Final Project: Hearing Aid Reformation

“Designing for people with special needs is often called inclusive or universal design. Those names are fitting, for it is often the case that everyone benefits...special features made for people with special needs often turn out to be useful for a wide variety of people.”

-The Design of Everyday Things by Donald A. Norman

In this project, Huaze and I intended to make a decorative hearing aid case for hearing impaired young people. From our research, we found that currently in the Chinese market, most hearing aids are designed for old people with similar, old-fashioned appearance. The younger population is ignored by the market. Inspired by some beautifully designed ear clips and some interview answers from young users on social media, we realized that it would be a good idea to make some aesthetic hearing aid case which could be applied and changed easily. We hope that our work could bring courage to these young people and we wish them to live a confident and beautiful life. Moreover, we hope our design could break the stereotype of hearing aids and change the majority's view about people with hearing problems. We used mainly 3D modeling and 3D printing technique to make the above hearing aid cases. If you are interested in our project, please continue to read the followings steps:

1. Choose Our Project

2. Research

3. Interview

4. Ideation

5. Preparation

6. Prototype 1: Hummingbird

7. Prototype 2: Whale

8. Prototype 3: Bat

9. Prototype 4: Jellyfish

10. Coloring

11. Final Work

12. Reflections

13: My Partner Huaze's Post

A Hearing Aid

Rhino 7

Meshmixer

3D Printer

Transparent / Flexible / Plastic / Solid PLA Materials

Scissors

Hot melt adhesive

Nail Polish for Coloring

Other Decorations (eg. 3mm gems, pearls, crystal balls.etc)

Since this project did not have much topic limitation, we first started with browsing some different kinds of artworks on internet. The app we used most frequently was a Chinese app called Xiaohongshu (小红书). We also viewed Pinterest, Instagram, Instructables, and some other apps and websites. Since a large part of this course is teaching about 3D printing, most artworks we searched also used the technique. Some of the interesting ones are showed above, including a fantastic 3D printed fish, some weird marine animals, a poster about Alzheimer, a cloth design about say no to body shame.etc.

The one that inspired us to start this project is a beautifully designed ear clip. We believed that we could also make something like that. Moreover, we realized that the ear clip almost exactly leave the place for a hearing aid and that reminded us about a reading we read last semester which mentioned that:" Designing for people with special needs is often called inclusive or universal design. Those names are fitting, for it is often the case that everyone benefits...special features made for people with special needs often turn out to be useful for a wide variety of people." We realized that it could be a good idea to make a hearing aid that looked like an artistic ear clip.

Since this was the first phase of our project, we didn't limited ourselves to only one idea. We also built up several other ideas. Another interesting one was that we could make a design that present some traditional Chinese culture and technique. We come to the idea to create a lantern where there would be shadow puppet character embedded in it. When the light rotated by itself, the characters would start moving and form a story.

After talking to the professor and evaluating the possibility of making each idea as well as the meaningfulness of each of them, we decided to choose the hearing aid reformation project.

The first step of research was to browse some popular hearing aid in the market. To do this, we went on Taobao (淘宝), an app similar to Amazon in China, searched for hearing aids, and chose monthly sales as the ranking method. From the searching result, we realized that most hearing aids are targeting elderlies as all of their promotion statements only mention elderlies; the pictures on advertisement are also old people's faces. Moreover, the most popular ones which cost less have similar shapes and design. The more expensive ones are smaller, some really expensive ones are even invisible, but less popular.

After searching for hearing aids, we started to look at other platforms for ear clip designs as well as sharing ideas from people with hearing problems. From Xiaohongshu(小红书) and Taobao(淘宝) we found lots of beautifully designed ear clips and you could find them in the above pictures. From also Xiaohongshu(小红书), we found some young people with hearing problems sharing ideas about hearing aids and their lives. We realized that the elderlies’s needs are almost meet by the current market. The younger generations are the ones whose needs are ignored. We should target the younger population.

After deciding our target users, we send message to some young hearing-impaired people who have shared their ideas on Xiaohongshu before. We asked them about how they want the appearance of hearing aid to be reformed so as to make it not only link to old people and meet their needs.

We have interviewed about 20 people. Among them, 75% ignored or refused to answer our message; 15% said that they want a more convenient and conspicuous hearing aid design; 10% wanted some invisible hearing aid that would not recognized by o

Some interesting ideas we received including one person want to have some hearing aid cases that similar to phone cases with different colors and styles so she could changed it according to her daily moods and ootd. Another person talks about how she want her hearing aid to be conspicuous so people will recognize her hearing problem and speak more loudly and clearly when communicating with her. Many of them also wish the hearing aid to fit more tightly to their ear so it will not accidently fall down because of wearing masks or glasses.

