We See Deaf People
Together with a team of international students, I worked on the project We See Deaf People in which we prototyped a Mixed Reality experience for deaf people who attend performing arts events. The project partner for this project was Sivupersoona, a company that provides deaf people with interpreters. Sivupersoona also does a lot for the deaf community in Finland, such as organising events.
The project was part of Demola, a network that connects companies, universities, and students for succesful co-creation.
Goal
The goal was to create an AR experience in performing arts events for deaf people. We had to develop a prototype so that deaf people can experience a performing arts event in a different, immersive way.Challenge
There were several challenges during the project. One of the biggest challenges was the budget of Sivupersoona. The prototype and our ideas for further development had to be profitable for Sivupersoona. Before I applied to work on the project, it was already known by the stakeholders that AR goggles nowadays are really expensive. The user challenge was to create an immersive, yet comfortable experience.The research
The target group of this project were deaf and hard-of-hearing people. From a first interview with the project partner Sivupersoona, I learned that the deaf community is a proud community and this community is not quite understood by many of the hearing people. This interview has led to an interview with people from the Finnish deaf community, as seen in an Instagram post of Demola Tampere. It was a really interesting and valuable experience for me to have the oppurtunity to get in touch with deaf people. It was really nice to learn more about the deaf community, but also about how you should interact with a deaf person as a hearing person myself.Final concept
As a team, we started creating concepts with what we learned about the deaf community during our research. We wanted to make music at concerts visible. To visualise the concept, we made a video which can be seen below. The video is silent on purpose. We thought that in this way hearing people will understand the concept of visualising music better. In addition to the visualisation of music, we made a prototype of a vibrating sleeve. The sleeve represents the beat and vibrates on the skin of the deaf person to enhance the beat.
We had the oppurtunity to test and show our concept to the same people we had the interview with. They were very enthusiastic and were hoping that our concept would become reality in the near future!
Finale
The last part of the project was a pitch for all the people who participated in different Demola projects. Our pitch can be watched below.
The end result? We got first in the finale and won the prize for Winner project of Demola Autumn 2017!
You can view my work certificate from Sivupersoona by clicking here.