing, they were sure deaf people could integrate into society, hold jobs, and participate in national cultureâ&#x20AC;&#x201C;until such time as they could eugenically eliminate deafness. Schools hired architects to build what they were building at every other university; to do anything else would harm the students, they believed. Of course, for most deaf people it was more work than it was worth to read and mouth back English to each other. A distinct Deaf social life flourished off hours, often in private Deaf clubs, where sign languages evolved alongside deaf performing arts and a Deaf Culture. Sign language is central to the recognition that there is a separate and distinct Deaf culture. Before the 1960s, most educators held that sign languages were peculiar copies of the spoken languages, lacking the originalâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s richness. Amid major shifts in linguistic theory, Gallaudet professor William Stokoe showed that sign languages not only had every aspect of a natural language, their grammar and syntax were distinct from the local oral language. By the 1980s, politics surrounding disability and identity had reversed. Rather than teach deaf students how to navigate a world not built for them, they would advocate for the world to include them. At the same time, the idea arose that people who are audiologically deaf could also be Deaf, capitalized, as an identity to embrace. This conceptual shift led to a slow re-tooling of the education system that is now reaching the design of the built environment in DeafSpace. T: EDWARD MINER GALLAUDET M: ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL B: WILLIAM STOKOE 4

BASIC DEAFSPACE PRINCIPLES, ILLUSTRATED BY DANGERMOND KEANE ARCHITECTS

DESIGN PATTERNS DERIVED FROM DEAFSPACE PRINCIPLES IN CHARRETTES, DANGERMOND KEANE ARCHITECTS DeafSpace differs from the “reasonable accommodation” standard of the Americans with Disability Act or the UK’s Equality Act. It tries to develop thoughtful elements that work with the different balance of abilities of the Deaf and the cultural features that result. The DeafSpace guidelines begin from a handful of elements for human interaction. From there, architects have worked with users to identify the value of clear sightlines, features that enhance situational awareness, leave room for the ASL’s body movements, let students walk while keep-

ing their eyes on each other, and sense presence through vibration or reflection. The use of translucent glass in private doors illustrates how this works in practice: if a door is opaque, a deaf visitor can’t tell if anyone’s inside. If they open it, they’ll be stuck fumbling an apology while propping it open. A clear glass door offers no privacy at all: a visitor could read the signing of a private conversation. Translucent glass fixes this problem, the person outside can see the room is occupied, but not eavesdrop.

In classrooms, whiteboards and video

monitors hang alongside each other. Students sit in tables that form segments of an oval. In many rooms, the tables can move around so interpreters for blind students can sit perpendicularly. Fixtures cast bright and even light across the room. Among the DeafSpace principles, the insistence on blue walls is unusually specific and absolute. In some classrooms, white dry-erase boards come with blue screens, custom colored to match the walls. The blue is one of the most striking feature of the multipurpose hall in Gallaudet’s newest dorm, designed by LTL Architects.

Hansel Bauman ROlls down a whiteboard shade

There is no symbolic value in this family of colors. The school’s official colors are a dark blue (Pantone 295) and a beige (Pantone 7502), that merchants tend to shift to gold. The slate blue was picked solely because it functioned optically. That’s unusual in architecture. If you exclude the use of color to alter the perception of space and pseudoscientific mood theories, Western architecture has left little room for color that’s not key-coded blunt symbolism. To some degree, white is functional because it shows dirt. Mostly, architects gravitate to it as an evocation of purity, shedding extraneous features. The use of light or dark surfaces to manipulate solar gain comes from optical properties, it’s true. But they don’t require a specific. Maybe the fluorescent orange and chartreuse colors used in high visibility clothing or signage. They work because those pigments that stand out well against natural colors. The OSHA blaze orange (Pantone 152) was chosen for highway workers because it contrasts so well with blue and gray skies. Still, there’s a symbolic key: orange for warning, the yellow-green just to get your attention. Symbolism can be counterproductive in DeafSpace. Surfaces in the thinly postmodernist Hall Memorial Building present variants of royal blue and multiple shades of yellow. The color on floors, niches, doors, and walls shifts arbitrarily,

OTTO WAGNER’s TUBERCULOSIS SANATORIUM, 1910. WAGNER SOUGHT HYGEINE THROUGH GLOSS WHITE TILE

“COOL” ROOF ON THE US DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY HQ

HALLWAY IN THE HALL MEMORIAL BUILDING

SAME, DISTORTED TO SIMULATE USHER SYNDROME, THE MOST COMMON CAUSE OF DEAFBLINDNESS

GALLAUDET’s graphic Identity TRACES HANDS MAKING THE SIGN FOR “GALLAUDET,” and ENGLISH

leading students with low vision into walls. With a good number of students both deaf and lowvision, this hamfisted effort at school spirit hurts more than it helps. The man who runs the DeafSpace project, Hansel Bauman admits that he learned personally from this mistake in the first DeafSpace project, the Sorenson Language and Communication Center. A language learning building designed by SmithGroup, itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s a neomodern building with a busy, gestural exterior. Its striking, light-filled atrium has many features the Deaf appreciate: clear sight lines, even light, and curvilinear walls. The clearest proof Gallaudet was serious about implementing DeafSpace principles are the expensive glass-enclosed elevators, which let students see each other and chat while they get on their way. But actually, the atrium has many problems. On the main circulation route, the floor folds into stairs in a subdued, uniform gray. Without clear color differentiation, those low-vision students who struggled with the Hall Building also trip here. The school has had to crudely outline the tread edges with tape, a kludge Bauman regrets.

