This project and collaboration with Oticon only lasted 2 weeks but was one of the most true-to-the-business oriented projects as we were supervised and worked with designers, engineers and the head of marketing.
I chose to work with Christian (a one year more experienced student on industrial design) and together we designed two different hearing aids which won the price of the best designs for the Oticon collaboration.
For the project Christian and i agreed that we wanted to push the engineers understanding of having an invisible hearing aid. In stead of only designing for hiding and camouflaging we too made the hearing aids beautiful for the user to enjoy when putting on and taking off. We had a customized concept where one side of the hearing aids could be very personalized. This side would be hidden behind the ear when having the aids on but exposed when taken off. As a little gift to yourself maybe a orange pattern or a snakelike material would appear.
Also we created a hearing aid which was asymmetrical but had the feature of being hid in the curves behind the ears having really little of the aid exposed.
Other than that we had worked with finding a skintones scale in wood, to have plastic imitating woods which matches the skintone of the user camouflaging the aid.
Other than that we found a plastic which imitated shimmery metal which in the colors would blend in with the hair colors.
A great thanks to Christian for a very intense project. But especially for putting all those hours into the project which paid off in the end.