The archive · Product Ideas · Product decision · 2023–2025
Cemento Sol's coded pavement tiles guide blind Peruvians — Cannes Lions 2024 Grand Prix
Sightwalks: tactile cement tiles whose line counts tell blind pedestrians what shop or service is beside them.
Cemento Sol (Unacem Perú) · Circus Grey Perú
What it had to solve
Peru has 1.8 million people with visual disabilities and almost no accessible streets. Cemento Sol, a cement brand whose stated purpose is safety and quality of life, needed a way to make that purpose tangible through its own product.
How it works
Peru has 1.8 million people with visual disabilities, yet its streets lack accessible infrastructure. Cemento Sol, the country's cement brand, and agency Circus Grey Peru turned that gap into a product: Sightwalks, a new podotactile tile system that complements standard tactile paving.
The code is embedded in the tiles themselves. A blind pedestrian counts tactile lines to identify what is beside them — banks, pharmacies, restaurants, hospitals — and reads vertical marks above or below the lines to know whether the entrance is on the left or right. The tiles were developed and tested with Peru's Union of the Blind and the NGO Yo Soy Tus Ojos.
More than 100 tiles were installed in the busiest triangle of Miraflores, Lima. Crucially, the designs and patents were released as open source and free, so any city or organization in Peru or abroad can replicate them without paying the brand.
The work won the Design Grand Prix at Cannes Lions 2024 — Peru's first ever Grand Prix — along with Gold Lions in Outdoor, Media and Brand Experience; at El Ojo de Iberoamérica 2024 it won the Grand Ojo in Design and Sustainable; and it collected eight D&AD Pencils in 2025.
Why it lands
- The solution is the product: cement tiles are what the company makes, so the campaign lives inside its own core business rather than in an ad.
- It is low-tech and scalable — a cane and a counting system, no electronics — so any city can install it cheaply.
- Releasing the design without copyright turns a commercial campaign into shared infrastructure and multiplies its reach.
- It was co-created with blind people's organizations, so the code matches how cane users actually navigate.
What it did
The system won the Design Grand Prix at Cannes Lions 2024 — Peru's first — plus Golds in Outdoor, Media and Brand Experience, the Grand Ojo Design at El Ojo 2024, and eight D&AD pencils in 2025.
What you can take
A brand's core material can be the message: instead of an ad about inclusion, encode inclusion into the product itself — and give the design away so it scales.
Since then
Sightwalks became Peru's first Cannes Lions Grand Prix in June 2024 and kept winning through 2025 (Grand Ojo Design at El Ojo, eight D&AD Pencils). Unacem's commercial manager said the recognition would push more municipalities to adopt the tiles, and the open-source format left the system free to spread beyond Lima.
Sources
- El Ojo Design celebra Veredas que guían, de Circus Grey
- Unacem y Circus Grey ganan Grand Prix en Cannes Lions 2024: las claves para alcanzar este galardón internacional
- Grey Scores 12 Pencils at D&AD
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