Methods Lab 2009-2010
10-11 November 2009, Royal College of Art
Tina, the team's creative partner, is a university career advisor who is deaf. The team experienced what it means to be deaf by testing different hearing aids and earplugs. Inspired by the stenographic equipment that Tina's reporter used to translate speech to text and her hearing dog, a series of advertisement ideas were proposed to emphasise facts about the deaf community to increase public awareness.
There are nine million deaf people in the UK and only 25 registered 'speech to text' reporters (stenographers) to support this form of communication. As a result, it is a very expensive service and not many deaf people can afford to employ these reporters regularly. This places a huge communication challenge for the hearing impaired community.
The team presented their ideas in silence. Words were whispered by the team to the reporter who spontaneously translated them into text to illustrate the reality of this type of communication.
Another idea for the campaign was to hijack headphones of people when they passed a billboard. The aim was to broadcast how people with hearing impairments hear music in a distorted way. Photos of merging iPod and hearing aids were also presented as powerful images to make people aware of sound pollution as a potential cause of hearing impairment.
