Connecting deaf/hard of hearing students with their peers trough group work

Abstract

This report is a master thesis for the faculty of Industrial Design Engineering, at the Technical University in Delft, with the goal of graduating with a masters degree in Industrial Design Engineering, master Design For Interaction. The graduation assignment has been executed for the Dutch company Ask Roger, located in Delft. Ask Roger is an ICT communication specialist, specialized in software solutions as Skype for Business/Microsoft Lync and Cisco teleconferencing solutions. The company had the ambition to expand their business to the educational market and this assignment should aid this ambition. If Ask Roger is able to show an innovation/concept within the educational market to their potential customers, they believe will assist in convincing them of their company and differentiating their company from their competition. Since Skype for Business is a video based communication tool, a fitting target group was determined within the educational market, since that market is simply too broad and undefined. Video is a tool which can be used to communicate verbally and nonverbally. This is especially useful for target groups which have difficulty with verbal communication, leading to the choice to focus on deaf/hard of hearing students within secondary education. During researching the educational context and the hard of hearing target group it became clear cooperation between deaf/hard of hearing students and hearing students is difficult in class. Hearing students have trouble adjusting their behavior to benefit communication with the hard of hearing student, especially during group work. They initially change their behavior if the hard of hearing student requests it, but within five minutes their behavior falls back to what they are used to. Hard of hearing students experience a threshold for asking repeatedly for repetitions and the speaker to slow down, since they think they will be seen as an anchor for the group. It was discovered group work will be applied more as an educational method, an important development within secondary education. Legislature is being changed as well leading to more hard of hearing students following education on secondary schools with mainly hearing students. Thus the market shows a need for a tool which helps hard of hearing students cooperate better with hearing students. A design goal was set to create a more equal, inclusive, inviting and natural form of collaboration and communication between hard of hearing students and hearing students. It was envisioned by giving the hearing insight when behavioral changes could benefit the hard of hearing and by giving the hard of hearing a low threshold way of expressing appreciation to each other when someone has adjusted their behavior to their/another persons benefit. By giving the interaction qualities as compassion, attentiveness, sympathy, fun, camaraderie and insight, the interaction between the hard of hearing and hearing students via the product could improve. In the following ideation phase lots ideas were generated, with as a result three different concepts. These concepts were evaluated by hard of hearing students and the designer together with the supervisory team. After a concept was chosen, an interaction prototype was built to be able to test the envisioned interaction with a group of hard of hearing and hearing students. This led to the final concept. The proposed concept consists of three predefined messages: "Good Job", "Could you repeat what you said?" and "Could you speak slower please?". In the final design these are expressed via an app on a smart wearable/watch. The final design is an app which enables users to nonverbally send messages to and receive messages from other group members. Each smartwatch has a different colored band, these bands represent the person the message is sent to. The user tests with the prototype showed the hard hearing student experiencing a lower threshold to express themselves and as a result they felt more equal in being able to cooperate with hearing students. But the prototype test showed as well the interaction with the prototype was experienced as less natural, distracting and disturbing to the conversation. Therefore was chosen to develop a future vision for the final concept in the recommendations. These future versions use the same three messages as the final concept, but are designed to be less distracting and disturbing to the conversation.