Design for redundancy in a participatory action that helps calibrating hearing devices

This paper aims at analysing redundancy as a specific aspect of the design activities tied to 3D Tune-In, an innovation action funded by the European Commission. 3D Tune-In is mainly oriented toward (a) implementing software technologies (binaural spatialization engines, hearing loss simulator and hearing aid simulator) and (b) adopting these technologies to create videogames that can be used by people with hearing aids to fine-tune their hearing devices.
The high number of stakeholders involved in the project and their differences (in terms of needs, wants and agendas) motivated a design approach supporting redundancy: rather than orienting all the design and development effort toward a clearly and strictly defined set of functionalities, 3D Tune-In created a wide variety of more or less loosely connected components with their own – at times disjointed - features. This paper intends to explore how this redundancy helped stakeholders in carving their own niche in the project, but, at the same time, increased the design and the development challenges.