ARRG! Long time no speak!

Ok so to recap on the missing months of my life... here’s a brief(ish) summary of what I’ve been doing!!

After the Spiritual Object exhibition which I mentioned here a couple of times, I then was invited to apply for a design Internship at Orange, and got it! Woohoo!



So I packed my bags, moved in with three total strangers from gumtree, and started working full time for three months in London. Best experience ever. Made some great friends, met some great people, and even got some graphic design experience on the set of a feature length film.



As you can imagine, I completely ignored the fact that I had to go back to university! So here I am, back in rainy Dundee, trying to get used to being back at ‘school’.

This is my honors year (that must mean I have an ordinary degree already!) so there are two main pieces of work: a written dissertation and a personal project which will be exhibited at our degree show (May 2010) and maybe at New Designers next summer.

I am going to try to keep this blog up to date this semester as I did last, and maybe this will help me organize my life, and keep track of my process.

My dissertation is on the current state of interaction and product design for adults with cerebellar ataxia. My mother has this condition, and has a list of symptoms ranging from mobility issues, coordination and speech dysarthria. The condition is progressive, and as such it is a bit of a challenge to source and design products to help her retain some form of independence. Realistically this isn’t a long piece (only 7700 words) so my argument will be more exploratory.

So far I have recruited and interviewed three people with the condition, at different stages of the condition: one slight, one moderate, and one more progressed. I have also sourced a speech therapist, occupational therapist and two designers (with heavy experience in design for disability). I completed a 2 hour interview with one designer last week, and it was a very interesting conversation. Somehow all the design lectures from my three years here mean less to me than having a conversation directly with someone in the industry, and to have the opportunity to take design methodology from a conversation that I’ve had, instead of a stale quote from a book, really helps me maintain my inspiration for writing this paper. So yes, that was a good, ‘productive’ day!

Ataxia UK, the charity for the condition, have kindly invited me to their first regional meeting this afternoon in Dundee, where I hope to make some new contacts to help not only my dissertation but also my honors project which I will explain next!

My honors project (which will hopefully get approval following my presentation this week) is also exploratory. I wish to develop a concept based on near future speech recognition technologies that primarily ensures the user feels confident and stimulates desire to contribute to the conversation. The outcome will not focus on the technicalities of the software, but on the value of the outcome to the user. Essentially the experience of communicating in an environment as an adult, with flare that the user needs to feel valued in the dialogue.



I might choose to focus on loss of clarity for the individuals over the phone due to the speech dysarthria, as this is something I noticed myself when speaking to my mother. Her speech is intelligible, and we have been playing with Nuance Dragon speech recognition software, and she is understood by it, to a degree. What my focus is is on the actual output design. Most alternative, augmented communication devices (AAC) that I have come across are text to speech converters, so the output is almost a third person in the room, speaking on behalf of the user. This loses the focus on the person speaking, and essentially isolates the individual from the conversation.

I’m hoping that through research with current and future recruited users to understand their tastes and feelings towards AAC devices and to then develop a prototype that exhibits my findings and a graphical or typographic output that demonstrates the level of maturity and intelligence, the beauty of their conversation. This should be desirable to use by everyone, and as such encourage people who find themselves misunderstood to speak more freely.

Breath.

I’ll continue this soon.