Corner

Project Introduction

This project focuses on the persistent listening fatigue experienced by children with hearing impairments in everyday communication, a condition that is often overlooked.

For most people, understanding a conversation is an almost automatic process. For many children with hearing impairments, however, each interaction requires sustained and deliberate attention. They must constantly interpret fragmented auditory signals, read facial expressions and gestures, and reconstruct missing information from context. Even with hearing aids, sound does not necessarily enter the brain as naturally or completely as it does for people with typical hearing. Listening therefore becomes a continuous process of interpretation, judgment, and reconstruction.

This process consumes a significant amount of cognitive resources and can lead to long lasting listening fatigue. The difficulty becomes even more pronounced in conversations involving multiple people. Children must constantly determine who is speaking, where to direct their attention, and which information should be prioritized. As their visual attention repeatedly shifts between speakers, the brain remains in a state of heightened processing. What appears to be an ordinary conversation can gradually become an exhausting cognitive task.

The work attempts to transform this invisible fatigue into a visible experience, revealing the transparent yet persistent barrier that exists between children with hearing impairments and the hearing world. Rather than presenting listening fatigue as an abstract concept, the project translates it into a visual and spatial experience that viewers can intuitively perceive.

Research suggests that listening fatigue in children with hearing impairments is not caused by hearing loss alone, but also by the sustained cognitive effort required to understand speech. They must continuously process incomplete auditory input, interpret facial expressions and gestures, and combine scattered information into coherent meaning. As the number of speakers increases, visual attention must be repeatedly redistributed, further increasing cognitive load. For children who rely heavily on visual information, this makes multi person communication particularly demanding.

I therefore wanted to develop a visual language capable of expressing this state. Bubbles became the central visual metaphor of the project. They resemble air, a medium through which sound travels. Transparent and seemingly weightless, they nevertheless create a subtle separation between the individual and the surrounding world. The outside remains visible and appears close, yet it can never be reached without obstruction, as though every piece of auditory information must first pass through an invisible membrane.