Hello! We are Joyride, an ETC team helping to facilitate and document ChairJam. ChairJam is a game jam / hackathon focused on exploring the joys and playability of wheelchairs. The event will be held October 18, 19, and 20, right after our Project Halves! From now until then, our job will be to help recruit, organize, and promote the event to the best of our ability. This also means that we will be learning a lot about disability over the course of the semester, and that learning began this week.
Much of the week was filled by handling the minutiae of project beginnings. This meant ironing out team roles, filling out self assessments, and trying to wrangle together a schedule of when we could all work together. The last piece of project paraphernalia that hadn’t been squared away by the end of the week was our team name. We had brainstormed out a couple options and were fairly confident in our choice: “Play+Able”. However, we were told shortly after that the name was problematic, due to the way that it centers focus on the ability of wheelers (people who use wheelchairs) and not on the pleasure of wheelchairs. This was the first lesson in what we are sure will be many throughout the semester on what we do and do not know about disability. We have since changed our name to [the much better] Joyride.
We went to check out the Access+Ability exhibition at the Carnegie Museum of Art Friday morning, and saw a lot of inspiring work. Innovations abound in this area of work, and we hope to enable some playful ones this October at ChairJam.
We met our clients Heather Kelley (ETC Faculty & Our Advisor), Patrick Carrington (HCI Researcher at CMU), and Theresa Devine (Gaming Innovation Researcher at Arizona State University & A Wheeler) with Ricardo Washington (Our Advisor) on Friday afternoon. We got a lot of out this meeting, not the least of which was a more concrete direction for our project work. Our priorities for now are primarily Recruitment (of participants), Community Outreach, and Logistical Prep for the event. From these, we have drawn up our first goals to be refining ChairJam’s flyer and website. With these, we can begin to reach out to possible participants in the near future.