Design, Empiricism, &
Deaf Visual Cultures

Deaf Cultures are
visual cultures.

The articles in this section explore the relationship between the Deaf World and Deaf visual culture to visual culture, more broadly conceived. The diverse methodological orientations show how visuality can encompass different iterations of a shared object of analysis, be it visual art practice or the functional visual “everyday” attended to by design professionals and question the continuing utility of the borders and bridges between empiricism and Deaf aesthetics and expression. 

Where the articles from Visible Language engage materially with the nuts and bolts of visual language, communication praxis, and the affordances that emergent design-thinking offers diverse communities of users, the articles from Visual Anthropology Review, all selected from the 1992 special issue “The Third Eye: Reflections on Deaf Visual Culture” edited by Lakshmi Fjord, present rich experiential narratives by Deaf artists, scholars, and allies reflecting on the tensions between Deaf visuality and hegemonic visual cultures. Read together, the confluence of design practice, visual theory, and activism can catalyze ways for design to accommodate Deaf visual culture instead of Deaf people accommodating design. Further, it can make the case for why it should be Deaf designers themselves enacting such work. To consider how these different disciplinary perspectives offer lines into the radically novel but often invisible Deaf World requires our mutual speculation on the stakes each brings to this interdisciplinary endeavor.

For example, how does the work of an anthropology steeped in critical theory speak to the relationships between the reductive aspects of functional design and the changing borders of the Deaf body?We can consider the emergence and partial-becoming of a Deaf culture that also includes Deaf people caught in the space between tech, hearing, and American Sign Language (ASL) informed Deafness. Without dismissing the existential anxiety that cochlear implants engender in ASL Deaf Worlds, opening dialogue with both implanted Deaf people and their extended hearing and Deaf networks may present a conjunctural moment in which Deaf advocacy can be empowered through new social alliances. For instance, the enmeshing of Deaf bilingualism into oral schooling would mean that congenitally Deaf children would learn to listen, speak, and sign in pedagogical contexts amenable to ASL and amenable to processing the deep history of marginalization specific to Deaf World. Such an approach to everyday bilingualism could be inspired by the way that Mexican Deaf students use photovoice to negotiate communicative barriers through a visual modality (Pfister 2020). Pushing against clinical practices that have historically relegated ASL to the periphery of special education in one-size-fits-all public schools, novel endeavors would create spaces for Deaf culture and Deaf power that have not existed before. If history is opaque, perhaps attention to a more inclusive design will open us up to Deaf visual culture moving forward.

Visible Language comes to communication design from a place of problem-solving: a pragmatism rooted in the use of empirical data to dissolve practical barriers to visual language use in the processes of design. It is equal parts form and function. The effort to develop such functional visual iconography has often meant that designers work to create forms with the broadest use value and with the least amount of interpretive abstraction. This preference for universality in the designing of visual signs and icons may in part reflect a post-globalized reduction of aesthetic variability in favor of communicative efficiency. Though functional at the core, ASL is very much rooted to Deaf Culture within an American context. A representation of a representational code, ASL as a visual language has increasingly turned non-representational in the art practices of artists including Ann SIlver (Schertz and Lane 2000). Silver uses the movement and form of ASL, augmented in her installations and paintings, to embody affective registers otherwise lost in the reduction to semiotic universals.

To get at both the synchronic and diachronic contexts required to understand Deaf visual iconography/gestures requires an anthropological ability to tack between scales, praxis to structure. Tracing the ways Deaf artists, students, and designers harness their intimate relational experiences helps the like-minded to organize,weaving stories of alterity and illegibility into aesthetic and political statements. These interscalar negotiations of hegemony, trauma, and resistance work when artists and designers integrate context and empiricism together as a malleable utility. In parsing the Visible Language archive, we witness the tangible legacy of how Deaf children in particular have been addressed within positivist studies on design.

Cavedon, Adele, Cesare Cornoldi, and Rossana DeBeni. 1984. “Structural vs. Semantic Coding in Reading of Isolated Works by Deaf Children.” Visible Language 18 (4): 372–381. http://visiblelanguage.s3.amazonaws.com/pdf/18.4/structural-vs-semantic-coding-in-reading-of-isolated-works-by-deaf-children.pdf

Research presented in Visible Language on Deaf language coding in children has engaged Deaf communities in comparative, controlled studies with typically hearing communities. Specifically, psycholinguistic studies have tested the use of structural versus semantic coding strategies that Deaf children use to develop literacy in comparison to typically hearing children. Adele Cavedon, Cesare Cornoldi, and Rossana DeBeni (1984) tested the hypothesis that Deaf children learning to read code printed text into memory through structural (visual) versus semantic (acoustic, phonological) coding. The results troubled the presuppositions that semantic coding (read: reflexive) was unavailable to developing Deaf readers and instead pointed to the complex hybrid visual-acoustic processes enacted by Deaf children to gain literacy (Cavedon et al. 1984, 374–375). In this case lipreading by Deaf children, though an imperfect replacement for acoustic information, allowed some access to phonological cues in the coding process. A critical interpretation of the data allows us to move beyond seeing Deaf children’s strategies as imperfect replacements for hearing, but rather as contextual differences that are specific to Deaf literacy acquisition. 

