Group school project from the fourth year
2020 April
Vocalize is an office desk accessory for freelancers with a built-in front-facing speaker that can connect to your digital devices via Bluetooth, and changes and produces various tones when making calls, allowing the altering of mood, humour, politeness, confidence, and enthusiasm.
Other aspects of work conversation such as apologizing and adding word fluff are also integrated as features to minimize the cognitive effort required when making calls.
Digital communication has allowed those with telephobia to more easily voice their thoughts to others, but in most cases, it has not helped with their real-life social skills. Email has become one of the preferred methods of communication for freelancers as it’s fast and efficient. However, it lacks personal connection and can have a misleading tone of voice. On the other hand, verbal communication through the phone provides a more personal and immediate response.
For many people with telephobia , communication through the phone poses a problem as they may struggle to get their message across due to nervousness, unintended apathy, or discouragement, even when it’s not necessarily what they’re trying to communicate. People in this situation are anxious about how they are perceived through the phone. They worry about what they say and what their tone as they tend to overthink and obsess about what was said during the call. This design is meant to create a diversion to alter the tone so that the user can focus on the content of the call, rather than how their tone is being perceived.
Sig challenges the concept of Voice AI, specifically about the focus on the ‘command and control’ aspect of the technology interaction. It attempts to explore different dimensions, interactions, and personalities of Voice AI rather than having a device that spits out an answer when prompted. It also explores the concept of ‘training’ and ‘learning’ where the learning process is more transparent and how that relation would affect between the owner and the device. While provoking the thought of how much control do we actually want to have over interactions with these devices.
The design must allow for the delivery of personalization to promote the flexibility of personality selection, which is important for telephobic individuals who want to choose how their tone of voice is perceived.
A playful accessory that helps relieve and calm individuals with anxiety and autism. The clicking, spinning, and twirling children and adults can do with fidget spinners and cubes help to keep hands busy and provide a distraction or sensory stimulation for those with specific mental health issues.
By utilizing the familiar toy-like elements of the fidget cube, we plan on infusing that ludic and fun aspect into Vocalize , where it helps soothe telephobic individuals while they’re on a phone call.
What we did is combining the elements of our inspirations into a phone-case which is really common accessories for us, but the another problems seems to reveal very quickly to our head.
Phone case is so common in very kind of space not only in the office, and because freelancers work at home at their own desks most of the time, we want to make a product that would easily fit in with this setting and doesn’t stand out too much.
Simple, muted colors help evoke a laid-back tone. To make sure what Vocalize is producing matches what the freelancer wants to communicate, they can playback the speech it outputs after they’re done talking into it. By keeping the functionality and logistics of Vocalize to a minimum, we’re able to focus more on not what it is capable of but how one might use it, and how their usage of it could affect their work interaction.
The video above contains all process of our project based on our three-week-long workbook (click to download). From the concept to the final product this video and workbook explained all the decisions and problems that we improved by the help of our instructors Will Odom and Nico Brand, it also have all personas we created for this project. If you think this is too long you can go straight to our final present video which would explain our critiques.
We want to explore how dependency on a product like this could affect real, in-person communication. By having Vocalize slowly take over and be able to handle all aspects of a conversation, we aim to provoke speculation on how beneficial or detrimental it could really be on those with social anxiety.
If there is absolutely no required effort into displaying social skills, how will we learn to develop these skills in real-life? What are the implications of this on in-person behavior?
By placing our product in the context of a tech company that releases newer (view the website), updated versions models every year, we’re able to show the slow progression of customer demands, the feedback they have, and how new features to this product could be used in different contexts. By showing this evolution of our product, we hope to elicit questions about this shift in agency in digital communication. Although this company provides more features that are beneficial to socially anxious individuals in the immediate sense, continuing to ignore confrontation and genuine conversation can further amplify the problem.