Thursday, January 18, 2007

Watch Design for Visual Impairments







Below are some research and sketches that I have done so far. I have decided to use braille technique with few changes and audio system to allow user to hear the time if they want to. ( Almost as using Talking Tactile Tablets ) Numbers will be represented by using dots which will be elevated up to indicate the current time. So basically when user touch surface of the watch only texture he/she will sense is the current time. There are no time indicator arrows in the center of the watch instead there is a speaker system (small holes) to hear the time if it is desired and the button will be placed on the clasp of the wrist belt to turn the sound on and off. I have come up with this solution because for a visual impaired person touch, smell and audio are very important to sense the environment and the objects in the environment. Since there are some difficulties using smell ----such as it might be disturbing to release different types of smells for different times of the day for time indication purposes and also it is difficult to keep any kind of smell for longer period of time plus there is a need for placeholders(containers) to keep the liquid for releasing odor and watch is a small equipment to have this kind of system altough it might work if let say I was designing a clock almost like an art intallation type of clock for visual impairments,---- I have decided to use only touch and audio. I have done some experimentation to finalize the design idea --below is the process
I have turned the lights off
Closed my eyes
And tried to figure out what time it was by touching my watch
Ofcourse I was not successfull because my watch has a flat surface and there is no texture or audio to help me learn the time
I will start working on the prototype tomorrow and continue with my experimentation

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