emio
Sound Design | User Experience | User Insights
emio deepens the experience of pregnancy through sound by involving
the non-pregnant partner in the early stages of the pregnancy.
About the project
Opportunities
Involving and connecting the partner to the early stages of the pregnancy.
Team & Duration
Mathilda Karlsson, Arvind Sushil
& Sydney Eilbacher
2.5 weeks
Project Role
Mostly contributed with sound design, user research & concept development.
We supported and collaborated on all part of this project.
Concept Video
Research
We performed 11 Interviews with 9 different interviewees, who had gone through several pregnancies or were currently pregnant, to get a deeper understanding of the experience.
All interviewees are represented with sketches, to protect them according to the GDPR standards.
“If we who carry the child has a hard time knowing what is going on, then imagine how it is for the partners.”
“You experience something emotionally when you take part in the ultrasound — even if it sounds rather alien. It is definitely not what we expected to hear.”
“You want to be as involved in the process as possible, it feels like something that doesn’t really exist. You know what is going on, but you don’t fully realize it until the baby is born.
“Hearing the sound of the baby's heart is a huge industry, which is lucratively preying on parent’s anxiety.”
Our interviews and research highlighted, that the experience is mainly maternal, often individual instead of mutual. The sounds often feel weird to the couples undergoing their Ultrasound and is often initiated in environments, where they feel very anxious.
Concept Development
The aim of the product is to connect the mother, father and coming child. We tested, different sizes, ways of grabbing and interacting with the early homemade play-doh models, ensuring enough space for two hands to interact.
The triangular shape represents the three individuals involved in the pregnancy.
Sound Design
Our early interviews highlighted the importance of creating sounds, that were bound to reality but not too realistic. We aimed for an intermediary between sounds that were too abstract or too realistic — with a heavy focus on the emotional aspects.
The sounds created, aimed to evoke warm, soft and joyful emotions.
The Activity, Background and CMF sounds should support each other having a consistent sense of feel and be aligned with the overall design language of the physical concept.
All sounds were created in the synthesizer called Vital
and then layered and edited in Adobe Audition.
Most of the sounds have been made with slight variation in pitch, envelopes and frequencies to ensure they wouldn’t get too repetitive over time. This especially applies to recurring actions such as kicking, hiccups and movement.
Most of the clips here have been shortened for demonstrative purposes.
emio
Deepening the experience of pregnancy through sound.
The speakers were placed on the side around the concept, to ensure the hands wouldn’t muffle the sounds when interacting with interwoven fingers as a couple.
Essential Learning
Task management and planning was essential to handle this 2.5-week project, especially when working together with people I wasn’t completely familiar with, as a new Exchange student at Umeå Desing Institute — on top of highlighting the importance of sounds related to human emotion, when dealing with sensitive subjects like pregnancy.