Degree project at the Bachelor programme in Industrial design, Umeå Institute of Design, 10 weeks in 2008

This project was a collaboration with the Swedish association of the visually impaired, SRF in the county of Västerbotten and Norrbotten (northern Sweden).
I had the opportunity to meet with seven persons in different ages who had different levels of visually handicaps. I arranged meetings, brainstorm sessions and evaluations with three of them on a regular basis thrue the whole project.
The people I had in my focus group had a visual acuity between 0,2 - 0,03. Most of them was born with the hadicap. A few of them had encountered some accident and lost parts of their vision.

I borrowed low vision googles at the eye clinic at the hospital in Umeå (Norrlands Universitetssjukhus) and went for an shopping tour. It was surprisingly how the other senses became more powerful when your vision was restricted. I felt smells stronger and it was tricky to determine depths. I asked all participants in the focus group to do some everyday activities at the city centre while I was observing them with an film camera and created flowcharts afterwards.







Bus stop screens. Visual disability top left: 0,2 acuity and bottom left: 0,03 - 0,02 acuity.
Main function is cleaify (or elucidate) information. I found the word "elucidate" in a dictionary and thought that it could be implemented in to the product's name. I created the function list together with the user group by having individual meetings with each of them.







Product analysis from product to detail level of a common aid (magnifyer) on the market.








I found out what kind of porducts that currently existed on the market.






Brainstorm session with the focus group. I brought some objects from home in order to get them to associate and trigger their minds and create new ideas. The participants wrote down the thoughts and ideas they came up with.






12 concepts was made.








I met the participants one by one to evaluate the early concepts. The two most liked concepts were combined to the final one.








A research of new technology was made in connection with the sketching session. Top left corner: OLED- screen from Sony, a small camera module from Samsung, Motorola Motofone which has a screen that can be used even though it is hard sunlight. Polymer vision's e-reader device with a bendable screen.








Sketches of how the form were developed.

3 dimensional form explorations and studies with people holding the different mock ups.

The finalmodel in its context.