Final Reflection

I started this project without having much knowledge about the topic. Especially the deaf culture. In fact, I was ignorant of how their day to day living in the home might be affected by their lack of awareness of sounds. For the most part, my decision to join the team was based on my interest in ubiquitous computing and internet of things. I was more interested in the solution (technical aspect of it) than the problem. So, at the initial phase, I found it very challenging to be interested or relate with the topic because I was missing that empathy and connection with the target audience. Therefore, it became very important for me to know the user, their world and build empathy. That was when the learnings all began.

Lessons learnt

Getting to Know the User and Building Empathy

In order to immerse myself into knowing about what a day in the life of the hearing impaired is like, I became involved in the primary research design and field visits. Going to their homes; hearing their challenges and their stories; learning about how it affects their independence as well as their household members was an eye opener. We had the opportunity to not only hear stories from the user’s perspective, but also from their spouses’ and children’s perspective. The anxiety of leaving them alone; how the kids had to grow up faster than their age to help their

hearing impaired parent and how they were also willing to wear a device to help them get the attention of their hearing impaired family member. Before the visits I made a wrong assumption about how there isn’t a need for safety and security alarms because it is something that can maybe happen once in a lifetime and the blinking lights that come with fire alarms should do. However, the fear of missing that once in a lifetime event was striking.

Empathic and value sensitive design

Without realizing, I grew passionate about our topic. I wanted to be fully involved at every stage of the project and at this point, my primary concern was the user experience. Based on our findings from our field visits on how discreet they try to be discreet about their hearing impairment and do not want to feel stigmatized by another assistive device, we learnt we had to take a value sensitive design approach to building our concept. While we had many ideas like making spaces in the home as a means to communicate alerts, we had to put them aside and design from the user’s perspective by involving them from concept generation to user evaluation.

What I learnt here was that it is not about going wild and creating something new but about enhancing experiences with usable and useful technology. You do not have to create a new device or a complex interface to be innovative. Leveraging existing mainstream technology that work for people to find a new way to create a much better user experience and improve the quality of life, as straight forward and as simple as it may be, is also innovation.

Team management

This was one of the valuable lessons for me that will go a long way in helping me in my future career. While working in a team with diversity in culture, personality, educational backgrounds and working styles can be very problematic, it is what drives a project. Compassion, respecting other’s opinions and effective communication are key. We had our ups and downs but we grew as a team throughout the quarter from our passion for our topic and drive to make an impact; taking critiques and learning from our failures; celebrating our success and most of all learning from each other. I learnt to let go of my opinions and see things from others perspective. This helped me to go out of my comfort zone and explore other possibilities.

I feel very fulfilled that I was able to experience a project with such value and at the same time, apply all my learnings throughout the academic year to address a real-world problem. As challenging and rigorous as the capstone project was, it was by far the greatest learning experience i’ve had and I couldn’t have had it any other way.