Researches and My Idea on Nonverbal Communication

Once I thought about the concept nonverbal communication, the online chatting emotions came into my mind. I am a fan of chatting softwares, such as MSN, QQ and ICQ, and I am a experienced practitioner who is good at using emotions to express my feelings. I usually download emotions from the professional website and install them in my computer. There are thousands of emotion symbols and animitions extensively used by online chatting practitioners, and those symbols give people fun and happiness when they chatting online, so that people can enjoy their chatting experience.




Nonverbal communication for clinical department is different from for entertaining. I did some researches on the existing noverbal communication methods/systems in clinical field which help patient to communicate with doctors.

One of them is invention which discloses a communication device to facilitate the communication abilities of speech-impaired individuals. In particular, the communication device is designed to offer those speech-impaired individuals with limited manual motor capacities the ability to communicate quickly and unambiguously.

Another example is communication with nonverbal patients in India - augmentative communication devices. Various communication prostheses have been developed to augment the limited communication abilities in children and adults who are speechless because of developmental disabilities or neurological diseases. Communication boards remain the most economical of such communicative prostheses. Five communication boards in Hindi containing alphabet, words, and pictures are discussed, which were developed to assist non-verbal persons in northern India, and which have been used to promote communication with adults with stroke. These communication boards can equally be used with minimum modification by both developmentally disabled children and neurologically impaired adults.

Alphabet Communication Board




Lexical Communication Board




Eye-Gaze (E-Tran) Communication Board



Communication Board



Picture Communication Board



Blissymbol Communication Board


From the above examples, it is obviously that their nonverbal communication device is design for patient who is disable or inability to speak, and their device are very practical and more focussed. The nonverbal communication system I want to design is for suicidal people who reluctant to talk about their stories to professionals and clinicians face to face, but utilizing a communcating system or device which can use tons of symbols to express their experience and stories.

An idea came into my mind - can I design a gamelike system which gives suicidal people an oppotunity to play themselves according to their own story in a game? But they are only allowed to set their real personal information such as job, age, sex, background, hobbies and so on. I bet many people have played one of the most popular games - 'Sims', it's an amazing game that people can create their own characters and control the characters' life. It's a really good example for me to explore, but one important thing is my game is not for entertaining, but it tries to creat a relaxing enviornment for suicidal people to talk about their story in a tricky way. So there should be a strong and enormous database which support the clinical department to evaluate the risk of suicide of people who have finished playing the game.



Devices of the game 'Sims'

In addition, of course there will professional methods exist which teach possible suicidal people how to play the game efficiently and explain to them the purpose of the game - evaluate the risk factors of suicide. However, this idea is difficult for me to practice, because I am a graphic designer, not a game designer or a multi-media designer, so I have no idea about the database, the scripts and the related softwares. Therefore, my interest is tend to do the critical design in my project.

Books I'm Reading

Reflection on Tutorial 22 2 08

After this tutorial I felt relaxed and happy, I was stucked for a long time in my project, it seemed like I was trying hard to look for an access or a entrance in order to come into a new space, but I couldn't find it, it really made me frustrated. But today I got two clear accesses to go through, one is nonverbal communication, another one is critical design. As Mike and I talked about the problems I found, he suggested me to think about nonverbal communication, this is as same as what I thought about. But before I was not sure what sort of communication system I should do, now I was suggested to do a nonverbal communication around clinical department (counselling, A&E, GPs, mental illness service liaison, etc.) to help identify the high risk issues. And I will research on how nonverbal communication (symbols, objectives) works (based on visual communication/interactive device).

Critical design is another suggestion Mike gave me, and I am really interested in doing it. He reminded me the a chapter in the book 'Need to Know Teenage Suicide', the chapter talks about the role of Media in suicide and also I came to remember a news which report the young girls suicide in a small neighbourhood of a town in Wales. These facts show that Media sometimes is not to be considered as a method which can increase people's awareness on suicide, contrarily, it is a very dangerous medium and sources in suicide. So a critical design which towards the Media issue or other national and public motivations might be designed to start a discussion about the relationship between national suicide prevention strategy and suicide. So I will also do some research on critical design, because for me this is a new conception even I have taken a critical design workshop which launched by Graham last semester.