Client: Barry Emons B.V.

‘Shall we play?’ is a game that has the goal to make deaf, hearing impaired and hearing children able to jointly play without having the feeling that the handicap of the deaf child has any influence on the interaction between the children.

For children who are born deaf or hearing impaired it’s often difficult to develop their social and personal skills in the same amount of time as their hearing ‘friends’. From the day children are able to communicate with sounds, it becomes almost impossible for a deaf or hearing impaired child to keep up with a hearing child. As a result, playing with deaf children and hearing impaired children, becomes less interesting for hearing children which often leads to the isolation of deaf children from their hearing ‘buddies’.

‘Shall we play?’ is a game that has the goal to make deaf, hearing impaired and hearing children able to jointly play without having the feeling that the handicap of the deaf child has any influence on the interaction between the children.

As a solution I designed a hide and seek game that can be played by one or more children. The game consists of a little beacon, that ‘talks’, but nobody can hear the talking because the sound produced by the beacon has a high frequency. The only way you can ‘hear’ the beacon is by searching it with a radiographic track-device that vibrates when it detects the frequencies of the beacon.

When the track-device detects other sounds in the room it gets disturbed and for a while the device is not able to vibrate and thus to show you the location of the beacon. So to find the beacon you have to be as quiet as possible, which brings the children, deaf or hearing, on an equal level.