C:\CAMEO> cd umwelt
UMWELT
FOR YOU
If you could see, would you? A viewer-directed documentary interview, set in 2030, in a world where blindness has a cure and some people refuse it. Co-created with Kimberly Dixon-Mays.
Playable In your browser, one viewer at a time · take the interview
00 The world
The cure was announced on a Tuesday. By Friday, seventeen million people had registered for the procedure. By the following spring, blindness, congenital, acquired, or degenerative, was for the first time in human history a condition with a known exit.
No one asked what happened to the people who didn't want one.
In 2027 the Universal Sight Device, a cranial implant, began restoring vision in full. Ama Owusu, a poet and cognitive researcher in Accra, declined it and published a 900-word essay in a science journal explaining why. She called the visual world "a room where every surface is a screen." The essay was shared four million times. Sixty percent of the comments called her mentally ill.
By 2029, an estimated 340,000 people were living as voluntarily blind. In Chicago, a residential enclave called Umwelt won full legal recognition of its members' chosen sensory status. Its mission: preserve blindness culture and sight rights, push for more careful policy, and make good trouble.
The name comes from Jakob von Uexküll: umwelt is the sensory world an organism actually inhabits, as distinct from the world as it objectively exists.
01 The interview
How it plays
You're the journalist.
You step into a post-screening Q&A with Ama Owusu. You choose the questions. Every answer leads to a follow-up: what happened after she published, how the world responded, what people learned from her.
How it ends
She can hang up.
Eighteen questions, and one path that reaches Umwelt itself. The interview ends when you're satisfied, or when Ama decides she's done. You keep only the footage you got.
Being a documentarian is a talent, and not everyone is up to the task.
02 Glossary
- CuredsTook the procedure. Fully sighted. The majority.
- NaturalsWere never blind, never needed the cure. Increasingly irrelevant as a category.
- VoluntariesChose to remain blind, or to return to blindness. Umwelt's population.
- TogglersUse the interface situationally. Neither fully in nor out. Contested status.
- AdvocatesSighted allies, lawyers, family, sight doulas. A complicated position.
- Interface TechsThe people who maintain, calibrate, and can override the devices. Enormous latent power.
03 From the community's texts
Once, the world made images faster than minds could metabolize them. What began as aesthetic fatigue became perceptual collapse. The sighted built systems to correct this and the systems accelerated it. Those born without sight did not fall. They were already practicing what the sighted would spend generations trying to learn: to know the world without demanding it perform for you.
04 Credits
- Co-created byCameo Wood and Kimberly Dixon-Mays
- Kimberly Dixon-MaysPlaywright and audience engagement strategist, principal of Dual Role Strategy in Chicago. She moderated the staged post-screening Q&A where Umwelt premiered, and wrote "A Reason to Fight," the quipu poem that serves as one of the community's sacred texts.
- Developed inOdyssey Works Experience Design Certificate, 2026
- NoteSpeculative fiction. Umwelt, Ama Owusu, the Universal Sight Device, and the events above are invented.