Deaf-led alarm design: technology and disability in home, work and parenthood.

Abstract

Domestic alarms are highly personal technological appendages that help us achieve an individual sense of safety and familial well-being-like baby monitors that help us care for children and alarm clocks that ensure a daily routine and help us get to work on time. Alarms can be understood as technologies that extend our eyes, ears, and memory to monitor our homes and ourselves in various ways beyond typical human capacity. The designs of domestic alarms tend to favour audible forms of alerting, and disabled users and inventors have hacked and redesigned alarms to fit their own families' needs. Alarm design can tell us what type of domestic futures designers and technologists have imagined, casting visions about who is fit for parenthood and who is a reliable worker, and what types of futures disabled users imagined for themselves. As the future of these technologies becomes subsumed into smartphones and other IoT devices, a look into their predigital material forms uncovers episodes of disability agencies that assert a right to disability futures of domestic bliss and safety. Through the archives of The Deaf American and other deaf community publications, this research reviews the postwar alarm designs of Emerson Romero, a Cuban-American deaf activist and engineer, to show how deaf-led alarm designs are forms of material rhetoric that assert a right to a domestic future for disabled parents and workers.