The old is made new again

Before there was Langer’s conceptual design, there was Soundfinder’s ‘Earing for Hearing’. Brushed bronze with a metal filigree cast over plastic, these transistor hearing aids resembled vintage half-bead earrings that one can find in antique stores, save for the curved tube extending from the flat back, a raised component door for a size 13 button battery and a geared volume switch (Advertisement 1968). Created by Sound Ear, of Mount Kisco, New York, in the mid-1960s, the device appears to be an astonishing innovation, perhaps even ahead of its time. Technological miniaturisation, as Mara Mills argues, is typical of hearing aid design, and Soundfinder’s creation was no exception (Mills 2011). With the flexible printed circuit board consisting of the transistors and integrated circuits encased in a space no larger than 2.7 inches in diameter, these were small hearing aids, comparable to eyeglasses hearing aids with technical components built into the frames. They were attractive options for deaf users (especially women) who wanted discreet instruments that could blend in with their personal style. To wear the device, a user would connect the tone hook (the curved tube) to their earmould inserted into the ear; the ‘earring’ part would freely hang downwards or be attached with a clip to secure it to the earlobe.

Marketed as the ‘Hearing Jewel’, the instrument was promoted as ‘the world’s smallest hearing device’, developed for those ‘who hear but don’t understand, if words run together’ (figure 2). Sound Ear’s president, Thomas G Broderick, had previously worked for Tonemaster and Otarion, two prominent industry firms, and certainly possessed the engineering and marketing experience to launch new hearing aid models. Despite claims the Hearing Jewel was designed for a narrowly defined group of people with ‘nerve deafness’, that is, for ‘those people who need that extra clarity in conversation, while watching television, at a concert, in the theatre or church’, the device failed to meet basic standards for hearing aid performance (Star Gazette Advertisement 1971). Quite possibly, the Hearing Jewel never moved beyond the prototype stage. Broderick’s company appeared as a startup compared with the giants of the industry and given that the Soundfinder trademark was not renewed by 1975, it is probable that the product could not compete with other hearing aids on the market.

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Figure 2

Advertisement, The Panama City Herald (8 January 1972, 6).

Deaf consumers nevertheless had a multitude of options for ‘hearing jewels’ from other hearing aid manufacturers, though these were predominately accessory attachments, rather than stand-alone instruments. Two decades prior, for instance, Maico created the ‘Hear-Ring’ which permitted women to conceal their receiver under a pair of matched earrings secured by a plastic holder. The receiver is connected to a wire to their hearing aid, and depending on preference, could either be worn underneath their hair or at the top of a bra strap. Designed by Fresen of California for Maico, the ‘earrings’ could be fitted for any hearing aid model and specially ordered earmolds. They were immensely popular, especially after Maico placed full-page advertisements in Vogue’s September 1955 issue to frame their products as fashionable luxury goods (The Hearing Dealer 1955). Other firms followed suit in the 1950s and 1960s to incorporate the cosmetic effects of hearing aids with fashion. Ardente of London in 1951 created a hat for women that included concealed pockets for the hearing aid and external battery. Versions of hearing aids to be worn on the wrist, in the hair or even special wigs—including one created by celebrity makeup stylist Max Factor—were available for deaf people. Industry giants Sonotone introduced the ‘Sono-Charm’ jewelled pins and ‘Sono-Comb’ hidden microphones; Tonemaster created their ‘Cordless Barrette’; Beltone created decorative microphone covers for their ‘Opretta’ hearing aids and also disguised their ‘Triumph 5 Super’ 6-transistor hearing aid as a stainless-steel tie clip. As advantageous as these accessories were for disguising the devices, they were not ideal for security, for the anchorage to the body was weaker, thus could accidentally fall and damage the transducers (Berger 1974, 117).

The advent of the transistor and the integrated circuit made it possible to combine the microphone, amplifier and receiver in a single unit with further miniaturisation as the decades passed. Behind-the-ear and in-ear models increasingly replaced body-worn units capable of binaural fitting, and, as the size reduction of components continued into the 1990s, so too did the variability of design options. The hearing aid industry—then a monopoly of five or six companies—essentially standardised aesthetics, with most device models offered in a range of colours to blend in with skin or hair, rather than to appeal to a deaf person’s fashion or stylistic preference. Technical innovation continued, with the emergence of digital hearing aids in the late 1980s, and further experiments in improving power supply, acoustic gain or minimising the microphone feedback and harmonic distortion of analogue hearing aids. Essentially, with the ‘modern’ hearing aid, the design gave way to medicalisation (Pollack 1975).

