character decoration

I wonder if I can have a personalize-able form of decoration, into which I input my most favourite things. Cars, pointe shoes, flowers -- they inform the shape of a work of art that entirely represents who I am.

sonar maps for the blind

I saw a man in the bus yesterday. He was blind, and when he got on he asked the bus driver about a location, then sat down and started making a phone call by feeling the numbers on his phone. I have no idea how he actually got onto the bus in the first place. How does he know the bus is coming and How does he know it's his bus?

There's a great deal of sensory information that we are fortunate enough to have access to these days, and our capacity to assimilate every aspect of our lives is speeding far ahead of us. Effective signs tell us where to park, iPhones tell us where to go, and we don't need to sit and sift through useless information like we used to. And this makes us very efficient people. But only when I read iPhones for the Blind a few days ago did I realize how absent this potential for optimization was for the blind.

The through-and-through

Buses that tell you their number, ear phones that give you directionally-placed sounds -- sounds that give you the low down on where the road stops, where the building starts, where the bus stop is and where the food may be. Sounds that vary by pitch for proximity, by velocity-difference for direction, and one chord tells you everything you want. Isolate the signal for a certain region, or a certain type of destination, and you can find exactly what you're looking for.

And now in slow motion.

So here's the not-too-complicated-idea, possibly not-new-idea -- a simple sonar-map set up in public, frequently visited areas. Starting with buses, every one can have its own wireless transmitter that triggers the recitation of its number to a blind individual's ear piece, when it arrives at a bus stop. Bus comes, number is told to the user.

To find the placement of bus doors, have one transmitter on each side of the doors. Now say you're standing facing the road, the bus is coming from your right. You hear two dings coming from far away, getting closer, getting louder. One ding suddenly travels to your left, because sound's now being transmitted from your left side. One ding on your left, one ding on your right, the bus door is right in front of you.

[Spatial sound representation like this is actually a very common thing. Your earphones can relay sound as coming from your left, your right, or right ahead of you. It depends on the speed at which these sounds come to you, just like in real life. In fact your earphones can simulate sound coming from 10 o'clock, 11 o'clock -- the entire spectrum.]

Okay so this sounds like overkill for what could essentially be two bells attached to either side of the door that the bus driver will ring every time he approaches a bus stop. Yayyy problem solved. But what if we could put these transmitters on every building, every street corner, every fire hydrant... And what if the pitch of these sounds increases with distance? The further away something is, the higher the pitch will be.

Then all you need is one simple, beautiful chord to play and all at once you have an entire mental map of your surroundings. It's not like simply listening to sounds coming from everywhere and identifying that This Rustling Tree is Here, or That Horning Car is There, or That Loud Woman is over There. It's like suddenly having complete information about Where is Your Pathway. What is a Wall, and What is actually a Door?

Now. as far as useful information goes, this might not be it. Power to knowing where streets start and stop, but there could be 10 people in your way and 6000 pebbles. So a service like this has to have a great deal more utility. So, what if the pitch or the frequency of the Ding could tell you more information about what exactly is at that Ding? Like that's an Office Building, that's a Bus Stop, that's a House, that's a Restaurant.

All you need to do is issue the same transmitter to every eatery, put the same transmitter at every bus stop, different ones for each MRT line. Have it run on a passive system, so that only when the person presses for assistance do the transmitters and receivers go active.

Anyway it is obviously not any kind of full-proof answer, I have done no research into this and as yet know nothing about the needs and provisions for the visually impaired in Singapore. Maybe there's already a far better way and this is rather pointless?

So hor,...

Aight this is my new blog. Lately, I've gotten really into design. I have these ideas, some insightful, some very not-clever -- but my hope is that my passive, lazy lifestyle up until this point has, in someway or the other, in reality, been a powerful and significant gathering of information about the world around me. And that now it will allow Great Genius to spring forth fully formed like from the brow of Zeus. Let us see where this hypothesis takes us.