The project started with the idea of stitching audio and visuals together in a way to explore locations with the help of both sound and images. To visualise the information or the sounds, the first attempt was to capture the places, both through a camera and a recorder.

For one month across three cities, images and audio were collected. The aim was to capture the essence of different places across Delhi, Mumbai, and Dehradun, for example, the famous markets of Delhi, the local cuisine of Mumbai, and the temples of Dehradun. These places keep within themselves the essence of these regions.

The attempt is to empower users in a way where they can identify the locations on the basis of the sounds. Thus, they will be able to map these sounds in a better way. In the future, such systems can help locate areas on the web when only audio feed is available. This would give way to research in areas of geotagging, where anyone can upload a local sound and tag it to a specific location on the map. This would help to create immersive audio guides where people can go around a city collecting audio clues and thus exploring the city using the image suggestions and then finding those places in the real world.

The objective of this project was to gain experience in a special education environment and learn about the dynamics between educators and children with developmental disorders. It was aimed at understanding the difficulties faced by children and how those are addressed by the special teachers and assistants.

This opportunity helped me form a mindset and generate empathy for the people involved in this ecosystem. From the first semester, when we had the user studies module, I was deeply interested in going among the users and knowing the difficulties at ground level. I learned that talking face-to-face with people reveals so much about the issue at hand. This is why I chose this NGO for this objective, so I can learn how assistance is provided to the young ones through intervention and effective, tailored teaching methods. It helped me understand how creativity and fun can provide children with opportunities for free expression, creative thought, and problem-solving skills.

Wayfinding relates to the decision-making process while going from one place to another and making important decisions along the way that help to traverse the path. We constantly confirm our position while approaching a destination or a nearby location. This is an integral part of our day-to-day lives.

Indian cities are laid out in a very different way than the grid-like structures of western cities. We have an organic growth of infrastructure in most of the cities. The reliance on maps for navigation has always been low; rather, asking around is the norm. What makes us comfortable with this way of navigating? One of the reasons is cultural. People are not used to maps. Giving directions in India is an idiomatic art, well-rehearsed but rarely done following formal strictures.

Nobody says, "Head south." Rather than oral directions, use a series of routes and familiar landmarks with additional information in the vicinity of the landmark to better guide the user.

Using this knowledge, a hypothesis was created revolving around the concept that if the existing way of moving people is used rather than pushing a solution that works well in grid-based cities, a simple yet familiar concept of wayfinding can be created with a focus on landmarks and the spatial distances between them.

The final concept focuses on implementing subjective wayfinding. Simply understand the user's mental model and offer a meaningful understanding of the environment that can be easily comprehended. This combines context-aware information about local landmarks with simple schematic maps imitating user behaviours in real life. Each upcoming landmark in the journey is combined with sound, image, and other data that makes the process more subjective and makes identifying and remembering landmarks easier. The solution helps the user to utilise local information that is available within a community and finally create a shared database of familiar routes.

In a simple schematic map, landmarks are used as guiding points from one checkpoint to another. Landmarks are points where a user can get oriented through visual and audio help. Each landmark has a corresponding image and other data associated with it. Users create routes and share them with the community. This collective effect makes available a larger depository of easy-to-follow maps that anyone can use and update.

For evaluation, users will be asked to reach destinations on selected routes using the design and other existing solutions. The aim is to know how comfortable users are finding destinations with the given interface and identifying landmarks to take turns and make routing decisions. How easily one can remember the route and create their own landmarks.

The design gives way to future work, including more rich data that can be kept up-to-date in a changing environment. Such designs can leverage our existing ways of problem solving and enhance them with technological intervention. We don’t need to change what already works well; rather, we should find a technological solution that can coexist with and complement what we already have.

As of January 22, 2013, there were 228,994,454 students enrolled in recognised schools in India, and it is believed that 15% of the total enrolled students are dyslexics, which brings our count of dyslexic Indian children to nearly 35 million. Dyslexia is the most common type of learning disability that affects one in every five children and creates major difficulties in learning to read, spell, and write correctly. Struggle in distinguishing alphabets, words, and learning the connections between written letter patterns and their sounds leads to poor reading and learning at school. Such children try to avoid school time and any confrontation that involves reading. They are labelled as ‘dumb‘ or ‘stupid’ when they actually have average or above-average IQs, and some are even gifted.

The social stigma of a learning disability often prevents parents from seeking appropriate remedies for children with dyslexia that can actually help their children. Struggling to keep up with the progress of the class, such children are labelled as slow learners or dumb. This is where the first strike of dyslexia starts having a major negative impact that continues to unfold for a long time. Such children are promoted without special attention until their first public exam, in the 10th grade, and the issues start snowballing. This is especially troubling as early childhood and primary education are crucial to long-term success. A properly directed education for such children in these early years helps build foundational skills to cope with the difficulties that affect the rest of their learning and lives.

Here I have attempted to deal with these learning issues considering the barriers the child has due to low confidence and direct instruction-based teaching at school. I have put together a system to develop interactive applications that direct focus on the phonological deficit in dyslexics. I have followed the approach to building letter-sound relationships through engagement and positive reinforcement.

Key insights were derived from long interviews and sessions with educators, children, and psychologists at multiple locations in Mumbai as a part of extensive user studies.