The notion that deaf people should feel compelled to use concealable hearing aids reflects societal stigma as encapsulated through design. Scholars have demonstrated how the concept of a prosthetic ‘good fit’ for a technology to be effective and comfortable requires integration with the body to the extent that either a user forgets they are wearing or using technology, or the machine merges with flesh (Almond-Brown 2023; Porter, Walter, and Healey 2018; Virdi 2017). For some users, this might become another strategy for passing, that is, to conceal visible markers of disability to suppress their conceive ‘otherness’, avoid stigma and appear ‘normal’. Yet passing itself is a personal act, one dependent on life circumstances and environment more so than disability politics or ableist assumptions, an act that, as Jeffrey Brune and Daniel Wilson (2013, 2) explain, ‘blurs the line between disability and normativity’. Rejecting this binary requires a shift in perspective. In the case of hearing aids, rather than balancing choices between aesthetics and functionality for purposes of passing or ‘un/covering’, deaf users’ incorporation of fashion and style offers fundamental new insights for product design (Evans 2017).

Reconsidering design-as-discretion

The manifesto of crip technoscience as devised by Hamraie and Fritsch (2019) ‘calls attention to the powerful, messy, non-innocent, contradictory…practices of critique, alteration, and reinvention of our material-discursive world’. By addressing dimensions of lived experiences of disability and technological design beyond functionality or aesthetic, crip technoscience presents approaches for analysing practices of what Hartblay (2020) terms as ‘disability expertise’ for situating disabled people as theory and design producers. Disabled people are positioned as experts and designers, but more crucially, their perspectives on design for their everyday technologies—like hearing aids—are embedded with political meanings, including normalisation through assimilation, or resistance and protest. As Aimi Hamraie emphasises, the ‘politics of disability technology raise important theoretical and empirical questions about epistemologies, methodologies and social implications of design by, rather than for, disabled people’ (2023, 304). This includes notions of futurity, but it does not imply all deaf users of hearing aids are preoccupied with design or the vanity of passing, a point expressed by Kimberly Fields (2006): ‘vanity doesn’t get to be a factor in the decision [of wearing hearing aids]. Less than 10 decibels away from the category of deafness, my unaided hearing loss would keep me out of mainstream society’.

One method of incorporating crip technoscience and disability expertise for reconsidering hearing aid design is with the concept of ‘Supernormal’ introduced by Graham Pullin as borrowed from Japanese industrial designer Naoto Fukasawa and British product designer Jasper Morrison. A ‘new approach to disability-related design, at once radical and unremarkable’, the Supernormal rejects the binary of drawing attention to or from disability, and instead proposes thinking about design as how objects are used in everyday contexts—that is, objects we tend not to think about because they are not disruptive to our environment (Pullin 2018). Pullin elaborates: ‘We imagine a super normal hearing aid that is beautifully resolved in form, materials and details—to the degree that eyewear is—yet unmistakably, unashamedly and unremarkably a hearing aid. Not as an ironic statement in anti-design but as an object with positive connotations’. This includes rethinking the material of hearing aids. By incorporating Supernormal materials (cellulose, leather, wood), the design draws us to natural elements that embody familiar environments. Product design thus becomes about easing into the body of nature, as opposed to adding cold, hard elements such as titanium that disrupt the organic flow of the body. Arguably, the Supernormal becomes another way of thinking about good fit and discretion, but Pullin insists that the Supernormal is divorced from any political meaning of assimilation. It does not stand apart nor disappear but is just there such that we become accustomed to its presence without the need to engage with its existence. Within this framework, hearing aids designed as super-bionic futuristic devices become an aberration in our environment, an unintuitive feature far removed from present reality.

The futuristic approach can appeal to deaf people who think of themselves as disabled or as a linguistic minority, but it disturbs the phenomenon of individual practice and collective engagement typical of disability culture (Hamraie 2023, 305). Deaf and disabled people learn strategies of adaptation, accommodation, assimilation and anti-assimilation from their communities, but at the same time, vanity can direct their individual choice for discretion—an understanding long exploited by hearing aid firms in advertisements. Though ‘fashion can be understated, and discretion does not require invisibility’, as Pullin emphasises, the tension between the two in design communities means that one quality must be categorised as a priority (Pullin 2009, 15). This is exemplified in the evolution of spectacles from medical aids to fashion accessories such as eyewear. The design of eyewear takes into consideration the entirety of the face: how it sits on the bridge of the nose, balances the eyes and eyebrows, accentuates the cheekbones, frames against the hair and sits comfortably on the ear. There are colours and shapes, sizes and depth of lenses, nearly an infinite possible combination to appeal to a person’s face, style, cost and preference.