HI-VIZ COLORS CONTRAST WITH THE SKY AND ROAD

Students also quickly realized another problem. Now that they had bright, diffused daylight, the pristine white walls threw a lot of glare. The daylight, which everyone seemed to want was making sign hard with those bright, clean walls. Getting away from white walls, into dark shades would go easy on the eyes. But they quickly realized that dark walls muddied the signing of students with darker skin tones. White hadnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t been as much of a problem for pale students because color perception is so much an issue of balance: White walls made the buff and pink of white skin look pinker. But a lot of dark colors: browns, yellows, and reds caused problems for dark skin.

TAPED STAIR IN THE SORENSON CENTER

Gallaudet caught themselves from making a mistake many other designers have. Ignoring dark skin tones has led to devastating oversights.

Designers continue to ship facial recognition software whose algorithms rely on features that register more strongly against white skin, like eyebrows. Against a bright background, black faces were just lumps. Digital cameras capture only a narrow range of light. Programmers balanced the light on what they saw in front of them. Unfortunately, that was usually light skin. The chemicals in film render reality a little better. But, during its development, that technology’s designers left dark skin out of the balance. In the 1950s, Kodak controlled the majority of color film production. They understood that most photographs they’d process would be snapshots of family events and personal photos: human bodies in developed countries. They presumed white ones. Given the limited range of luminance, they chose to focus their research on consistently resolving lighter skin tones.

“NORMAL:” A SHIRLEY CARD FROM 1969

The system had a lot of room for human input too: technicians tested prints against standardized images showing black, white, colors, and light skin tones. The original reference photograph was a blue-eyed white woman in white fur and black gloves, called a “Shirley Card.” Technicians unfamiliar with darker skin tones tended to either lighten the photos too much, or leave black faces illegible blots with teeth and eyes. Like a lot of ways business has excluded minorities, it may have seemed a very rational decision. Perhaps they simply didn’t have the ROI to make it worth development. That doesn’t excuse the researchers. The wrong is more fundamental than disrespect: Personal photography, an exhaustively designed technology, simply functioned less well for people of color. Similar omissions in product lines for adhesive bandages, clothes, and cosmetics reflect a lack of consideration that Gallaudet could not abide.

A MULTI-TONE SHIRLEY CARD FROM 1996

Which FEELS EASIER? In VIDEOS PRODUCED BY GALLAUDET’S Center for Bilingual Teaching and Learning,

HOW ABOUT THIS? AND THIS? OR DARKER? ANd in TEXT: FitzPatrick Type 2 SKIN TONE, blurrED to simulate LOW ACUITY, AND FITZPATRICK TYPE 6 SKIN

Dr. Dani Hunt signs the same PRESENTATION WITH DIFFERENT BACKGROUNDS. USED WITH PERMISSION.

HOW ABOUT THIS? AND THIS? OR DARKER? 11

A dark wall that better registered the words of light skinned students would literally give them a louder voice. So the DeafSpace team shifted beyond tone and into hue and saturation to find a color that was equitable. Around the Sorensen’s atrium, hidden behind movable panels of an exhibit on Gallaudet’s history are a number of swatches of blues. Both darker and lighter than the colors they settled on. Some are fully saturated; a few are so pale, they’d make the university look like a nursery. From these tests, they made some conclusions. Desaturated, matte, midtone blues worked the best. Actually, other colors weren’t seriously considered, because students suggested blue to Bauman. They were sure it was the right color.

TEST PANELS IN THE SORENSON CENTER

Blue is a peculiar color, relatively

rare in nature and difficult to reproduce for most of human history. In human perception of nature it appears mostly in elusive places, like the sky, the ocean, rare birds, and flowers so striking they were taken as a symbol of an unimaginable perfection. Down in the commonplace site of human bodies, blue is very rare. There’s no blue pigment in faces. Blue eyes like mine are more like the sky: an optical effect caused by light scattering. This phenomena happens in all eyes, but only reveals itself in an extreme lack of melanin. The absence of oxygen also brings out blue. Without air, hemoglobin becomes dark, changing the color balance of the skin, taking the red out and leaving the faintly bluish connective fibers and yellow-brown melanin. Red undertones, even in dark-skinned people, indicate vitality. Because color perception is always about contrast, a blue background makes the reds, yellows, browns of human skin pop. The low levels of blue in human skin, and the undesirability of a blue pallor are the main reason it’s so popular for the chroma key process. Isolating an image with a hue mat can be done with any color; green backdrops provide the sharpest contrast for digital video because there are more green pixels on camera sensors and it’s more efficient for video’s Y’CrCb color encoding system.