Mitchell, Marilyn, and Peter van Sommers. 2007. “Representations of Time in Computer Interface Design.” Visible Language. 41 (3): 220–245. https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/visiblelanguage/pdf/41.3/representations-of-time-in-computer-interface-design.pdf

In considering how differing modalities of time are represented in icon design and human-computer interfacing, Marilyn Mitchell and Peter van Summers (2007) point to the benefits that studying a functional icon system like ASL can have for emergent communicative design projects. The authors note that, as with oral languages, ASL represents time in relation to both the speaker and the way that speaker reads directionally with text. Although understandably limited in what examples they could include, they do assert that pre-design research must engage in deep observation of language difference and use, particularly when tacking between linguistic modalities. ASL offers designers both a prime example of a guidable functional iconography and a language that is very much culturally specific. In short, designers must research anthropologically.

Schertz, Brenda, and Harlan Lane. 2000. “Elements of a Culture: Visions by Deaf Artists.” Visual Anthropology Review 15 (2): 20–36. https://doi.org/10.1525/var.2000.15.2.20.

When Deafness has been engaged by Visual Anthropology Review, the journal has emphasized the lived practices of Deaf artists and scholars, acting as a platform for Deaf artists and activists to both visually and textually tell their stories. However, the fact that all but one of the included articles in this section came from a single themed issue makes clear the need for more engagement and representation with the practices and concerns of Deaf visual artists and scholars in visual anthropology. Brenda Schertz and Harlan Lane (2000) make powerful claims for cultural inclusion and social justice through an attention to the incorporation of American Sign Language (ASL) as lived conceits of the embodied suffering endured growing up Deaf in hearing worlds. Highlighting the late 1980s as a conjunctural touchstone, the authors discuss how Deaf artists began to create and display intimate works reflecting their identities as creatives, at the margins of the art scene and first for each other, then unapologetically and without qualifiers. Often these politico-aesthetic visual statements directly engaged the controversies galvanizing the Deaf community, including the existential defensiveness of many in the Deaf community to audiological practices focused on oral speech and technologies like cochlear implants. It is this resistance to the norms and structures of audiology as an institution that illuminates how there is a history of distrust within parts of the Deaf World towards the methods of empiricism that hearing institutions presuppose and defer to almost metaphysically.

Bagga-Gupta, Sangeeta. 2000. “Visual Language Environments. Exploring Everyday Life and Literacies in Swedish Deaf Bilingual Schools.” Visual Anthropology Review 15 (2): 95–120. https://doi.org/10.1525/var.2000.15.2.95.

Conducting ethnographic research at a Swedish school for the Deaf that instituted visual language and Swedish Sign Language (SSL) as two parts of their bilingual curriculum, anthropologist Sangeeta Bagga-Gupta (2000) reveals that in functional practice, multi-modal language use is the norm for students, their hearing and Deaf teachers, and the school’s interpreters. Bagga-Gupta’s work is illustrative of the power of participant observation in highlighting what formalities work for students in-context (96). This article also reinforces how ethnographic methods as developed in anthropology are beneficial for designers attempting to understand the affordances that must be negotiated when communities switch and combine two or more language modalities in practice. 

Durr, Patricia. 2000. “Deconstructing the Forced Assimilation of Deaf People via De’VIA Resistance and Affirmation Art.” Visual Anthropology Review 15 (2): 47–68. https://doi.org/10.1525/var.2000.15.2.47.

Patricia Durr (2000, 48) considers the kinds of art and art making crucial for defining Deaf visual artists to each other and the world. She makes parallels with other historically marginalized social groups who have used art as a form of activism and identity construction, and argues that Deaf artists tend to enact two types of categorical art practices: affirmation and resistance. Tethered to the 1980s, when resistance and resilience were not foregone conclusions in a Deaf World disempowered by ableist hegemony, I’m curious about other kinds of aesthetic practice that have emerged out of the collective Deaf View/Image Art scene since. Durr asserts that De’VIA  art practices have been an expression of a uniquely Deaf visual acuity and positively presupposes Deaf presence in professional design studios that are open to the aesthetics of a Deaf visuality (48). 

Pfister, Anne, E. 2020. “En Mi Casa Quiero Señas: Photovoice as Language Advocacy.” Visual Anthropology Review 36 (2): 255–274. https://doi.org/10.1111/var.12214

As a practical bedrock for collaboration between anthropologists and those they study, photovoice has been a modality employed in ethnographic research. Its uses include introducing anthropological interlocutors to visual practice through photography as both a framework for relating personal narrative and as a visual mapping device. In this article, anthropologist Anne E. Pfister (2020) uses photovoice with Deaf Mexican children of hearing parents to foster self-advocacy in their everyday lives. Through this case study, we can better understand how a Deaf visual culture will not only emerge out of ASL Deaf culture, but can also coalesce around the hybrid spaces Deaf people negotiate between hearing and Deaf Worlds.

Image Credits

Schertz & Lane 2000, 25. The caption reads: “Susan Dupor, I interesting hamster, 1993, oil on masonite, 49x49.5.Photo: Spike Mafford”

Mitchell and von Summers 2007, 225. The two captions read:“Moving-ego and stationary-ego versions of time.” and “Signs for past, present and future in ASL. © 2006, reproduced by permission. Source: http://www.Lifeprint.com.”