Figure 1: Illustration of a Deaf swimmer and a kayaker.The kayaker uses the DeafSwim app on a smartphone to send a vibration alert to the swimmer's smartwatch to gain their attention.

In the era of ubiquitous information technologies shaping our everyday lives, the advancements of technologies ‘for the deaf’ have provided significant access for deaf users not only for participation in hearing-dominated environments but also within deaf communities. However, since these technologies have predominantly been developed through implicit hearing-centered design that puts deaf experiences second, they often require deaf users to adapt to them. This poster provokes the question: what would technologies look like if they centered on the experiences and desires of deaf people instead? By employing a case study from broader ongoing research on Deaf Tech, we investigate and discusse insights garnered from the concept of DeafWatch developed in one of the workshops. Through our analysis, we aim to tentatively move forward in providing different socio-technical narratives from a deaf-centered perspective.

In our experience as researchers engaging with non-academic audiences, we observed that it remains a challenge to receive direct and critical feedback from participants. This is particularly amplified in the context of disabilities even if the researchers identify themselves as disabled given that the interaction is governed by social status and material power dimensions to say the least. To work productively with these power dynamics, we explored embodied approaches to articulating critique acknowledging the different ways of knowing stemming from different bodyminds. Here, we line out two exploratory cases illustrating how physical bodies can be directly attended to to express critiques in more direct ways than participants might be used to on a language based level (spoken or signed). We show how communication and critique can take on many forms encouraging us to broaden our methodological toolset to incorporate practices common in disability cultures. Our experiences show that we need to embrace crip approaches to knowledge production to receive more actionable and useful feedback in developing technologies with disabled communities.