In this stage, we considered about the users need and started to design the hearing aid case.

Firstly, after viewing the interview answers, we decided to make the hearing aid conspicuous, removable, compactness, and stylish. To further explain, although some users wish to have an invisible hearing aid, there are already this type of hearing aid appears in the market. Therefore, we chose to design a conspicuous hearing aid case to meet the other 15% users' need. Also, we found the user's idea about making something like a phone case really interesting and decided to create various styles of hearing aid case. Moreover, making our product fit to ear and won't fall easily is also very important. We want to mimic how ear clips meet this requirement by having some part of the hearing aid case clip to people's ear.

After discussion, we decided to design 5 hearing aid cases which are in the shape of hummingbird, whale, bat, giraffe, and elephant. The logic behind our concept was that all of these animals communicate using ultrasound which human could not hear. We believed that impaired people are just like these 5 animals, they could communicate with others and with the world in a unique way that normal people could not. We hope that such concept could bring more self-esteem to hearing impaired group because these animals remind them of capabilities and worthiness. After concerning our time limit and our abilities, we decided to reduce our design to only 4 hearing aid cases and we decided to eliminate one animal between giraffe and elephant.

In this stage, we bought the most common type of hearing aid from Taobao. At first, we wanted to 3D scan our prototype so as to create a model and import it into our computer as a reference. We failed the first time because the hearing aid has some little parts that are transparent and reflective. Therefore, we choose to spray colors on it to make it easier to scan. However, the next time when we wanted to try the scanning machine, it was sent to maintenance. Therefore, we decided to measure it and create its model in rhino 7 by ourselves using the place function in view. We succeeded.

After the preparation, we start to make our first prototype. I started to build the humming bird in my computer and Huaze started to build the whale in her computer. We separated our works so that we could be more efficient.

While I was building the first prototype, my only hope is to build the bird's body shape that people could recognize and make sure that it will fit both to the hearing aid and human's ear shape. After one afternoon's working, I succeeded. I used the sub D tool in Rhino 7 to create the bird's body and it worked out well. I started from creating sphere and move the points, lines and faces in several ways to finally create the bird's body. An important point is that always do the same thing to each side to make sure the shape come out to be symmetric. After making the body, I make its tail using the standard mode in Rhino 7 and Boolean difference to create a space for hearing aid to plug in. The 3D printing for this model was under the professor's help and it comes out quite successful.

After that, I tried to make the second prototype. From the first prototype, one of the comment I received was that the bird was too which make people feel difficult to recognize that it was a humming bird, it looked much more like a chubby sparrow. Therefore, I decided to alter the shape to become thiner as well as with a loner beak. Moreover, I wanted to add the wings to it too. It was quite easy to alter the shape of its body. However, creating its wing was rather challenging. I looked up many hummingbird pictures online because I really want to make it look good. After observing its wings, I started working by first creating an outer shape of the wing, and then creating several lang rectangles, alter their angle to mimic every layer of the wing. Finally use Boolean Difference to cut all the parts that is unwanted. The step went as what I expect but needed patience and took time. Since it was on holiday, and the professor was not in the lab, we tried to 3D print the model by ourselves. We failed the first time but later we altered the position of the bird from beak face down to wings face down. As the position became more stable, we successfully print the bird. However, after getting our prototype we realized another problem that is the angel of the wings and of the bird's body is kind of wrong and it didn't really fit to human ear when hearing aid was plugged in.

The next day, I started to alter the its body and wings' angle. This process went very quick but we met problem in the printing phase again. This time, even when we change the bird position for printing, everything didn't work. The bird's bottom would always didn't stick to and fly away from the 3D machine bottom. Therefore, we had to stop and wait for school days to ask professor. After watching how professor alter the settings for us, we realized that we should make a raft bottom for our bird which we set wrong previously. This time, we used felxible plastic to print the prototype. The outcome could fit to human's ear quite well but the flexible material made stands that are really hard to remove and the surface was not smooth enough as I espect.

Finally, I add holes to put eyes for the humming bird and 3D print my final work using transparent, not flexible material. We also learned how to change material for the Ultimaker 3D printer this time. The outcome was quite well, we really love it!

Huaze has created the whale and if your want to read more detailed documentation, you could find the link to her post in the last step.

For the first prototype, the challenge she met including having difficulties to make the whale share thinner and the hearing aid could not be plugged in.

For the second prototype, she realized that she could break the whale's body into pieces, alter the angle and position of each part and then use the sub D bridge function to make them connect again. Moreover, she decide to make the whale just like a phone case with a hole on half of it and surround it to half of the hearing. Therefore, the body of the whale would be thinner. The problem she has is that the whale didn't fit the heairng aid well.

