by Mike Rosen | Mar 25, 2014 | Rosen
Here’s a story that proves that experience can be humiliating, instructive and inspiring at the same time. Quick background: our young company, E.A.S.Y. LLC, has been around long enough that we’ve got a really solid base of experience with our intended customers. After all, no product design engineer worth her or his salt can be successful in the marketplace without an intimate knowledge of the people s/he hopes to serve. In our case, that’s people who are blind or have low vision. We’re in the tactile graphics business, meaning that we design, build and sell the suite of “inTACT” products, which make it possible for people make, edit, save, send and receive raised-line drawings of pretty much anything for pretty much any purpose. Problem is that whenever we think we know what “any purpose” includes, we re- discover the limitations of our own imaginations. And so the story: Setting: Kids’ Camp at the NFB National Convention in 2013. This is one of several events in which E.A.S.Y. has engaged children in making, changing, adding to and exchanging raised line drawings. We’ll be doing it again at the 2014 Convention. Cast: a dozen or so blind and low-vision children, ages six to twelve, to be coached in tactile drawing by us – Mike Coleman, Josh Coffee and me, the founders and brain trust of E.A.S.Y. LLC. These boys and girls are visually impaired for a variety of reasons; some have drawn before and others have not. Plot: We are to occupy these energetic and suitably demanding young Federationists for about an hour and a half with tactile drawing. We have...
by Mike Rosen | Mar 17, 2014 | Rosen
Once a year, my grown daughter and I, minus her kids, take a long weekend off in New York City. We take in a show, walk miles, eat more than we should, and find delight in the endless surprises the Big Apple always supplies. We did this again last weekend, and the experience was, as always, punctuated by the unexpected. But here’s one element of our jaunts through the Boroughs that, dazzling as it is, no longer takes us by surprise: art is everywhere. Literally everywhere. I’m not talking about the museums of the upper East Side – magnificent as they are. I don’t mean just the back-to-back galleries – flakey, friendly, futuristic and freaky – that seem to have colonized places like the 23rd Street and 25th Street on the West side. No; I really mean everywhere. Drawings are no less the surface and substance of New York than pavement and brick and gray slush. The act of drawing seems to be what New Yorkers do, as commonly and casually as they honk their horns, sing on the subways and call out to each other in all the languages of the planet. Begin a walk across the Brooklyn Bridge and look South at the projects and playgrounds. No wall is too small, too big, or too hard to access to be the canvas for an unofficial mural. Graffiti goes way beyond “Jake was here!!” to become brilliant chaotic expression of attitude, imagination and mood. (No money for paint, brushes, canvas or art school? So What! Steal a spray can.) Cross the Manhattan bridge and turn left on Bedford Street...
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