industrial sound design

A little bit late, but I still want to show the result of the 2-week industrial-sound-design class we finished two weeks ago. My classmate Siri (Swedish) and me collaborated with Dawid (Swedish) and Robert (Dutch) from the product design master programme. 

Our brief was to create some product solution where a combination of sound and light serves as the innovative feature. We decided to work on with bicycles / traffic which was one of the topics to chose from.

After some first brainstorm sessions we focused on the aspects of awareness and navigation as they seemed to be the most relevant to be indicated. We thought about what would be the things which are important to indicate and how that indication could happen, ending up with a solution that used the handlebar-grips as light and headphones (optionally integrated speakers). One of the main concepts was to use directed sound on the left or right ear to arouse attention having a light signal on the respective side. The main task was to design suitable sound and light signals to express the events we chose to be the most relevant.

The grips have integrated LED's and connect to your smartphone via Bluetooth. The actual 'brainwork' is done by an application on the smartphone, so the options to use the product are not limited to what we showed up and can be open-source (e.g. numerous location based service are imaginable).

As we didn't want the product to be overloaded with features, we limited it on

1. An indication that the system is active
2. A warning signal (red) if cars approach from the backside (left or right) indicated by a light and sound signal that changes in pitch and frequency depending on how fast and how close a car is
3. A warning signal that indicates that a dangerous spot is ahead
4. An indication to turn left or right
5. An indication that a destination is reached

To make the idea a little bit more clear we created a simple mock-up using an Arduino-board and some prototyping magic (Processing code with minim-audio library) to do some 'Wizard-Of-Oz' it with some potential users. (see video down below)

It was fun to see the reactions :)  We pre-recorded some footage while riding the bike to simulate what was happening in traffic and showed on the bicycle prototype itself how the product would work. People using the 'bike' started to act out if the could control the video and reacted when there were indications...

For the presentation we did a short animation to explain the concept a bit better...

It was an intense but super funny project and we learned a lot. The collaboration with the product design guys was great (as Siri and me both have an industrial design background we sort of understood their language) and led to a very nice result everybody was happy with, still leaving a lot of open questions if it would come to a further development (e.g. what happens in a super-busy traffic like in a US downtown district?) But that was a bit too much to consider in two weeks...