For the research interaction, I wanted to have primary research and personal engagement with actual people that have hearing impairment. It’s something to think about the issues and thinking about empathy tools to understand how the targeted users feel, but it’s another thing to understand the personal experiences of the hearing-impaired individuals. This led me to attend actual workshops to develop an understanding of how to actually develop inclusive design for those with hearing impairment. I worked on creating a solution based on actual interview with the hearing impaired and personally experienced how to communicate with them. This sort of communication experience actually led me to understand more issues about the deaf experience. My sort of understanding changed from simply “they experience communication issues” to “the communication between us is slow and sometimes has misunderstandings”.
I interviewed Adam Liu, someone with severe hearing impairment, to understand more about how his daily life experience is like where I understand that he can’t hear and has issues with the tools to help him understand. Not only does he not understand, but sometimes, it is inconvenient for him to actually ask for understanding.
This initial understanding led me to understand more issues in his daily life. I found that he also mentioned that the voice recognition tools also can’t differentiate multiple voices and he can’t communicate to drivers which led to my design direction and design solution. I wanted to focus on the clarity of language, resolving singularity of voice, with noisiness, and verbal communication.
From my initial focus direction, I then thought of issues to resolve to stimulate my design mindset and truly understand what the issue at hand is. The three issues are all related to communication and understanding, and essentially lead to the question “how might we restructure the way Adam communicates with his surroundings?” really pushed me to think about their interactions.
Thinking about how their can be responsive interactions with the environment for communication, I thought about the solution of Hand Talk which essentially is a combination of digital and physical interfaces to aid the communication of hearing-impaired individuals. It’s not only glasses to have a reception of information, but I also think that the output from the individual is important. If we only create something to let the user become passive in the interaction stage, it does not resolve the issue. Therefore, the output of the individual is important too! Therefore, while the glasses help the visualization and understanding of dialogue, the gloves allow the users to communicate faster rather than just typing. I feel that the digital voice from the gloves to the phone aids in communication which is very important to my concept. I think that because Adam can’t talk to drivers and drivers don’t read the text, it’s important to create a methodology for him to communicate. Thus, there should be a sort of digital transmission/translation aspect of glove and glasses where your sign language can become a digital voice for you to talk in calls and in normal life. It’s also important to understand who’s talking so there’s the eye tracking aspect of it.
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