INVISIBLE DREAM
Do you often see blind people in your life? How do you think dreams are formed? Are the dreams of blind people very different from those of normal people?
I started from the dream of the blind, stood in the perspective of the blind to interpret their dream, and finally found a lot of interesting things.
Inspire
Congenital blind people, especially well educated and trained congenital blind people, can produce "brain mental imaging" in waking life a other than vision.
Reference:
What research methods did we use and why?
We divided the research work into three phases. The first phase was secondary research, where I searched for dreams from relevant papers. The second phase was user research, where I conducted user interviews, brainstorming and sketch iterations to map out our findings and inform the design concept. The third phase was build space, where different population tests informed the design iterations and ensured that our design functioned exactly as we expected.
Preliminary search
When sleeping, some brain cells are not fully rested, and weak stimulation will cause them to move, thus triggering dreams.
Dreams are nerve impulses released by the brain.
When a person enters a state of sleep, some desires will sneak out of consciousness and expressed in various images.
Survey and user interviews
I conducted offline interviews with blind people to gain insight into the dreams of blind users, and our scripts with questions and rationales helped us stay on track and eventually generalize and summarize them.
Online communication with psychological neurologists
Offline Interviews
What is your daily life?
An introductory question to the interview process, asking this question gives us the opportunity to learn more about a day in the life of a blind person.
What is your definition of a dream?
To understand the dreams of the blind, it helps to understand the user's feelings, and the commonalities of their dreams.
Can you describe your dream for me?
The goal is to visualize their dreams and will help to bring them to life.
I grew up dreaming of visualized images twice, the rest were just sounds or other sensations, and I have frequent nightmares (most of which originate from everyday).
It feels like it comes from life.
I often rely on other senses and assistive technology, such as guide dogs or screen readers, to navigate the world.
Brainstorm
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Weak lines：Only the edges of the object
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Mostly car sounds
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Frequent contact items
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Things the blind touch
Device sketch
I updated and iterated on three options and finally chose to let the user have a spatial experience. In terms of both feeling and presentation, the spatial installation option is the best I have come up with recently.
3D model
Outcome
Reflection
THINGS I LEARNED AND SOME THOUGHTS.
This project was quite challenging as the blind community is a secured space and getting them to talk about something as private as their dating life was not easy. It taught us the value of empathy, the importance of user research and the skill of connecting with users to understand their frustrations.
I personally think it’s very important to not design for, but design with people with disabilities. Representation is important and collaboration with disability experts results in an efficient, empathetic and a truly ‘universal’ design.
CareerUp
PennyGo
Meta-universe fashion
