Co-designing vibrations

Co-designing vibrations without vision and hearing

I included people with deafblindness in design processes to help them communicate their haptic expertise.

Keywords: Deafblindness, Co-design, vibrotactile communication
Project: Master thesis
2023

The aim was to create a tool and method that, when used in combination, enable designers and haptic experts (people with deafblindness), to collaboratively design meaningful vibrations (personal solutions) for any given situation.

The tool ‘Shape2Vibe’ developed to this purpose, consists of a basic black board with multiple copies of four different shapes on it, each shape representing a particular vibration. In addition, the board has a white, round playbutton, a playfield, and a vibration output. The vibration output is activated (a) simply by positioning a shape on the playfield (irrespective of the number of individual shapes already on the playfield, only the last one put on the playfield activates the vibration output), or (b) by pushing the playbutton in which case the complete sequence of vibrations is played, from left to right: A rhythm. This way various combinations (rhythms) can be created for different kinds of situations.

The shapes in this tool represent vibrations from the DRV2605 library's waveform graph. In a clay modeling experiment, participants felt a vibration and shaped clay to match their perception. The clay results served as a source of inspiration for the shapes.

The picture below shows a photo taken during the evaluating test. What is striking to see is that while the designer (left) communicates her idea for a vibration, the sign interpreter (right) translates what the designer is saying. The haptic expert - the individual with deafblindness - (middle) feels what the designer is saying, while at the same time holding the motor in her hand. This way, the tool supports the designer and haptic expert to communicate ideas about vibrations.

I had the pleasure of presenting my research during the Tangible Embedded Interfaces conference in Cork. The paper can be found here.

Xavière van Rooyen, Gijs Huisman, Myrthe Plaisier, and Sylvia Pont. 2024. Shape2Vibe: A tangible tool for vibrotactile co-design with people with deafblindness. In Eighteenth International Conference on Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied Interaction (TEI ’24), February 11–14, 2024, Cork, Ireland. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 9 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3623509.3635264