Image © Jose & MidJourney
I was in my twenties when my father started losing his eyesight, he was a diabetic and had retinopathy. When he started losing the left eye, he went to get laser treatment, but something went wrong and he lost the eye, so when he started losing the right eye, he didn’t want to risk it and basically lived until he was completely blind. For a man that lived the way he did, this was a hard period, for him and for those around, especially my mom. My dad died more than 30 years ago, but whenever anyone asked me what I feared most in my life, my answer was always ‘going blind’.
About 5 years ago, I woke up one day with blurred vision on my right eye, I immediately scheduled an appointment, and the doctor told me I had a Central Retinal Vein Occlusion CRVO episode, of the ischemic kind, meaning a significant loss of blood flow and oxygen to the retinal tissue, which causes permanent severe vision loss (I can only see major light changes). I could not believe that my biggest fear was materializing, went for a second and third opinion and they all told me to focus on my good eye. I have learned how to live with this, can’t do 3D movies and forget trying to shoot a basketball hoop, but in general, and because it is not visible to others, I am Ok.
Lately I have been asking myself, what if I went completely blind, what would it mean, and how would I deal with it in a way that perhaps would be less disruptive to me and others around. Above all I have been asking myself what it means to be a blind designer and if the concept of a blind designer exists at all. A blind designer does not seem any different from any other blind person, even if I try and team up with people out there that might need their eyes to do their job, even if we advocate that design is more than a profession (a way of life), that is still probably the majority of professions out there.
The question of what it means to be a blind designer cannot be disassociated of context, be it age, physical and mental health, type of design practice, family support, etc. Ultimately, it leads me to ask what I do as a designer today, what do I see myself doing in the near future (the far future is blurry…), how much of that could I learn to do without my eyesight. And while it scares the hell out of me, I think of this as an exercise of dealing with a probable future in a way that might open up new possibilities, I find myself creating positive scenarios more focused on what I believe I could end up learning, how my other senses might be heightened, what that could mean for someone as curious and connected to the world as I am. And I find myself paying attention to stories of those that became blind in their late life, and how they dealt with it, what they ended up doing to remain active and productive members of society.
I also do mental exercises of using existing tools to get something done without my eyesight. This weekly post could eventually be done if I was blind, I could record voice memos on topics, I could dictate a post and have it read to me, tweak and perfect through a back & forth process. I could perhaps dictate prompts to a generative AI image generator, and have it describe to me what it created, I could explore a new dialogue with the engine and focus more on the unseen part of the image, the underlying, the symbolic and the profane. Would I miss going through the image creation, make decisions based on simple changes in color and hue, proportion, balance, white space, detail? Of course, but would that stop me from generating an image that you could build on top and interpret as you see fit, just like you do now anyway?
While my father was living his last years, with a super devoted nurse that was my mother, I started preparing myself for his death, or so I thought. He always said he would go without a warning, he didn’t want to be more of a burden than he already was. One day my mother called me, I was only a block away and ran, but when I arrived, he was already gone. And thought I thought I was ready for his departure, I wasn’t. Perhaps this of losing the eyesight is not something I can prepare for, perhaps if and when it happens I will suffer as much as if it happened without a warning, but I can try and condition myself for this loss, because not doing it does not address the harsh reality that I am half way there.
I’m a legally blind photographer. Here’s how modern technology makes that possible. — Vox