The students of Industrial Design Centre, IIT, Mumbai has developed these two very user friendly sample products mainly for special people.
Sound album-SvAna for visually challenged
Jellow-a happiness device for cerebral palsy affected child
a communication gadget
SvAna is a hand-held device by which the visually challenged can record, organize, edit and share memories. It has digital recording, bluetooth and memory card.
SvAna is Sanskrit for sonorous sound.
This product is developed by student’s team of Rashmin Raj, Ravi Krishna and Visvanath K.
Jellow facilitates nonverbal interaction on the basis of six basic emotions. The form of the jellow has soft and cuddly feel that elicits emotional responses based on touch.
Jellow is an attempt to bridge the gap in communication between those affected by cerebral palsy and those not.
The basis of the product is an Emotional Language Protocol (elp).
Students core team of Anchal Kumar, Samraat Sardesai, Peter Joseph, Antara Hazarika and Preeti Thakkar has worked diligently to develop this product.
(Edit: The Jellow is still in conceptual form and in a year’s time it will be produced.)
The basis of the product is an Emotional Language Protocol (elp) that works as its interface and is driven by four concurrently acting features – color, shape, motion and sound – corresponding to the sensory modes of the visual, the tactile and the aural.
The interaction itself is facilitated by touch of varying intensities including pressing, thumping, squeezing, turning and, of course, by touching.
The interplay of this interface and interaction allows the cerebral palsy child to express his different needs and emotions to another person.
Also, Jellow’s mobile connectivity allows its users to communicate with someone far away.
The product form draws its inspiration from the lotus flower, which has the ability to bloom in the murkiest of water and yet remain untainted. The metaphor was meant to apply to the way cerebral palsy children have to unfairly carry the stigma of being mentally impaired. Jellow works primarily on their ability to think and thereby allows them to stay above this perceived stigma and establish to the world outside that they could be as ‘normal’ as the others if not better.
The key area where this product works is emotional communication which is an unaddressed domain so far. It is possible that some of the ensuing product functions will additionally facilitate communication problems in the physical domain, as well as be physically therapeutic for the cerebral palsy child in the manner of a comfort blanket.
SvAna-sound album for visually challenged
Good idea.
Hi anrosh,
agree, people should come to know about these products. But how many big weblogs, say for example, are ready to carry post for such products.
In this case , IDC team had made 3 products for visually challenged people. They interacted with special people and asked them to choose and suggest ideas!
some products have been designed tooo many times while products for some societes have been created very little to none. it is good to see that IDC guys have been paying attention to the lesser disadvantaged societies.
I think Organizations who cater to physically challenged/mentally challenged are limited on resources and may not even know that IDC’s and NID’s do exist who can help them to make their life a wee bit easy.
They should be invited to make presentations to faculties and students at IDC and NID who are competent enough to assess the needs, requirements and create a product. They all have a final project to complete before they graduate. Most often the students do not know what to do – a strong feature among students and some faculty members would be open to new ideas.
IDC, NID’s should be doing this if they are not doing it already.
Yes Robyn,
The design centres all over the world do so much research and hard work we know nothing about.
Nice weekend to you too!
Very interesting post, thanks for sharing this. It’s so nice to know how people with physical challenges are being helped.
Have a great weekend!