Many of you know Toph. The fearless earthbender from famous TV show, Avatar the last airbender. Although she looks like a young blind girl who needs protection, she is actually quite good at earthbending skills thanks to two giant badgermoles who taught her earthbending alongside a different form of seeing. Seeing with earthly vibrations.
There is an exhibition called “dialogue in the dark” which takes place in complete darkness and people are helped and accompanied by people with visual impairment in this experience. Because when we go into the dark, we are the amateurs. We all have a map of our area or our neighbourhood in our head which we create by mostly seeing. People with visual impairment also have the same kind of map but they create and organize this map according to their past experiences and habits. If anything changes in their familiar daily route, they quickly understand when they get in an interaction with it. Life of people who have hearing disabilities also has its own unique challenges. According to an interview with a person with hearing disability, she was replying to a question about the biggest challenge of her daily life by saying “I mostly live my life like other people. I do not have that much difficulty of communicating with others, in the worst case I use pencil and paper however, when I go home late at night, I always check my back if someone is coming or following me.”
Hearing contributes to that map of surroundings. If we could transfer an input of a sense to another sense, that would be a revelation. Seeing and hearing are the most occupied senses of daily life, and in case of losing these senses, the visual and audio sensual data may be transferred to tactual senses with the help technology.
TOPH
Designing on a deeper level is especially essential in this context. As human beings, we are always in search of different sets of experiences to expand our existences in this world through living and learning by using our senses. Toph is a haptic bracelet and earphone set which is iterated as a concept for people who have a senselost (People with visual impairment, people with hearing disabilities, people with visual and hearing impairment) in order to provide vibrational and/or audio feedback about their current surroundings. It basically translates visual input to physical or audio outputs so that people may sense other beings and their surroundings without seeing or hearing when they need to to so.
outputs regarding interface
Audio, haptic and visual feedback are set as the main outputs which gives a huge opportunity to create an effective language of interface. There are many parameters that can be played to create the meaningful product-user interaction such as frequency and intensity of vibrations, beeping sounds, vocal translation of visual surroundings or light feedback. Light will be mimicking the vibration motors.
Toph is conceptualized to be mainly sense opening alongside to be empowering for people with sense lost. The more we use and combine existing technological methods and modules to heal ourselves and our community alongside having fun and feeding our curiosity, the more inclusive and diverse the life and the human experience is going to be. I believe that we will see an era of “technological healers” who will use their knowledge to care for the planet with all beings on it.
