Dialoguing while Wandering on the Braille Trail

This film introduces a new method of data collection, dialoguing while wandering, to inform evidence-based design and press upon design praxis. This film documents Sarah, Janice and Megan dialoguing while wandering on the Braille Trail in Brisbane, Australia. It promotes a co-constitutive knowledge process which seeks to challenge externally generated knowledge and find new ways to create more equitable and collaborative forms of knowledge. Co-constitutive knowledge uncovers a world perceived from different angles and viewed through multiple vantage points. This allows for a perceiving of things, not from a single perspective, but rather from multiple viewpoints, physical positions and more. By employing this different interview technique, we strive to embody the experiences of the participants and to map out the encounters with one another, and all relations. Dialoguing while wandering encourages detailed and rich embodied knowledge and experiences because information is prompted by association to one’s surroundings.

This method is valuable in bringing forth phenomena that may often escape awareness of people who inhabit a particular environment. By engaging in dialoguing while wandering, the interviewer and interview begin to have a deeper emotional connection and therefore begin to listen, watch, experience, understand, and enact each other’s experiences. Furthermore, dialoguing while wandering has the capacity to excavate personalized knowledge of those with different abilities and uncover systems of exclusion that are often hidden or naturalized and thus rendered invisible to other interviewing approaches. These wanderings foster insights that simply would not have been made possible through more traditional interview techniques alone.

Research publications

Team

Relevant links



Brisbane braille trail