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Humanplus.
🎵 When clothing catches your ear.
Soundspace is a Uniqlo in-store experience facilitated by a phone app. Soundspace maps clothing features into a spatially accurate soundscape of the store that enables a spontaneous shopping experience for visually impaired people.
PROJECT
Group project with S. Wilson,
M. Drake and S. Chen
1 week
OUTLINE
Design sprint
User-centred design
DELIVERABLES
2-minute presentation
A3 poster
SOFTWARE
Adobe Illustrator, Adobe XD, Adobe Photoshop
The problem.
Brick-and-mortar retail often lacks consideration for visually impaired customers. Solutions for visually impaired shoppers are mainly goal-based as opposed to experience-based. This results in visually impaired people pre-planning what they wish to buy, losing all sense of spontaneity in their shopping experience.
The product.
We were tasked to design a product for Uniqlo. Researching Uniqlo's brand values of inclusivity and previous in-store experience installations, we came up with the idea of an in-store shopping experience for visually impaired people. Utilising research detailing the importance of sound to visually impaired people, we created system facilitated by an app which maps clothing items to specific sounds, creating an immersive soundscape within a store that would allow visually impaired customers to shop spontaneously with their ears. The Soundspace app would be open to all customers, serving as an experience and a tool.
"I've never heard of anything like Soundspace and I think it's super intriguing. By using sounds I imagine the visually impaired could experience shopping like sighted people do. Kind of being able to take it all in - what is in the store and where it is."
T. H., 27, London, visually impaired
The soundscape.
Visualisation of clothing sounds on a model of a Uniqlo store.
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