Bee'P
Product Design
Embodied Interaction
How to keep safe when you walk but cannot hear in busy urban city?
My Role
Main Designer
Timeline
Ongoing Project
Industry
Accessibility & Assistive Technology, Social Impact
Problem
Problem
How do you make danger legible when you can't hear it coming?
Urban traffic environments run almost entirely on auditory signals. For pedestrians with hearing disabilities, detecting an approaching vehicle isn't a hearing problem but it's an information problem, especially at intersections where visual attention is already overloaded.
User research
"I want a device that helps me feel safer and lets me know when something is coming."
To understand what this looks like day to day, I conducted contextual interviews with 8 hard-of-hearing pedestrians and cyclists, mapping how they currently navigate sound-reliant traffic environments.
insights
The problem was never sound. It's translation.
People with hearing disabilities rely almost entirely on visual scanning to detect danger. This doubles the cognitive load at every crossing and slows reaction time exactly when it matters most.
Knowing a sound exists isn't the same as knowing where it's coming from. Participants consistently preferred directional cues over generic warnings
Continuous alarms increase cognitive load instead of reducing it. Rhythmic, short pulses were easier to interpret than sustained vibration or sound.
Design Opportunity: The challenge was never simply detecting sound, and it's translating sound into direction, distance, and urgency a person can understand instantly, through a sense other than hearing.
design solutions
How do you turn "where" and "how urgent" into something a body can feel instantly?
The concept focuses on converting spatial sound information into two complementary feedback channels:
Visual feedback for directional awareness
Haptic feedback for urgency and proximity
Together these signals provide a quick and accessible understanding of surrounding traffic conditions.
Exploration 01
Insight #3 showed that continuous alarms raise cognitive load instead of lowering it, so the open question was what kind of signal reads as urgent without becoming noise.
Exploration 02
Insight #2 showed that knowing a sound exists isn't the same as knowing where it's coming from. The visual layer maps spatial position. The light position on the wrist band corresponds to the direction the vehicle is approaching from. So direction is read at a glance, not decoded.
Exploration 03
A signal only works if someone will actually wear it through a commute. Testing on-body placement and materials, I prioritized comfort / low profile / quick glanceability matching what Ming's persona flagged directly: "lightweight and comfortable design, suitable for children to wear daily"
reflections
Visual and haptic had to compensate for each other's blind spots.
Visual feedback is fast to read but only works if you're already looking at your wrist. Haptic feedback works even when attention is elsewhere, but can't carry precise direction on its own. Neither channel alone covered the gap, and two only became reliable together.
Continuous vibration only stayed meaningful because it was rare.
Reserving the strongest signal for the Critical state was a deliberate trade-off: if every state pulsed the same way, urgency would stop registering. The escalation across Approaching → Nearing → Critical is what let intensity itself carry information, not just presence.
next step
Reading a signal takes time, and time is what a pedestrian can't spare.
The visual layer currently needs a glance and a beat of interpretation to register direction. In a real traffic scenario, that gap between seeing the signal and understanding it eats directly into response time. The next step is testing and shortening that decoding time, and getting recognition closer to instant, not after a moment of thought.
