A blind designer leads the sighted

by Anna
(The Special Life)

It's true! If the blind ever needed a public icon to show off talent, here it is. It turns out that Eric Brun-Sanglard, is an interior designer who now has a home design show built around his talents. The show is on the A & E channel, and is called Designing Blind. Apparently the people who have chosen to have their homes designed on TV don't know that their designer is blind, which of course adds to the 'shock' element of the show. Okay, so it's a bit gimmicky. But still, there are important lessons to be learned about how people carry on their lives after acquiring a disability.

In this case, our hero was a creative director for an advertising company, but he gave up that career after he lost his vision back in 1995. Naturally, when he began to live in his own home as a blind man, he realized that he needed to change his surroundings to better accommodate his disability. The new show will demonstrate the use of tools like talking measuring tapes, raised blueprints and color detection devices.

According to the show promo, he's quoted as saying "... where it's different in my approach, is that I try to get in touch with how people really want to feel in their space and through using my senses, I achieve that goal."

What I like about the premise of this show is that it not only shows a person with a disability calmly going about their lives, but highlights that 'normal' people can benefit from working with someone with a disability in entirely new ways that they hadn't considered previously. In my view, anything that publicly demonstrates someone with a disability as a full participant in society is a good thing. The more social barriers that are breached, the better.