Skilled Vision

Skilled vision is a concept from visual culture and anthropology that describes the process of learning to see and interpret visual information in specialized ways within a particular community of practice. Originally applied to professional fields (e.g., radiologists learning to read X-rays, breeders learning to assess livestock), the concept has been extended to describe the expertise that people with low vision develop in interpreting technology-mediated visual information. Users of low-vision assistive technologies like head-mounted displays develop specialized skills for making sense of enhanced, magnified, or otherwise modified visual input — a form of skilled vision that is neither fully human nor fully digital but assembled through social and technical affordances.