Collective Creation: Disabled Innovation and the British Post Office

残疾人创新如何推动20世纪英国的技术发展？该项目将回答这个问题，重点是如何将残疾人的专业知识纳入英国邮政局为残疾退役军人和responauts（呼吸器使用者）建立的电信技术。第一个项目链将集中于开发适用于第一次世界大战后残疾士兵融入劳动力的电信技术。在两次世界大战之间的几年里，邮政局与各行业密切合作，调整和创造技术修复，使残疾退役军人能够在工业中工作，特别是作为电话接线员。邮局的工程师们热情地设计了使用交换机的新方法，试图帮助这些操作员，但并不总是成功地预见到这些操作员使用声音和触摸来完成这项工作的方式。第二个将侧重于如何“responauts”积极与英国邮政局合作，以确保公平获得电话。受访者在技术上的相互依赖意味着他们适应了各种各样的技术，以便与吸烟者相处得很好，并改变他们的个人环境。1963年至1989年在英国出版的季刊杂志《Responaut》的撰稿人讨论了这些技术。该项目将展示个人发明如何被这个用户网络激发成为“残疾人专业知识”，并探索这种专业知识在多大程度上被国家和私人利益商业化。这将使一个新的案例研究探索的性质，发明和协作设计在英国的背景下。

How did disabled innovation drive technological development in twentieth-century Britain? The project will answer this question by focusing on how disabled expertise was integrated into telecommunication technologies built by the British Post Office for disabled ex-servicemen and responauts (respirator users). The first project strand will concentrate on the development of adapted telecommunications technologies used to integrate disabled soldiers into the workforce after the First World War. During the interwar years the Post Office worked closely with various industries to adapt and create technological fixes that allowed disabled exservicemen to work in industry, notably as telephone operators. Post Office engineers enthusiastically designed new ways of using the exchange to try and assist these operators but did not always succeed in anticipating the ways that these operators were using sound and touch to do this job. The second will focus on how 'responauts' actively collaborated with the British Post Office to ensure equitable access to telephony. Responauts' technological interdependence meant that they adapted an extraordinary variety of technologies to live well with respirators and modify their personal environment. These technologies were discussed by contributors to the Responaut - a quarterly magazine published in Britain between 1963 and 1989. This project will show how individual inventions were galvanised by this user network to become 'disabled expertise' and explore the extent to which this expertise was commodified by state and private interests. This will enable a new case study exploration of the nature of invention and collaborative design in the British context.