"Xiao Yu"-Design For The Server Application To Hearing Impaired People

Prompted by the need to pursue creativity and social responsibility, a designershould turn his/her eyes to designs catering for public welfare, to help the disadvantagedgroups being one very important aspect. Projects for the disadvantaged may encountermany problems such as scarce business participation or deficient guidance due to theirlimited profits and comparatively inaccessible service systems. Faced with theseproblems, this paper aims to explore a new opportunity based on two new servicemodels, Crowd-sourcing and Social Learning, to design for the disadvantaged.A unique group among the disadvantaged, people with auditory handicaps maycarry off in a large scale the deficiency by developing alternative communication skills,for instance, lip reading. However, lip reading requires consistent practice, otherwisecommunication difficulties may frequently occur. In China, there are few productshelping the lip readers especially the advanced readers to practice. Based on researchesand experiments integrated with the two new service models, this paper presents XiaoYu, a new product aiming to help people with auditory handicaps.Providing young people aged from15to25suffering auditory handicaps withadvanced and diversified practices after they have some fundamental knowledge for lipreading, Xiao Yu consists of two parts: the volunteer module and the practitionermodule. By crowd sourcing, the former calls on mass power to upload contextual videosof lip reading for the audience to simulate, practice and rehearse, giving feedbacks inthe end to the volunteers. On the contrary, the latter places the audience in a communitywhere they can contact and communicate with each other, and practice using diversifiedmaterials uploaded by the volunteers.This paper will delineate the followings:1. support needed by people of auditoryhandicaps when they learn lip reading;2. the functions and frameworks of the entireservice system;3. the structure of the man-man and man-system communicationprocess;4. the mutual interface and visual perception presented by the system.