Innovative Design Of Phatic Product Based On Audio-visual Synaesthesia

With the development of the society,more and more close relationships are attached with the attribute of "long-distance".Emotional communication is an important part of maintaining close relationships,but the distance just increases the difficulty undoubtedly With the support of today's advanced information and communication technology(ICT),people in long-distance relationships do not lack of the opportunity to communicate and contact with each other.However,ICT is developed and designed for the purpose of processing,transmitting and exchanging information,thus there is a lot of discussion on it facilitating emotional communication.Products which designed and developed based on Phatic Technology,however,could avoid this problem properlyThrough studying exist papers and related projects with Phatic Technology as the core,concluding general characteristics and often involved design principles and techniques,in addition,finding problems of inadequate using of sensory channels,and thus introducing the theory of synaesthesia into the original theory innovatively and designing a phatic product utilizing audio-visual synaesthesia and sound visualization technology.Through summarizing key techniques of sound visualization,designing and partly realizing a phatic product that enables distributed parents and children or partners to exchange real-time ambience sound,which is a kind of content-completeless personal information,in the form of light.The product allows users to stay emotionally connected in the form of awareness establishing and in a playful way,thus facilitating emotional communication.Through conducting experiments on the product prototype in a simulated scenario and adopting interview method to collect subjective feedbacks,the result of the experiment suggests that the application of audio-visual synaesthesia theory in Phatic technology can reflect the ambience information of distributed users properly and the acceptability of this kind of "no content" light communication is quite high.It opens up a new channel for communication,which differs from the commonly used ICT means Although the product has no evidence of direct supporting for emotional communication yet,it is considered to have great potential to promote emotional communication among participants.According to the feedback of the experiment,further improving the product system through the design of a hardware device and a supporting software,but the improved product still needs to be tested through long-term experiments.