The Essay

For the final essay in the series, architectural designer Christopher Laing gives a personal account of how he started Signstrokes, which introduces standardised sign language for architecture. Deaf people are not new to architecture, however they face significant barriers because the sign language vocabulary of the profession is not standardised and lacks terms to express architectural concepts uncommon in everyday language.Christopher, drawing upon his own difficult experience at university, where he suffered the consequence of few deaf people before him studying architecture anywhere. The knock-on effect was that very few British Sign Language interpreters knew architectural terms or context, having never worked in the field before. Christopher had to take on the additional responsibility, on top of his degree, of helping the university interpreters familiarise themselves with the jargon and signs to use when interpreting the lectures.Christopher collaborated with Adolfs Kristapsons to create the corpus di