"It turns out, it was irrelevant to the brain whether the top or the bottom of the hand was receiving vibrations," Bieling noted.

For decades, deaf-blind people in Germany, Austria, and the Netherlands have used Lorm to communicate with each other, their doctors, and their families. Bieling said the system is relatively easy to learn, even for English speakers. And with his glove, a deaf-blind Lorm user should be able to communicate with any literate person, anywhere in the world, not just those able to decipher Lorm.

"Up to now, if a deaf blind person wanted to talk to you, you'd have to know the Lorm Alphabet -- and not so many people do," Bieling said. "Another barrier is that this system -- and other deaf-blind languages -- doesn't work over distance. If you're in another room, in another city, and you're deaf-blind, you can't easily talk with Lorm."

As his interaction studies with the deaf and blind got underway three years ago, Bieling said he became increasingly fascinated by "the smart and positive aspects" of their communication. His idea for the Lorm glove came when he followed a conversation that two blind people in his research group conducted across a loud room.

"If you or I were divided by a street, noise, or windows," he said, "We would not be able to talk anymore. But two deaf people would still be able to do so - the only thing they need is eye contact, and they can still communicate. I thought that was cool."

He continued his work observing the intuitive communication methods of blind, deaf, and deaf-blind people, and learned the Lorm alphabet himself -- something that he said takes only a few hours to do, and is much less complex than sign language.

As his work with the deaf-blind deepened, he came to feel that the word disability is, at best, an inappropriate label for a poorly designed world.

"The way we understand disability and the way we define it is often very much related to the way we design our world," Bieling said. "Stairs or ramps, for example, define whether a wheelchair-bound person considers himself disabled or not."

The glove that he shows visitors to his lab is the project's proof of concept, and one of three other projects that he is presenting as part of his thesis on how design could be used to reduce the stigma of disability. Future gloves will be made of a material less dense than GoreTex, and feature smaller sensors and invisible cables. Bieling's goal is to develop a glove so thin and so lightweight that not just the deaf-blind, but all of us will want to wear it.

"I want people to be able to grab things, hold things in their hand while wearing the glove. That's what we're working on for the next prototypes," he said.

Bieling envisions a world not too far in the future where tactile sensors are embedded in our clothes, too.