During a field trip in Mumbai, India Martina visited a speech therapy center where she met Nitish, 7 years old. They had no common spoken language to communicate and Nitish was also deaf. While her team mate Deval interviewed the mother of the child, Martina drew some figures in her notebook and gave it to Nitish, who started drawing with enthusiasm everything he could think about to tell her what he knew of. And so a common language was established through drawing. This moment of sharing is one of the most precious one’s of the artist, as it reminds her that sounds and speech is only a part of the communication that can occur when humans connect. This photo series and encounter with Nitish is one outcome of a design project between students from India, Nepal, Bhutan, the Netherlands and Finland. The project was about raising-awareness on children with hearing disabilities and design functioning service paths for them and their caretakers to start using open-source hearing aids and get to speech therapy.

design research & photography / 2019