Transcript:

Hey, I’m Nick.

That video I posted on LinkedIn last week has completely blown up. It’s been amazing. I said, I’m going to design and build my own pair of custom hearing aids in my bedroom. And so many people have reached out offering support from hardware designers, technologists, audiologists, Bluetooth consultants, legal experts, essentially a bunch of people who are way smarter than I am.

Change how we perceive hearing technology

So honestly, thanks so much to everyone who’s engaged on that post. And I’m super excited to build something together with so many other cool people. But I’m right at the beginning of this journey, this is a design process where you can really only start with the vision that you’ve got. We live in a world now where we’re just trying to optimise everything, whether it’s apps, productivity or nutritional products to optimize athletic ability. We’re all just trying to be the best versions of ourselves and given how important our hearing is for communication with other actual human beings the actual state on how we perceive hearing is incredibly annoying.

Why are we not trying to optimise it? I’ve got this vision that soon, we’re going to have access to some form of airbags that not only give us the optimum listening experience, but the optimum hearing experience too. And they’re definitely not going to look like hearing aids, but I also don’t think they’re going to look like ear buds either because there’s pre-existing connotations.

Rethink and change the design

It’s kind of like wearing a label for disability or ageing. And for everybody’s wearing them as a universal sign for listening to music. Don’t talk to me and I don’t really want people to think that I’m not listening to them when I’m talking to them. So if I’m going to be making my own custom here, I think there needs to be a subtle change to design.

I was talking to a great industrial designer and a really good friend of mine, Gray Dowdy. And he said, there’s really no perfect path with design. You just have to get side. So that’s exactly what I’m going to do. If there’s anyone you think I should speak to on this journey, tag them in the comments or just shoot me a message and I’d be really happy to talk to them.

Have a great week!

Nick 🦋