Distributing perception with (artificial) guides

Distributing perception with (artificial) guides
Damien Rudaz and Brian L. Due

Merleau-Ponty (2015) famously notes that “[t]he blind man’s stick has ceased to be an object for him, and is no longer perceived for itself; its point has become an area of sensitivity, extending the scope and active radius of touch […] To get used to a hat, a car or a stick is to be transplanted into them, or conversely, to incorporate them into the bulk of our own body.” As an attempt to ground the previous claim empirically, this paper explores “just how” a visually impaired person (thereafter VIP) can be intertwined in socio-material assemblages through which the immediate environment is perceived and the activity at hand accomplished.
A nascent yet rapidly expanding body of literature provides granular descriptions of the subtle know-how and practices accomplished by sighted guides and visually impaired persons (thereafter VIPs) as they mutually coordinate during various tasks. These practices can be embodied (e.g., a finely-tuned arm movement that steers the VIP’s trajectory in a crowded space – Vincenzi et al., 2021) and/or verbal (e.g., instructions calibrated in real time as a VIP progressively discovers an object haptically – Due & Lüchow, 2023; Simone & Galatolo, 2021). This articulation of the skilled expertise or “elusive knowledges” (Toraldo et al., 2018) of VIPs and their sighted guides (Bouaouina et al., 2025; Due, 2023d; Ink, 2016; Macpherson, 2009; Simone & Galatolo, 2020, 2021) is both a stimulating praxeological endeavor and an efficient manner to inform the design of new assistive technologies for VIPs.
While complementing these prior studies, our paper pays specific attention to how, as part of these VIP+Guides assemblages, perception gets distributed between agents. Crucially, this distribution includes non-human features of the setting: a white cane, an assistive smartphone application that reads the name of products in a supermarket, etc. Hence, beyond human guides, we explore the situational relevance of non-human features of activities involving VIPs – whose sensory information is used as resources (Due, 2021). These non-human semiotic agents typically include guide dogs (Due, 2023c; Simone et al., 2025), robot dogs (Due, 2023b), or assistive glasses (Due, 2025).

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