Last week and this week, we had the opportunity to get input from two fabulous members of the ETC community – Ruth Comley and Tina Blaine (Bean).

Ruth shared her expertise in working with haunted houses. She told us all about how people act when they are in the dark, beginning with “they lose their cool.” She’s seen every kind of reaction from people while they went through haunted houses, including parents using children as shields and people sitting down and refusing to move on, which are good reactions for us to be aware of even if we are trying very hard not to elicit a fear response during our experience. With an experience like this, where people are without vision, Ruth emphasized safety and the necessity of observation. If people are uncomfortable, they may not give honest feedback after they are returned to comfort. These are very important for us to keep in mind moving forward. We also hope to try to pull from the many examples of multisensory experiences she shared with us, but again, we are aiming not to scare people…so we will need to choose carefully.

Bean is a musical soul, so we sought her wisdom in the world of sound and hearing. She suggested that we speak to people who are visually impaired to see how they use sound in their everyday lives, especially to move around. Maybe we could ask them if there was anything people who are visually impaired wish existed to make life easier, and try to make it real, though Bean realized this is probably a goal far larger than this one project. She told us about some of her past work including an audience participation project that involved sending a ball (which was really a big button) through the audience at a concert so they could make sounds play as it was hit. This sounds like something we could replicate in a way in our experience! Exploring opposites like hot and cold and isolating senses more than simply being visionless were other suggestions of places to explore during this semester.

Thank you both again for meeting with us and giving us all this wonderful information! We hope to use it to make something great.