Why not the same for hearing aids? Why do discretion and miniaturisation remain the primary design criteria? As Pullin points out, ‘If anything, you might expect hearing aids to be less challenging than glasses: they don’t obscure the face; they are strong traditions of ear adornment and jewelry in most cultures; and we all reach for earphones and headphones from time to time’ (Pullin 2009, 25). Though the hearing aid industry has remained conservative and preoccupied with technological development, especially in the American context, the design paradigm is complicated by the fact hearing aids are not covered by insurance and the industry remains a monopoly with exorbitant prices. The visually stunning HearWear objects designed by Ross Lovegrove for the Royal National Institute for the Deaf, for example, offer a fresh perspective for merging organic forms with style, but even if they are ‘the antithesis of current hearing aids’, can they be functional across the auditory spectrum? (Pullin 2009, 28).

HearWear is resemblant of mid-century body-worn hearing aids that rejected discretion as a primary design feature, and instead emphasised colours, styles and decoration as marketable elements. Zenith’s ‘Royal’ line was produced with a brilliant gold-coloured plastic chassis with a black circular grate for the microphone adorned with the company crest, surrounded by steel gold-coloured clips (for securing in a pocket), and a braided wire emanating from the top connected to the earpiece (figure 3). Dahlberg’s ‘Special’ transistor hearing aid, with its brilliant blue and retrofuturism hints toward an atomic age, while Maico’s ‘Universal’ models in two shades of blue (AX in turquoise and BX in navy) are more subdued and serious, echoing perhaps, its traditional approach as one of the earliest hearing aid companies (Bauman, Maico Model AX, Maico Model BX). Paravox’s hammered chassis with a floral microphone grill leans towards the sophistication of Art Deco, as does Zenith’s rose gold Regent model (Bauman, Zenith Regent, Paravox Model). Acousticon’s transistorised hybrid model A-300 is an experiment in materials with celluloid over an aluminium case, gold trim and highlights (Bauman, Acousticon A-300). All these models feature aspects that go beyond functionality to appeal to a customer’s personal preferences—their style, fashion and sense of beauty. They outline counternarratives to discretion by drawing attention to the device and bypassing the masquerading of disability to claim the disabled gaze and reject typical representations of deaf users. Through the disabled gaze, deaf users of these bold instruments prefer to visually signal their disability, including as a coping mechanism for everyday interactions or communication struggles. As Zdrodowska (2021) elaborates:

If someone does not realise that they are speaking to a deaf person because that person does not use hearing aids or because the hearing aids they use are not visible (which was and remains the ideal and the goal in the development of hearing prostheses), they may perceive the deaf person as strange, rude or intellectually disabled. The deaf and hard of hearing cannot answer questions they do not hear (Zdrodowska 2021, 137).

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Figure 3

Zenith Royal Hearing Aid, c.1950s. Aluminium, metal, plastic, steel, 2.125 × 2.25 × 0.75. CC Attribution 4.0 International, courtesy of Science History Institute.

While this is a crucial argument that is also shown across other prostheses and assistive devices—stickers on wheelchairs, coloured canes, painted limbs—it does not translate well to mid-century hearing aids that were meant to be worn on the body (Ott 2002, 3). For one thing, no matter how intricate the design or how beautiful its features are, hearing aids were still meant to be pocket devices. Nevertheless, even if deaf people were instructed to keep their hearing aids in pockets or carriers, it does not necessarily mean they did so as a way to camouflage the instruments. As Hamraie argues, crip-making ‘relies on and produces form of knowledge and expertise that draws boundaries between assimilation and antiassimilation, able-bodied norms and disability culture’ (2023, 304). Deaf painter Dorothy Brett (1883–1977), for instance, crafted a leather case bartered leather, adorned with silver and turquoise pieces sourced from the Pueblo market to demand attention to her deafness (Virdi 2023). The disruptive box that housed her hearing aids, its use uncertain at first glance except for the sole wire emanating from an opening at the top, encroaches on polite conversations, more so when Brett positioned it in front of her body, insisting speakers to acknowledge its presence. Certainly, this could be merely artistic eccentricity, but the care that went into the case serves as a protective barrier: for the hearing aid itself, and for Brett’s need to self-manage ableist perceptions of her deafness within her hearing environments.

