Product Design Engineering School of Design
Joe Doyle
Joe Doyle is a Product Design Engineer from Paisley (near Glasgow, and Paisley International Airport).
While notions of product design were nurtured in secondary school, Joe caught the making-bug at Anniesland (Glasgow Clyde) College, where he cut his product-design teeth studying Stringed Instrument Making & Repair. This formative experience made Joe determined to find the path that would weave together his newly found love of making with his knack for technology and passion for all things music and sound.
Over the five years hence, Joe has developed a modest portfolio of projects with a strong focus on hardware in the product category of audio and music technology. Joe is in his element while working at the edge of his technical ability and continually seeks to expand the frontiers of his engineering knowledge, manufacturing competencies and visualisation techniques. While his presentation style may suggest modernist sensibilities, Joe strongly resonates with the newly emerging Humanise movement within design and architecture. This temperamental bent has long been apparent through his use of complex, curved forms; varied textures; and propensity for finding inspiration in nature.
Joe hopes that his final-year project, HEAROIC, may be seen as the natural crescendo to seven years of joyful learning and practice with much-loved colleagues and teachers.
Projects
HEAROIC
Spatially-transparent electronic Hearing Protection Device.
Conventional Hearing Protection Devices (HPDs) are known to significantly reduce the wearer’s spatial hearing ability (the ability to correctly perceive the direction and proximity of sound sources through hearing alone). Spatial hearing is also the primary mechanism by which our brains can focus on specific sounds, such as speech, in noisy environments.
Those working in Urban Search and Rescue (USAR) contexts often decline to wear HPDs in order to preserve spatial awareness and speech perception – despite the fact that the sound pressure level produced by USAR cutting equipment is known to be the cause of early-onset long-term hearing damage among USAR workers. Similar dichotomies are present in many blue-collar occupations.
HEAROIC allows the wearer to hear their surroundings at safe listening levels by automatically adjusting the gain applied to the externally mounted microphones. HEAROIC also employs a novel approach to capturing real-time spatial hearing cues in the microphone signal – the details of which remain confidential at the time of degree show.
