Design in Everyday Life: January 2016

In my 7th year of engineering education, I started this blog. Many people asked me: Given so many years of engineering training and great career prospects, why design?

I love technology, but love even more the enriching effect of technology on people. I have seen so many talented people who devoted on fascinating products, but failed to let people appreciate how fascinating they are; and so many diligent researchers who worked out long-standing unsolved problems after years' work, but lost their audience/followers in tedious, unintuitive communication. I can't help noticing the so many imperfections in the life, while observing people, talking to people, and understanding people; I can't help brainstorming better ways to solve the problems, and discussing with people to see if they fit their needs. And that happens to be the duty of an UX designer.

This is a blog recording the ideas emerging from our everyday lives, including design critique, need finding, ideation and basic prototyping. Your questions and comments are warmly welcomed!

Friday, January 1, 2016

Touch the world

Blind people rely on screen reader to read the content on the screen. The screen reader works perfectly with text, but for images and complicated websites, it cannot well present the content. The blind people have no idea what is really on the picture, or how does the site lay out.

The proposed assistive technology is to project whatever on the screen to a tactile uneven surface, along with touch sensible interactive screen reader. So the blind people can use their hands to have a much better idea of what is on the screen.

(Image reference: Ubi Interactive: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iu2XH5p_hMM&feature=youtu.be)

Furthermore, for real world scene, it can also be converted and projected to the tactile surface. It can be portable, so blind people can put it in the pocket and travel to anywhere, enjoy the beautiful world just as everyone else.

Lip-reading Glasses

Though many people with hearing disability wear hearing aid, they usually still need to rely on lip-reading to assist them understand what people are saying. But this becomes extremely hard when they are in group communication (e.g. meeting, group lunch, group chat, etc.). Even speech recognition techniques can not handle the multi-people speech very well.

This proposed assistive technology combines speech recognition and lip-movement recognition through a pair of glasses, and present the content in front of deaf people's eyes through augmented reality.