TYPE

Product Design for people with visual issues

DURATION

07/2017-09/2017

BRIEF INTRODUCTION

Light-Pad is an auxiliary tool of “watching” soccer and basketball games designed for the blind and people having a visual impairment. This product conveys the moving track of balls in the games through touch and stimulus between spherical contact points on the Light-Pad and user’ hands, plus with big data processing and artificial intelligence (motion data collecting and processing in the games). It is available to solve the problems of watching games and provide more experience and surprise for people having visually impaired trouble.

01 EXPERIENCE IN DARK

The Dark Restaurant is a theme restaurant of dark space, where customers could experience the feeling of having dinners in total darkness. The waiters there would wear night vision glasses and tell customers the locations of dishes, helping them get used to eating in the dark.

After that experience, I felt it was so inconvenient if people were unable to see things around clearly. In addition to inconvenience, the blind have to face the fear of darkness and unknown environment. Consequently, I began to pay more attention to them and learn about their world through documentaries, interviews, and books.

02 BACKGROUND

According to WHO data, there are 8.248 million blind people and 677.274 million are low visual acuity people all over the world until 2017. With the largest number of blind people, China has 17.210 million visually impaired people in 2015. Among them, over 5 million people are totally blind, 400 thousand newly increasing every year

03 MAPPING USERS

Date: On 30 August On 31 August On 1 September

Address: Shuangxin Massage Shop Served by the Blind

Interviewers: 4 workers in Shuangxin Massage Shop

Most modern people’s main outdoor activities, watching TV, and surfing the Internet are not apart of their daily life

According to interviews with blind people, there were very little entertainment activities in their lives.

04 ROLE-PLAYING

Based on the survey of the last stage, they are a few entertainment activities for the blind. Thus, an idea to involve the blind in entertainment activities struck me. I acted like a blind person to experience watching TV, dancing, watching soccer and basketball games so as to, from their perspective, deeply analyze the users’ experience and needs in each case.

According to the specific scene and character analysis of the four entertainment methods, the feasibility analysis was obtained.

The basketball game is the best choice.

05 INSPIRATION&TEST

The design point was sought from the extant communication means and tools offered for the blind. It was found that protuberance and touch are the means they get used to.

Three-dimensional creative toys were picked as the tentative model to conduct the test concerning the sense of touch.

The contact lever moves upwards and downwards against the palm and the location of the lever was conveyed to the blind by touch.

The blind can touch or wear this kind of products to sense the movement of objects. Thus the visualized trajectory of moving objects would be conjured up in the mind.

06 DESIGN CONCEPTS

A product was designed that enables the blind to feel the moving track of balls through touch (mainly for basketball and soccer games).

Gray rectangle area: Data acquirement device and data processing center The camera acquires the graphic statistics inside the competition venue.
OpenCV image processing: Analyzing the trajectory of the moving ball.

Artificial Intelligence: Data processing and analysis

Black shadow area: control area: The top data collection facility collects basketball data  within the control

Green circle area: User product terminal
The dynamic statistics of the ball is conveyed through the internet

07 IDEAS&SKETCHES

Plan A: I chose iPad as the source.

Plan B: Associating with balls, I considered the third shape for the product.

Plan C: According to studies, stomachs are more sensitive than palms which shall be released in games.

Plan D: Gloves were chosen as my inspiration source.

08 PROTOTYPE & USER TESTING

Four prototypes were made by PVC panels, foam balls and plastic hemispheres at the ratio of 1:1:1. Tests were launched on six users to make evaluations.

The product prototype was evaluated according to its style, portability, comfort level, and interactive intensity as well as simplicity in use. After tests on users
and five ratings, the product prototype fashioned

in IPAD gained the best comprehensive evaluation and appealed to users especially in the respect of portability, interactive intensity, and simplicity in use.

09 WORKFLOW

I created a workflow as instruction for using. It divided into three part: the Game preparation stage, Game on-going stage and Game end stage. 

In the Game preparation stage, it shows how users start to use and learn how to use the Light-pad.

In rest two stages, they show three vision: basketball vision, user interaction, and Light-pad vision. Three visions match together to show how Light-pad works.