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.

Stain removal laundry

Sometimes when you left an obvious stain on the clothes, simply dropping it in the washing machine can't remove it perfectly. Many people do a manual pre-wash by scrubbing the stain part with some particular detergent. But this is not very convenient.

So the design problem is, how to remove the particular stain perfectly using laundry machine without a manual pre-wash?

For example, we can signal the stain parts with some detergent chips, with the corresponding detergent that can efficiently remove the particular stain. Then add an extra pre-wash cycle to the laundry machine, scrubbing the stain parts hard, followed by the regular washing cycle. So the stain parts are washed twice and removed perfectly, while the other parts are washed only once without too much energy cost.

Watch out! You are in my way! - To design a better car horn

This is a car steering wheel with the horn at the center. To use the horn, one has to use one hand to push hard at the button at the center, and use the other hand to hold tightly the steering wheel.

But, when we have to use the horn, we are usually in an urgent traffic condition, and we want to use the horn to warn others to pay attention. But under such cases, it is not safe or convenient to free one hand to push the horn button. People tend to hold tight the steering wheel with both hands to make the car more under control.

Here is the problem: how to design the car horn so that people can use it naturally and conveniently under urgent cases?

Here are some brainstormed design ideas. They are not necessarily be practical or efficient, but they are recorded as a process of design thinking.

- The horn button can be hidden inside the steering wheel rim, activated by strong hand gripping. Under urgent cases, people tend to grasp the wheel rim tightly, which would automatically trigger the car horn.


- The horn button can be located at one side of the steering wheel, as highlighted in the red circle above. So people just need to free one finger instead of freeing one hand.



- Similarly, the horn button can be hidden inside the brake. Only when the brake is pressed hard, would the horn button activate.


- Similar to blind spot detection, the car can automatically detect dangerous occlusion or maneuver, can use horn to warn the driver or other cars/pedestrians.
- The horn can also be activated by the shout (or dirty words :P) of the driver. Most drivers would say some particular words under urgent traffic cases. Each individual can configure these "activation words" to use them to activate the horn.

Advice are good, but make them useful!

This idea occurred to me when I was arguing with my roommate about a newly open restaurant. They went there once and told me it is totally terrible, and I decided not to go there. However, coincidentally, I went to the restaurant and ordered the same food some day, and I was amazed by how good it is! I should have known that my roommate and I have different tastes on food. It is amazing that how the experience on the same issue can vary vastly from person to person.

The same thing happens when people seek advice from others' experience. Everyone has different background, and the advice might not be applicable. Therefore, I propose a personalized estimation system, gathering not only users' reviews and feedbacks, but also their background, personality, level of proficiency, etc. Based on those information, and the situation of the person who use it, it would generate a reasonable estimation/advice for this person.

The following two storyboards describe two use cases of the design:

Storage Alert! What should I do!

If you are using a macbook pro with 128GB storage, you might be familiar with this:



This is an alert from Mac OS about the disk storage. I click "OK", and then what? It doesn’t direct me to the right places to free spaces.

Moreover, even when I go to a directory and want to free some space, the interface of the directory (as shown below) doesn’t show the folder size! I have to right click the folder, click “show info”, then it tells me how large it is. It takes a lot of working memory to solve the storage issue.




[Redesign] Storage Alert

- Instead of letting user just click "OK", it directs users to the place ('Finder') to free some space. And the files in 'Finder' should have visible 'size' property, and be sorted by size.
- It provides a drop-down menu listing the files that have not been used for a long time, sorted by the size, based on the assumption that user may want to delete some old files or large files to free space. User can click on the file to see the details and decide to keep it or not.

Turn on the lamp. Don't try twice!

	Confusing gearwheel rotation direction This desk lamp uses a gearwheel as the on/off switch.  It turns on if it is rotated in a particular direction, and turns off if rotated further in the same direction. Nothing catastrophic happens if rotated in the wrong direction. But.. I never remember the right direction!
	[Redesign] Directly manipulated lamp switch The switch is hidden inside the lamp cover. Intuitively, we open the cover to turn on the light, close the cover to turn it off.