ULTRAMARINE: GIOTTO’S SCROVEGNI CHAPEL, 1305

SYNTHETIC BLUE: Yves Klein, IKB Godet, 1958

People making videos use bluescreens primarily because that color contrasts with the reds, yellows, and browns of human skin. Sign-language education relies a lot on video: instead of written papers in English, they produce videos in ASL. Gallaudet, offers high-end video studios, including bluescreen backdrops. With them, students have a lot of flexibility: unlike black drop cloths, any skin tone gets a pristine background. Students can drop in illustrations while they sign.

CHROMA KEY: THE RETURN OF THE JEDI, 1983

The best story seems to go: some Deaf people noticed that the pure blue color had something going for it. Or they just liked the color. Either way, Deaf videos started turning blue. Just like it does for mattes, color offered clean, strong contrast. They may have first found it more comfortable. Some people realized that the blue made it easier for people with poor vision to read sign. Gallaudet’s students suggested blue backgrounds to Bauman. He gave it a try. They started testing colors. Considering skin tones led to the desaturated mid-tone. Through a few iterations, an easily overlooked inference from an unrelated medium became a cornerstone design solution. They’re still experimenting. Since the blue can get monotonous, they’ve started testing dark grays and yellow-greens. Realizing that painting a room so dark can get gloomy, they’re covering only some walls, or the section of wall that falls behind signers, roughly chair height to a few feet below the ceiling. Research continues. With DeafSpace, Gallaudet is trying something talked about a lot in design schools, but rarely seen in practice: participatory design research. It’s expensive, risky, and time consuming. At Gallaudet, the results seem to justify it. It’s unlikely someone who didn’t make ASL videos often pursuing the observations that produced DeafSpace blue. And the architects had to trust that their users were seeing something they weren’t. Deaf activists like to talk about “Deaf Gain:” the insights that come from re-interpreting a world designed for hearing without it. A perspective missing some stimuli, but paying more attention to others, they argue, offers unique insights. The way DeafSpace has learned to use blue shows that color itself can be functional. It’s strictly a background element used to makes inhabitants comfortable. DeafSpace suggests that color conditions environments, just like lighting, ventilation, or acoustics.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

IMAGE ATTRIBUTION

Albers, Josef. Interaction of Color: 50th Anniversary Ed. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013.

P. 3: LLRH-6: Courtesy LTL Architects Sorenson: Courtesy SmithGroup JJR.

Banham, Reyner. The Architecture of the Welltempered Environment. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969. del Barco, Mandalit. “How Kodak’s Shirley Cards Set Photography’s Skin-Tone Standard.” NPR. NPR, 13 Nov. 2014. Web. 17 Mar. 2016. Brinkmann, Ron. The Art and Science of Digital Compositing. Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2008. Burge, Jeremy. “2015: The Year of Emoji Diversity.” Emojipedia. 04 Nov. 2014. Web. 17 Mar. 2016. Jarman, Derek. Chroma: A Book of Colour. London: Vintage, 1995. Lane, Harlan. The Mask of Benevolence: Disabling the Deaf Community. New York: Knopf, 1992. Pelkonen, Eeva-Liisa, Ed. Kevin Roche: Architecture as Environment. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011. Sacks, Oliver. Seeing Voices: A Journey into the World of the Deaf. Berkeley: University of California, 1989. Wagner, Otto. Modern Architecture: A Guidebook for His Students to This Field of Art. Santa Monica: Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1988 Wigley, Mark. White Walls, Designer Dresses: The Fashioning of Modern Architecture. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001. Federal Standard 595C, “Colors Used in Government Procurement.”

P. 4: Gallaudet: Public Domain Bell: Public Domain Stokoe: Lynn Johnson, CC-BY-SA 3.0 Wikipedia. 17 Mar. 2016 P. 5: Diagrams: Courtesy DangermondKeane Architects & Gallaudet University. P. 6: Classroom: Photo by author. Lupus Pavilion: Thomas Ledl, CC-BY-SA 4.0, Wikipedia. 17 Mar. 2016 Roof: Public domain, US Federal Government. P. 7: Gallaudet Identity: © Gallaudet University Hallway: Photo by author. P. 8: Steps: Photo by author. P. 9: Shirley Cards: © Eastman Kodak P. 10, 11: Stills from videos created by Gallaudet University’s Center for Bilingual Teaching and Learning, used with permission. P. 12: Photos by author. P. 13: Scrovegni Chapel, Giotto: Public domain. Yves Klein, IKB Godet, 1958, Walker Art Gallery. © Artists Rights Society. Star Wars: Source unknown.

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