[Transcript]

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I don’t like my hearing aids so I’m building the hearing equivalent of designer eyewear.

I’ve got this frame which fits around the electronics, but the black makes it look too much like headphones, and I don’t want people to think I’m listening to music instead of them.

So I went to London to meet Romain, an Eyewear designer, to learn how we can make hearing aid technology look as good as designer glasses so that I actually want to wear them.

We hopped on the train to the workshop where he builds prototype frames for eyewear brands.

There’s loads of different types of acetate to choose from, but we also wanted to explore how we can add titanium to the design. More on that in a bit.

I’ve got a digital version in a sort of champagne colour and it’s got this nice steel core in the ear hook that adds strength to the acetate as well as letting you bend it for different ear shapes.

We started by cutting out two halves of the frame from a 4mm sheet of acetate.

Then after dipping the sides in acetone, we could add the metal core and fuse the two halves together.

After sanding down the edges, we’ve got a first acetate frame prototype.

I like how it came out - it could do with much more than just 15 minutes of sanding - but with the limited time we had, it’s a good start. I’m thinking about whether or not we should cover the black front, maybe with a  metal disc. Let me know what you think.

But we had another idea - because I get asked a lot about how people would wear these with glasses. It’s actually not much of an issue, but it’s possible to make it even thinner, and here’s where we wanted to use titanium.

We had this one pair of glasses that has titanium temples. They’re super thin and really comfortable, so we decided to play with that idea.

We started by making some frames outlines that we could send to the CNC machine.

And cut out a load of rings that vary very slightly in size to see which one fits snuggly around the lens.

These dark ones are actually tortoise shell - but they’re kinda too dark right? They actually just look black, which is the whole thing I was trying to get away from! So next time I’ll get a lighter tortoise shell acetate.

But anyway.

For now, the next step was to add a groove for the titanium ear hook. There’s a great machine for that.

Then to bending the titanium, which was really difficult to do accurately because even though it’s thin, titanium is really strong.

But after doing so, it clips on and becomes an ear hook.

So after 4 hours, here are the first prototype directions we made in an eyewear workshop. I’m really happy with the progress we made in such a short time.

They’re not finished and we’ve got some more ideas on how to improve them.

I tried them both on to see how they look when worn - not sure which one I prefer or what colours or design styles to try next.

Let me know what you think!

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