London "Hearwear" Exhibit Shows Off High-Fashion Hearing-Aid Designs

A group of collaborators in the UK is bringing high fashion to hearing aids with an upcoming exhibit at one of the world’s leading museums for design, the Victoria & Albert (V&A) in London. Hearwear — The Future of Hearing, which opens tomorrow, is the brainchild of the UK’s largest organization for deaf and hard-of-hearing people, RNID (formerly the Royal National Institute for the Deaf).

Co-sponsored by Blueprint, the design magazine, and by Wolff-Olins, one of the world’s leading corporate and industrial design firms, the museum will feature contributions from Britain’s leading fashion designers as well as international product design firms such as Ideo. The exhibit will feature concepts for hearing aids and other hearing-assistance products ranging from elegant jewelry such as a sleek necklace to designer glasses incorporating a hearing aid to bold in-the-ear aids masquerading as earrings. Other ideas for consumers, some borrowing technologies already incorporated into industrial products for noisy factories, include devices to boost your hearing in noisy bars and products which cancel noise, enabling you to control your environment by blocking out unwelcome sounds. With only about 30 percent of hard-of-hearing consumers in the UK taking advantage of hearing-assistance products — comparable to the low market penetration in other developed countries — the organizers of the exhibit see a tremendous market opportunity for good design to eliminate the stigma of using hearing aids and spark consumer demand as it has in other consumer-electronics markets. “We need a revolution in our thinking about hearing products,” said John Low, Chief Executive of RNID. “Today there’s insufficient investment in the customer appeal of hearing aids. With the rise of new technologies, such as Bluetooth, there is a blurring of the edges around hearing products. Yet industry, particularly the consumer electronics industry, has been slow to recognise the vast potential of producing stylish, desirable hearing products that people want to use. Hearwear demonstrates huge possibilities. There has been an incredible revolution in the design of glasses, why not in hearing aids?”