HALO

• MISSION - Design, prototype, and present an object that enhances the mobility of its users

• TIMEFRAME - Four weeks in Fall 2018

• CONTEXT - Harvard University Master in Design Engineering program core studio assignment 02

• TEAM - Elisa Ngan, Berlynn Bai, and Oliver Luo

PROBLEM SPACE DEFINITION

Our exploration began with sound. Together, we shared what we each find compelling about designing with sound and arrived at common ground about our respective priorities in the design challenge. On the drawing board, we threw out ideas, reflections, opinions, findings on the web, and our stories of navigating with sound. We discussed issues of safety in walking home at night without being able to hear footsteps behind you, issues of health when it pertains to loud noises both in the public and the private spheres, as well as issues in verbal communication when speech isn’t perceived.

We eventually aligned on the hearing aid, with the hard-of-hearing as our extreme users. The hearing aid industry, with the decades of funded research and development and market sales, has experience and expertise that we understandably cannot rival in the course of four weeks. On this issue, we debated extensively on how we should position ourselves to deliver a prototype design with a solution proposal that is ambitious yet reasonable.

USER RESEARCH AND JOURNEY

To better understand our target users, we reached out for interviews with potential stakeholders, which included schoolmates whose family members are hard-of-hearing, members of online communities of hearing aid users, audiology experts, and one of us! Elisa uses hearing aids, and we learned a lot from her anecdotes and perspective. Through her stories, we realized that while hearing aid companies are constantly improving the hardware as well as software behind sound amplification and noise reduction, the physical hearing aids themselves are becoming smaller and smaller. The rationale is to hide them from plain view so that those who have hearing loss can blend into society better. What is problematic about this design trend is that it reinforces the stigma of hearing loss, that you cannot be accepted as a fully and capable human being if it’s known that you have hearing loss. Hiding your hearing loss does not contribute to your ownership of the condition and therefore harms adoption and retention – both of which are crucial for developing a healthy relationship with your hearing loss.

This argument, we realized, might not appeal to all users of hearing aids. We mapped out the changing relationship with hearing loss over time for a typical person with hearing loss who goes through the journey of discovering the condition, accepting it, adopting hearing aids, believing that the hearing aids will solve their problems, and ultimately arriving at a good relationship with their loss. Along this user journey, we identified points where our redesign can bring meaningful impact. One of those is children.

FIRST PROTOTYPES

So we moved forward with a few playful design prototypes out of modeling clay. Since none of us has experience designing for children, it was actually very difficult understanding how to design such that they would develop attachment, and it was also difficult understanding how they might influence their parents in the hearing aid shopping, especially with our design. Children also have widely varying preferences and characteristics at different stages of development, and we couldn’t identify a stage where onset or diagnosis of hearing loss is most prevalent or when intervention would be most impactful. We progressed, yet we felt like we couldn’t design with confidence.

PRINCIPLE PIVOT

In a conversation with our studio instructor Andrew Witt, we had an epiphany. Perhaps, instead of designing a form that appeals to children, we can think instead about a function that appeals to children. We’ve had the idea of a directional hearing aid for a while – the idea being that you can pick and choose the direction from which you hear sound. We just haven’t pursued that path because there are existing precedents of this technology on the market and given our definition of the problem at the beginning of the project, we couldn’t differentiate ourselves from them. Now, because of our design principles of visibility, association with hearing loss, and intervention for empowerment, we can.

THE FINAL SPRINT

With only one week left of our project, we ran with the idea. We designed in Rhino nonfunctional formal prototypes that wrap around the ear laterally to allow a hypothetical array of directional mics to sample all 360 degrees around a user. The design was made of a combination of soft translucent silicone for wearing comfort (which would increase retention) and hard opaque plastic for protection of hardware (which would increase longevity). The iterations were printed with 3D multimaterial printers.

For the functional prototype, we worked with electronic labs on campus to design a circuit board that takes audio input from six directional mics, amplifies them via potentiometers depending on which mics the user would like to have activated, and sends the amplified sound into a pair of earphones. The mics were paired into three options: front, sides, and back, to address possible usage scenarios where one might want to focus their attention.

PRESENTATION AND FEEDBACK

Our final presentation was received well. We presented our intervention as a superpower that we’re designing for our users – whether as children or adults who have grown up with their hearing aids. We also analyzed the potential market and supply chain for our redesign, taking into consideration how the product integrates with the service sector of personalized hearing aid calibration and fabrication. The critics praised our redesign of the hearing aid from the perspective of user empowerment through visibility, and they also provided critical feedback on our design and narrative. People were delighted to play with the prototype, because even though it was imperfectly made, being able to listen to the world around you differently was an enlightening experience.

Many thanks to Elisa Ngan, Berlynn Bai, Andrew Witt, Jock Herron, Peter Stark, Ariana Mazzeo, Jenny Fan, Saif Haobsh, Anesta Iwan, Mike Litchfield, James Weaver, Terra Moran, Evan Smith, Maddie Hickman, Steve Cortesa, and all of MDE '20