“Drama seems to be a valuable way of thinking about and looking upon design. Furthermore drama offers concrete ways of staging meetings between designers and users.“
Eva Brandt & Camilla Grunnet 2000.
We were asked to develop a dialogue tool for the company to uncover the needs and wants of possible future users. Working with this design brief provided by GN Resound, we have been inspired by critical and speculative design in the process. We have been curious to explore how we could use these approaches to create something speculative and futuristic, while still fitting into the everyday life of a big private company. To set ourselves in the right mindset and to push our own boundaries, we created the fictive futuristic company called “Decibel Future Lab”. Acting in the role of this fictive story has permitted us to push our own limits, and allowed us to be more brave and daring in our approach to the public. It has also brought us seriousness and credibility despite the weird and sometimes squatty appearance of our questions.
In the following you will see pictures from the design process - both from fieldwork doing interviews and going to a shopping mall and a culture house performing the act of Decibel Future Lab wanting to get responses to their newest design ideas.
Above: Images with questions used to structure a design interview with some of the company's users.
Above: Pictures from designers acting as Decibel Future Lab in public places to get a broader sense of how the Danes think about hearing loss, hearing aids, and possible future technologies.
Think of a lovely evening dinner with friends. The conversation is flowing and you thoroughly discuss one interesting subject after the other. The atmosphere is cozy, relaxed and safe in a way that makes you feel free to speak up with whatever comes to your mind.
Then combine this dinner with strange tools to use, bizarre props to wear and scatty challenges to experience which will slightly push you out of your comfort zone. Now you have the “Three Course Speculations”.
The dialogue tool is build over a three course dinner with; a starter, a main course, a dessert and in the end coffee, which creates time for sharing reflections. You first use the toolkit by inviting the participants you wish to see taken part in speculations about the future of hearing. This could be either employees within the company or people from outside (people with hearing loss or/and their relatives, possible future users, experts within technology, futurologists, ear specialists etc.).
Three Course Speculations is a dialogue tool created to assist GN Resound in imagining a speculative possible futures within hearing and technology. The tool suggests to gather people the familiar setting of a dinner while exploring and experimenting the challenges and the artifacts we have created. The toolkit aims to get people to generate new ideas, thinking differently and set them out of their comfort zone, since we believe that this creates a third space, where it allows the creativity to unfold. We hope for GN Resound to gain new knowledge and novel understanding of the issues related to hearing loss, as well as a glance of what the future could hold for the technology in the domain of hearing.
This project was carried out as a teamwork between five co-students and in collaboration with the Danish hearing aid company GN Resound.