For the third prototype, she redrew the hearing aid model and tried again. It still didn't worked.

Finally, she used a flexible plastic material. She also used meshmixer to draw lines on the whale's belly. This time everything finally worked. She used a pair of scissors to cut the stands and find it easier to use compare to the traditional stand removing tools when it comes to be the flexible material.

After finishing the hummingbird and the whale, we separate our work again, I started to make the bat one and Huaze and in charged of the last design.

When I was creating my sketch, I drew several bat siting on a mass of tree branches. I was intended to make the tree branches as something wrap around the hearing aid. I tried to use the tube function in sub D and I failed. I realized that the thing I made was like a hearing aid that growing some disgusting hairs on it. Something looked like a large germ.

I decided to change my method of making it. Reviewing what we learned in class, I realized that maybe I could try the grasshopper function in Rhino 7. I found a video tutorial that created a twisted pipe which could fit the hearing aid very well. I tried to follow the tutorial and first but I failed at the middle steps. This was because that the tutorial used an older version of the software and now everything has changed somehow. Finally, I decided to download the project file given by the video and alter the settings of the pipe. When I baked it, I realized that there was a problem as I could not Boolean Union the parts. I asked professor for help and he taught me how to use the create cage and cage edit function. Also, he suggested me to apply the make solid function in the Meshmixer software to my model after I finished making it in Rhino 7. After successfully create the pipe, I tried to make some cute little bats on it. However, when I sent the whole piece to print, problem occurs. I realized that every line was so think that although everything looked nice and delicate on computer, when it came to reality, the piece was even weaker than the stands.

For the second prototype, I changed some settings, made the lines to be thicker, and baked the model from grasshopper again. I didn't do any large change to the pipe as I want to first makes sure that the line is thick enough. Though, I still remembered to leave a hole for pugging in hearing aid. The second prototype came out quite well. Although I still broke it a little bit while removing the stand, it could fit both to the hearing aid and human ear.

Then, I altered the shape of the pipe a little bit, adding part of it coming out right in front of the earlobe in Rhino 7. I also tried to make everything more smooth using the make solid and smooth function in Meshmixer. Finally, I printed my final work.

For our final prototype, we decided to produce jellyfish rather than giraffe or elephant since we thought that jellyfish shape could be achieved aesthetically better in Rhino 7. Moreover, jellyfish also communicate using ways that human could not hear.

Huaze has created the jellyfish and if your want to read more detailed documentation, you could find the link to her post in the last step.

I remembered that the largest challenge she met in this work was to remove the stands as the jellyfish's hands are really thin.

After using scissors and pilers to remove the prototypes' supports, we started to color our prototypes. To paint the colors, we used nail polish. Nail polishing required our patience -- to show a smooth color, it was necessary to paint the colors layer by layer. We should paint one layer, wait for the polish to dry, and add another layer. We also applied shiny nail polish to the models to display shiny effect.

For hummingbird and whale prototypes, we used diamonds for their eyes. For the bat prototypes, we utilized hot melt adhesive as bats' bodies and applied shiny nail polish to them. For the jellyfish prototype, we used white string to connect pearl decorations. Since the white string's diameter was tiny, making a knot that was big enough to prevent pearls from passing through was very hard. Therefore, we applied hot melt adhesive to the string. Transparent drops from hot melt adhesive can firm the location of pearls.

Here are the detailed pictures of our final works

Our reflection could be broken down into following two parts:

Take Aways:

• Rhino 7 Experience: With the repeating process of using "SubD" and "Standard" tools in Rhino 7, we gradually gained more experiences about how to build models in Rhino 7 more effectively. For example, we learned how to carve out detailed textures on bird's textures with "Boolean Difference"; we also learned how to use "Bridge" tools to create the whale model's bent body.
• 3D Machine Operation: Since we utilized different materials for our prototypes, we not only learned about the typical features of certain plastic materials but also learned how to switch materials for the 3D printer.
• Threading Experience: Before this project, I had never tried to thread pearls with strings by myself. However, with the repeating process of threading, I found out that I became gradually more fluent with threading the pearls. I consider this as signifiant improvement!

Improvements For Future:

• Better Time Management: As we were making scheduling for this project, we did not anticipate that our time spent on iteration of prototypes would be as much as we actually went through. Therefore, in future, I think I would spare more time on making prototypes.

Final Note: Thank you professor Andy for your constant support during this project! We have learned much from your course :)

Since the whole workload was divided by two group members, more detailed descriptions about the production progress of jellyfish and whale is recorded in this link: https://www.instructables.com/Hearing-Aid-Reformation/