Crafting Inclusive and Impactful Experiences through Social Design and UX
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.
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