Hear Me Out

(2016)

Hearing impairment can be difficult to understand, and especially when you haven't experienced it yourself. It not only affects the hearing impaired, but also the people around them. Hear Me Out is a co-design project that takes departure in such close relationships by involving relatives in the adaptation process. The project output was a social tool that can be used within a family, that initiates a dialogue about hearing loss between the hearing aid user and his/her family. The tool makes the issue more tangible and easy to talk about through short, daily activities that the family share and explore together.

Co-design projects are often characterised by their open-endedness and focus on collaboration with different stakeholders and participants throughout the process. In this project in particular we invited different families to partake in the shaping of the toolkit; families that had experience with or was affected by hearing impairment. We worked with different exploratory design methods such as photo diaries/cultural probes, prototyping, enactment (acting out possible future scenarios), and ethnographic interviews, which lead us to the Hear Me Out Kit – our final deliverable for the project.

Our collaboration partner for the project was GN ReSound, provider of hearing aids and accessories, and was intended to inspire their ways of working with innovation project and user research.

Teammates for the project: Melanie Povlitzki, Sofia Germani and Andrea Østmo da Costa