The history of the mid-century design of hearing aids further demonstrates how bold design-forward approaches can be a confidence boost for users. Contemporary design presents ways for merging one’s identity and fashion as a new generation of HearWear, a trend already noticed in the tech industry where research indicates there is a rise of hearing aid wearers in their 30s and 40s who are appealed by the design of smart hearing aids featured with associated applications for autonomous adjustment. Children are also encouraged by colours, patterns, Disney/Marvel characters or futuristic options that add excitement to their devices. The old ‘Big and Beige’ prominence of hearing aid design emphasising camouflage seems to be disappearing (Cadwell 2023). This shift, however, presents another problem. As wearable health-tech companies take over hearing aid design to bring design innovations to a broader market, they tend to replicate the invisibility trope. Nearly every year Soundly (a tech site that reviews sound technologies) lists the latest ‘smallest and smartest’ invisible hearing aids entering the market or introduced as prototype. The Aura Ring, for instance, is another version of the Eargo, a rechargeable, ‘virtually invisible’ device that extends design to the product packaging (Cadwell 2023). The chromed metal, high-gloss Zon Hearing Aid, designed by Stuart Karten Design in 2008 for Starkey, received the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum’s People Design Award for its visual appeal. Yet the product description highlights the palette of six colours that are meant to be ‘virtually invisible when worn’. Phonax’s ‘Paradise’ also offers housing colours in seven options to match hair and skin; though, to their credit they do provide at least 28 colours for earmolds to personalise the device.

If culture influences technological design, what if we change our expectations about deafness and hearing aids, to centre deaf perspectives rather than industrial and product design?

Deaf-led design?

One of the tenets of a posthuman vision is the eradication of disability through technology, a process governed by eugenic impulses towards human perfection. Within this site of ‘no future’, as Kafer (2013) describes, the disabled body is merged with artificial intelligence technology or transformed into a prosthetic superhuman. These imaginative possibilities materialise in a future-oriented mindset through technological innovation that leaves no space for disability. As Murray (2020) asserts, ‘Disability futures are almost never thought to be desirable and appear rather as fraught spaces of struggle’ (original emphasis). Hearing aids, for instance, are elevated beyond their auditory benefits, to futuristic creations such as vibrating vests to ‘feel sounds’ or sign language gloves—innovations that design critic Liz Jackson defines as ‘disability dongles’ (Jackson, Haagaard, and Rua 2022). These are objects that are designed to bypass deafness to simultaneously provide a ‘cure’ and create a ‘post-deaf reality’ while simultaneously adhering to an overtly utopian discourse of world transformation that enacts proselytising impulses, as Jonathan Hsy cautions (Godden and Hsy 2018, 101).

Objects inform the concept of disabled selfhood and expectations of what Kafer describes as ‘crip futurity’, a world in which disabled perspectives and expertise are essential for technological design and community building (Kafer 2013, 3). Crip futurity is a longing for a future world-making where disability is welcome—not eradicated—and the knowledge of disabled ancestors is central for incorporating collective expertise and practices of everyday lived experiences of disability. Disabled people have long been the ‘original lifehackers’, to borrow Jackson’s term, adapting to barriers and adding their unique insights to elegantly make their world more accessible (Jackson 2018). Applying their disabled expertise, through the disabled gaze, disabled creators aim to transform the freakery and spectacle of their bodyminds to favour a more inclusive and progressive rhetoric of disability (Garland-Thomson 1997). This is apparent in the tension between aesthetics and futurity embedded in the history of hearing aid design, where deaf wearers favoured models that appealed to their own preferences, without necessarily thinking of futuristic aspects of disabled living or always adhering to expectations of normalcy.

Design and disability appear to be contingent and historical. Indeed, Bess Williamson and Elizabeth Guffey (2020) presented the ‘Design Model of Disability’ as a concept for examining how design and knowledge-making processes are entrenched in disability experiences, particularly through digital or material things. Instead of centring historical narratives of analytical perspectives of disability things through their connection to bodily cure, accommodation or rehabilitation, Williamson and Guffey argue that design provides useful, nuanced contexts for examining the relationship between disabled users and their objects. Emphasising design enables us to shift from discretion to assertion, and in so doing, design becomes about reclaiming and fostering identity. Disabled people are designers. Objects are designed for disability, rather than to suppress disability. And design is presented as a range of approaches for interacting with the built environment, though it also can create barriers as much as it can provide solutions. Focusing predominately on technology and innovation can, for instance, diminish the contextual histories of user tinkering and adaption that underscores much of the lived experiences of disability, as Laura Mauldin’s Disability at Home project shows (Mauldin 2022). Moreover, though disabled people may not always act as designers, their low-tech hacks, modifications and preference for design is not always acknowledged or translated to improved product development.

