‘aware’ is designed for urban runners to have awareness around its surroundings in terms of safety and motivation from listening to music while running. Sound signals from earphones warn runners about fast-approaching objects without compromising the music listening experience. It’s a combination of digital and physical products that include a pair of optional earphones and a detector to wear anywhere on your back. The detector is able to detect whether a bike or scooter is coming close to you. For runners who already have earphones, they only need to download Spotify software plugin. This Spotify software plugin is used to adjust music based on your tempo of running because the software will match your tempo of running with music tempo ( beats per minute), thus increase your motivation to run.

Current pain points

Imagine you live in a metropolitan city in the middle of downtown area. Some people call it a concrete jungle, not a lot of people have the luxury to live in a place where you are surrounded by nature. For people who live close to nature, they are able to enjoy a run outside without too much of a concern. However, when you live in the center of a busy city, there are things to be concerned about when you go out for a run. First, it is about traffic, will there be scooters or bikes coming from behind you? Especially if it is a path where pedestrians and bikes/scooters sharing the same path. Many times, it is very hard to hear what is coming from behind you. For cities that have lots of snow on the ground like Sweden, the snow acts like a noise absorbent that will muffle the sound of bikes and scooters even more. So it is really hard to hear what is coming from behind you. In addition, if you are listening to music while running as most people do, it is impossible to hear what is coming from behind. It is already quite hard to hear without the music, so on top of the music, it will be really hard to hear what is coming. So how might we help runners to hear what is coming behind a runner while listening to music?

Currently, urban runners will either sacrifice listening to music and make sure they do not get hit by what is coming from behind them, or they could choose to listen to music but only put one ear plug on without fully immersed in the joy of immersive music listening experience while running. How might we satisfy both? That is a safe running experience without compromising on the music listening experience.

Design opportunities

“aware” is designed for runners to have awareness around its surroundings and motivation to run. There are two main features for aware: motivation and safety. It’s a combination of digital and physical products include a pair of earphones that you wear around your ears and a detector that you wear anywhere on your back. The goal is to imagine and develop a concept that explores the perfect harmony between interaction, form, and sound. Enhanced spatial awareness combined with active noise cancellation. In this interdisciplinary project “Sound in Industrial Design”, four students from the Advanced Product Design and Interaction Design programs started a three-week collaboration to explore the powerful connection between sound, form, and interaction. Our chosen design opportunity relates to active noise cancellation, a technology that has evolved in recent years into a standard feature for wireless headphones. While noise-canceling adds a great value in numerous use cases, new problems have arisen as a result of its continuous development and optimization: for example in urban areas, where electric cars and scooters can be easily overheard while listening to music. We designed the conceptual product “aware,” a wearable sensor that provides an extra layer of safety for athletes in urban areas. Using sound signals – placed in a 3D audio space – the sensor warns users about fast-approaching objects, without compromising the music listening experience.

Design process

Interaction and industrial design students collaborate closely thinking about touch points like headphones, and how we could detect where the object comes from. We came up with a software like a Spotify plugin from a holistic point of view. The user research methods used are wizard of Oz, user interviews, ethnography research, iteration, drawing sketches, ideation together, brainstorming sessions with a timer, prototyping, validation of ideas, wireframing. It’s a double diamond process but it is not linear. Thomas Degn is our design teacher who provides consistent feedback and push us to do better. Research results showed that safety concern and music experiences are huge barriers and we can solve that by using a combination of software and hardware solutions.

We started with ourselves first, some of our team members are marathon runners, then we started interview runners who live in the center of the city, we experience it ourselves as well as to be empathetic with what urban runners experience as well. We spoke with subject matter experts in engineering to see if what we are visioning is possible with our design. For example: if the sensor we develop to detect the distance behind you is accurate or even possible like spatial awareness for your surroundings, noise cancelling but aware of what is coming from behind you. We want to make sire it can detect in 3 zones or levels of danger. By that we meant, there are three kinds of alert sound that can be detected depending on which zone a vehicle has passed. Zone 1: Dangerous (really close); Zone 2: getting close; and Zone 3: far away but towards your direction.( This is illustrated in the Lego pics we provided)

Solution

We want to present our solution by imagining a story with you. It’s snow season and you live in downtown Stockholm in Sweden. On a Saturday afternoon, you are about to go out for a run. As you are leaving home, you put on your sneakers and earphones. You took out your phone and select your favorite music track. As you start your run, you realize it ‘s a busy street, so you put your earphones away to hear what’s coming behind you cause you are afraid you might be hit by a bike or a scooter ( as we all know how quiet can a scooter be, let alone when there is snow on the ground which will dampen the sound of scooters even more.) You feel a bit unmotivated without listening to music while running. That’s why we designed ‘aware’. Our goal is to protect the safety of runners and at the same time without interrupting the music listening experience.

The essence of the solution is safety without compromising music listening experiences for urban runners. There are two main features: motivation mode and safety mode. It’s a combination of digital and physical product consists of a pair of earphones (optional) that you wear around your ears and a detector that you wear anywhere on your back. This feature lowers music volume when there is an alert sound, but the best part is the music follows your tempo of running thus gives you motivation to run. This is done by the software part: a Spotify digital plugin. Current market have designs for bikers, but with not ideal user experience. We also thought about camera with AI technology embedded to recognize exactly what kind of vehicles you have.

Sustainability

The earphones are optional so that we are not adding unnecessarily products to the planet. We will produce ensuring fair labor, we want to use aluminum materials that can be recycled unlimited times. The packaging will be minimal, using as less as possible. The social impact is to save people from getting injured so that less hospital visits and save resources on healthcare. People do not need to take sick leave because of injuries. We also try to design a Spotify plugin instead of a whole new app, the reason being that it is not necessary to waste resources, e.g. hosting data in data center somewhere, it will use less power for the users on their phone by having one less app to install, with just a plugin.

Future

As a team, we hope that this idea could be in the real market even it is a student project. Actually we want to do some iterations on our existing designs as a team. For example, the sensor at he back right now is magnetic, we want to make a 2.0 version, like a running belt along the chest area since one of our group member is a marathon runner and through his feedback, we realized that might be a potential 2.0 solution. For the software side, we are hoping to be able to collaborate with Spotify and actually create a our plugin with them with their design language seamlessly. As a group, we are an ambitious of four, and can see ourselves as designers who add value and make people’s lives easier and happier in our ways.