Talking Tiles
Do people with hearing impairments ever get tired of listening?
Individual project
2020: 5 months
Part of Msc Design for Interaction at Delft University of Technology
Design brief: Design something that has a specific effect on someone in a certain way.
Activities: Interviews, observations, academic research, design goal, interaction vision, iterative prototyping, evaluation
Context
Listening can be tiring, especially when you are hearing impaired and in a situation where multiple people are speaking simultaneously. It can lead to listening fatigue, which makes you feel exhausted and even less able to focus on listening.
Listening breaks
Listening breaks seem to be a solution to the problem, as they allow the user to leave the conversation and move to a quiet space to calm down and energise. However, people dislike taking them because they like to stay involved.
Solution
Talking Tiles is a package with sixteen different icons designed to allow you to calm down and energise in a quiet space while remaining involved with your friends. Your friends use these icons to summarise the conversation you miss while leaving to go on your listening break. They flip an icon at each new subject of the conversation to mark its topic. When you return, your friends bring you up to date, using the icons to jag their memory.Â