This appears most assuredly in the legacy of fashion and style in hearing aid design—though it is important to note that some users do prefer concealable aids, which is absolutely fine as there is no one way of being deaf. Custom-made options for coloured chassis or ear moulds, skin covers, charms and stickers for tube have been available as accessories through manufacturers to personalise their hearing aids or cochlear implants. Transforming hearing aids into fashion statements is part of the trend of the ‘personal appearance market’, one in which unique accessories offer users to beautify or personalise their devices to better reflect their personalities. There are numerous sites online with instructions for creating do-it-yourself (DIY) ‘hearrings’, or available to buy on Etsy. Designs feature a range of colours, pearl-clasped moulds, crystal or silver charms and chains and even diamond-encrusted attachments hanging from the tubing of the hearing aid. Wanting her daughter to accept the hearing aids, Suzannah Parker created a company selling hearing aid charms to act as ‘a doorway to the conversation about hearing aids and what they are’ (McGorry 2024). Jenni Ahtiainen, the designer and founder of Finnish-based DEAFMETAL, created the range of adaptive jewellery after struggling to accept her own hearing aids: ‘My hearing aids became part of me when I transformed them’ (Ahtiainen 2024). These fashion-forward designs are not new, of course. Deaf designers have been creating their own attachments and circulating instructions through deaf newsletters and community ephemera for decades.

Collectively, these DIY adaptations demonstrate the scope of personal aesthetics and design for assistive technologies, but more importantly, they showcase the creative possibilities that arise when pushed back against the medical gaze of disability—and the potential for inclusiveness when we incorporate the disabled gaze, much like how Sophie de Oliveria Barata used the medium of prosthesis to create highly wearable art pieces with her Alternative Limb Project. Could there be bolder approaches that completely redesign the shape of hearing aids? College students offer instructables for reshaping hearing aids into conspicuous animals—hummingbird, whale, bat, giraffe and elephant—creating concept prototypes for bringing ‘more self-esteem to hearing-impaired group [sic] because their animals remind them of their capabilities and worthiness’ (Hearing Aid Formation). Patronising statement aside, the design concept is interesting, but likely only appealing to children or individuals who want bold, unique creations; still, there is no indication as to whether this design hampers the functionality of the hearing aid. Even Alice Turner’s Amplify, a ‘socially inclusive design’ that received rave reviews, is reliant on bone conduction technology and not suitable for all deaf people.

Designer Lauren Regolini collaborated with jewellery designers to create hearing aid attachments for a charity event for Telethon Speech & Hearing featuring deaf models wearing gorgeous pieces that were an indication of a futuristic conception of hearing aids reconceptualised as everyday accessories Regolini’s design, however, was not meant to expand to a market. Deaf transgender artist Chella Man, on the other hand, created a similar concept to accentuate the hearing aid or cochlear implant as an art form, partnering with Private Policy, a genderless Asian-led fashion brand (Allaire 2021). The handmade, flexible gold-plated designs launched in 2021 with sculped ear cuffs to be attached to hearing aids, priced between US$330 and US$620, with 50% of sales going to the Deaf Queer Resource Center. As expensive as these were, again, they were a limited edition. Recently, French deaf designer Kate Fichard, owner of PAIRED, used three-dimensional printing to apply strong design to hearing aids beyond technology and performance. Winner of the Grand Prix du Jury Swarovski in fashion accessories in 2018, PAIRED designs aim to ‘bring the world of jewelry to audio devices’ through the line of EarWear. Of all the products available, the ‘shell’ for hearing devices is sold out (and have been for a while, because I was even willing to spend the €350 on them!).

Does this mean deaf futures are limited? Or is beauty merely fleeting? Whether it is EarWear or HearWear, these designs prompt us to view deafness technologies as objects on the same scale as how spectacles were rebranded as ‘eye wear’. Above all, they ask us to shift our ableist conceptions of deaf people as always wanting invisible devices. That deaf people should feel compelled to disguise their impairment with an invisible technology says a lot about how deafness is stigmatised. Jewelled hearing aids are not new creations, nor is the use of fashion and style to draw attention to disabled bodyminds. To consider these designs for deaf future, however, means we need to reconsider how hearing aids are perceived to claim, and own, deaf pride.