Collective Creation: Disabled Innovation and the British Post Office

在二十世纪的英国，残障创新是如何推动技术发展的？该项目将回答这一问题，重点是如何将残疾专业知识融入英国邮局为残疾退伍军人和应急者(呼吸器用户)建立的电信技术中。第一个项目将集中于开发经过调整的电信技术，用于在第一次世界大战后将残疾士兵纳入劳动力大军。在两次世界大战期间，邮局与各行各业密切合作，调整和创造技术修复，使残疾退伍军人能够在工业中工作，特别是作为电话接线员。邮局工程师热情地设计了利用交易所的新方法来尝试和帮助这些运营商，但并不总是成功地预测到这些运营商使用声音和触摸来完成这项工作。第二个主题将关注“答复者”如何积极与英国邮局合作，以确保公平使用电话服务。应答者对技术的相互依赖意味着他们适应了各种各样的技术，以便与呼吸器和睦相处，并改善他们的个人环境。《响应者》的撰稿人讨论了这些技术，这是一本1963至1989年间在英国出版的季刊。这个项目将展示个人发明是如何被这个用户网络激励成为“残障专家”的，并探索这种专家在多大程度上被国家和私人利益所商品化。这将使一个新的案例研究能够在英国的背景下探索发明和协作设计的性质。

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.