Haptic Sports Messaging
FOR HEARING-IMPAIRED TEAM SPORTS \ FOR HEARING-IMPAIRED TEAM SPORTS \
Hogeschool van Amsterdam
PARTNER AGENCY
Fonk Amsterdam
TIMELINE
4 Weeks
⌚️ EXPERIENCE DESIGN
♿️ ACCESSIBILITY
🎓 STUDENT PROJECT
The brief was short, yet challenging - to design something that empowers amateur athletes with impairments, enhancing their autonomy and performance in their sport. With a mandate as broad as that, we decided to narrow down to facilitating communication for Deaf and Hard of Hearing (DHH) individuals in team sports.
PROJECT ROLES
IDEATION
PROTOTYPING
STORYTELLING
FIELD RESEARCH
As part of the project, I got to attend DHH football matches to directly observe communication challenges. I observed that the players in a fully-DHH team communicated seamlessly using a combination of sign language and other gestures. And while there were issues with player-referee communications, this happened only during a stop in play.
Coupled with an insightful interview with Luuk Ruinaard from the KNDSB, this shaped our design direction significantly. His core input was about how the challenge lies predominantly between the coach and players - especially in catching the correct player’s attention.
MORE RESEARCH
Alongside the field research, my team and I explored the domain of DHH sports communication extensively - especially on the use of haptic feedback and visual communication strategies in sports.
We also mapped out the stakeholders, looked at how communication happens in games through signal mapping, sent out surveys to hear directly from DHH athletes and coaches, and set some clear guiding principles for our design.
This mix of observing games, talking to experts, and digging into research helped shape our project from the ground up.
DESIGN THROUGH PROTOTYPING
The core of our concept was to design something that helps coaches catch a DHH player’s attention while they are on field, and in a quick glance, give context about why they’re reaching out.
Since we decided to use haptic feedback to catch the DHH player’s attention, it was important that we created a functional testable prototype and not just UI screens on Figma. So I built a wearable phygital prototype using an Adafruit Featehr ESP32 TFT Developer Board, a vibration motor, a tiny LiPo Battery and a 3D-printed case. I also built a coach’s dashboard using Arduino Cloud, where one could tap on the signal that needs to be sent, and the player would receive the corresponding haptic vibration pattern and icon visual on the TFT screen.
STORYTELLING
Even though this project was predominantly about accessibility and phygital prototyping, my advertising past pushed me to use this as an opportunity to bring in a storytelling angle as well. So, I decided to put together a fake brand called sgnl for the platform with a logo inspired by carrier pigeons carrying messages silently through the air.
I also created a short pitch deck outlining the gap, value proposition and extended use cases of our product. Out of my own curiosity as well as the super-tight timeline, this was a good opportunity to use Generative AI to create images which would match the ethos of the product and the context it would live in.