visual impairment
DESIGN CHALLENGE
“To create a device that helps people with late onset blindness being more independent by scanning consumer products, telling them what it is and when it expires.”
During the project, we worked towards the design challenge 3.0. With doing research, meeting with our co-designer and overall gathering information the design challenge became more apparent and specific. Here the process from start to revised design challenge is explained
To create a device that helps people with late onset blindness being more independent by scanning consumer products, telling them what it is and when it expires.
Concept design
Development
Design challenge 1.0
Designing a product that helps visually impaired people with daily life tasks, while giving them more confidence around the house.
Design challenge 2.0
To create a device that helps a visually impaired person who got impaired later on in life in the kitchen by recognizing products.
Design Challenge 3.0
To create a device that helps people with late onset blindness being more independent by scanning consumer products, telling them what it is and when it expires.
Reasoning
While making the context mapping report the first design challenge was formulated. Here the focus area was not defined yet, so the design challenge is quite diverging. What became clear after doing some research is that designing for people who are born blind, is not the same as designing for people with late onset blindness. As our codesigner is the latter, we choose to implement this in our first version of our design challenge.
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After the context mapping, we discussed with our co-designer and started ideating. This ideation phase was diverse and did not focus on a specific area of the daily life of our co designer. By doing the co-design methods together with our specific user, some problem areas arose. Think of finding things (either food items or clothes), or dusting/cleaning the house.The ideation and idea generation that led from this was again discussed. Here the focus areas of being independent and recognizing products in the kitchen were set. These focus areas were put in the challenge, leading to design challenge 2.0.
Lastly, we did some more brainstorming and fine tuning together with the co-designer and together as a project group. Which led to the revised version of the design challenges. Here we decided on a scanner which scans consumer products, so food and non-food items such as laundry detergent. This is done by listening to the specific user and really translating her needs and experiences. After scanning the products the ISE scanner tells the user what product it is and the expiration date if needed. This research led to the final design challenge 3.0: To create a device that helps people with late onset blindness being more independent by scanning consumer products, telling them what it is and when it expires.