My final project, Simulating Deafness toolkit, is my visual solution to my thesis project. My thesis can be summarized as follows: hard of hearing individuals may struggle to understand day-to-day communications within a workplace. Design holds the potential to simulate deafness in order to create an empathetic experience for hearing colleagues, and thereby create an inclusive social environment for the hearing impaired. I propose to use participatory design methods, along with visual tools, to create an interactive workshop that helps hearing colleagues experience the interferences a hard of hearing individual faces in communication. 

Essentially, this application contains 4 parts: lipreading exercise, background noise exercise, applying it, and the results section. 

"Read My lips"-- is a guided exercise in which users watch videos without sound and try to the best of their ability to figure out what the person is saying. Afterwards, participants are prompted to ask a series of questions. If they get a correct/incorrect answer, the user sees a "helpful tip" and the "big idea." Eventually, I would like to animate the characters that show up before a wrong or correct answer. 

"Background Noise"--is an exercise where users wear headphones to listen to a loud environment while trying to converse with a partner. This was challenging to set up because I was trying to think of an interactive way to walk users through the exercise step by step. I created an instructions page where three circles animate into the page. The topics page is animated similarly and the user is able to click on the circles to see a conversation topic. The two participants must talk about this topic for 1-3 minutes while listening to background noise. Afterwards, the participants are prompted to answer two questions. First, a sliding scale of the various emotions they felt during the exercise. Second, creating a short narrative answer of anything interesting that occurred during the exercise.

"Applying It"--is an interactive exercise off the iPad. Participants form a small group to mock a workplace meeting. One participant is singled out to become the "hard of hearing" individual. First, while participants are trying to converse with each other, they must pass a "speakers ball" to whoever is talking at that moment. Afterwards, everyone reflects as a group. Then, participants are asked to create their own idea of a visual aid to be used in a meeting setting. The idea is to get people involved to understand what multitasking is like in a meeting setting for someone who is hearing impaired. 

"Results"--See Project 3