Collective Creation: Disabled Innovation and the British Post Office

在20世纪的英国，残疾创新是如何推动技术发展的？该项目将通过关注如何将残疾人专业知识整合到英国邮局为残疾退役军人和应答者（呼吸器使用者）建立的电信技术中来回答这个问题。第一个项目链将集中于发展适用的电信技术，以便在第一次世界大战后使残疾士兵融入劳动大军。在两次世界大战之间的几年里，邮局与各个行业密切合作，以适应和创造技术修复，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。邮局的工程师们热情地设计了使用交换的新方法，试图帮助这些操作员，但并不总是成功地预测到这些操作员使用声音和触摸来完成这项工作的方式。第二部分将关注“受访者”如何积极与英国邮局合作，以确保公平使用电话。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，以便与呼吸器一起生活，并改变他们的个人环境。《Responaut》（1963年至1989年在英国出版的季刊）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品化。这将使一个新的案例研究探索的发明和协作设计的性质在英国的背景下。

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.