The interview is conducted by Ming Wu, who is a blogger and freelance writer about diversity and inclusion, accessibility and blindness and visual impairment. Besides being a guest writer for Eone, she is also the author of the blog A Blinding Light.
In the interview with Pinar Guvenc, Partner at SOUR, Ming and Pinar discussed with which motivation and vision SOUR was created, and why the SOUR team feels a need to explore answers to issues that are troubling in our world today.
“SOUR is a play on the words ‘social’ and ‘urban’, but we also believe it represents our attitude. We appreciate discomfort, being in the grey. We’re comfortable introducing ourselves to things we haven’t explored before. When we were launching, we said that we believe there is enough sugar-coating in the world, it’s time to be sour.”
Pinar Guvenc
They continued the conversation on co-design, the importance of bringing in people with lived experiences and co-design, expert and project collaborations, and the need for designers to become team players and to create solutions that work for everyone, either in bottom-up or top-down collaborations.
You can read more on the website of Eone here.
Eone was founded with an innovative spirit and an unwavering mission: to create fashionable products that are accessible for everyone.
Eone was founded to solve a problem: to tell time, people who are blind have had to choose between intrusive talking watches, or fragile tactile watches. There were hardly elegant, quality alternatives.
Eone founder Hyungsoo Kim was a graduate student at MIT when he learned of this problem through a friend who is blind. Guided by the conviction that everyone has a right to time, he collaborated with designers and persons with vision impairments to create a watch that everyone—sighted or blind—can use and enjoy.
