Vi vil Mo også gerne have oplevelser ² en optimering af ...

Abstract
Produktspeciale i Oplevelsesøkonomi, E’11/F’12
Lone Daubjerg (20062512) & Nana Nielsen (20062071)
When thinking about it, most of our greatest experiences when it comes to travelling and cultural
events are visually constructed. In fact, when we recall the memories of these experiences we
often talk about them by describing them as we saw them, or we refer to the pictures we took to
make sure that we would always remember this particular experience. Now imagine not being
able to see the world around you. How would that affect your experiences? This is not an easy
task and most people would probably claim that if they lost their vision there would no longer be
any point in travelling, going to museums, or attending theatrical performances. Thinking of this
you probably wonder; does the blind and visually impaired participate in the cultural scene? We
could not recall having seen any blind or visually impaired people while visiting cultural
institutions. This observation inspired our curiosity and marked the beginning of our journey.
The end of the journey is the thesis named, "We also want experiences" – optimizing the accessibility of
experiences in a cultural institution through sensation, which you are holding in your hands right now.
In October 2011 we met and interviewed eight people who were either blind or severely visually
impaired. We talked with them about how living with a visual disability affected their everyday
life, their relationships with other people, and their attitudes towards the cultural scene and
institutions.
We discovered that we were dealing with a group of people who has a strong desire for
participating in the cultural life. As one of our respondents put it, they seek experiences just like
everybody else does. But the fact is that they often feel excluded from many cultural experiences
because of the overflow of visual information without which the meaning of the experience is
not easily grasped. This deprives them of the independence that is such a crucial part of life in
our society and forces them to rely on someone else’s translation and description of the
experience. This leads to another question: if the experience is described by someone as his or
her personal interpretation to the blind or visually impaired then whose experience is it really?
Our work has been focused on accessibility of cultural experiences. Accessibility is a term which
is often thought of in a physical or communicative way. In this thesis, though, we work with
another definition of accessibility, more specifically; the mental accessibility of cultural
experiences meaning the mental awareness that follows a sensory effect on the body. This type of
accessibility, it seems, has largely been ignored so far in the framing of cultural experience. A fact
which to us seems highly unfair. Throughout the thesis we examine the effects that exclusion
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