The archive · Product Ideas · Product decision · 2024–2025
Senseiforall's Sensei maps each room as a touchable surface for blind navigation
Senseiforall designed tactile wall and floor surfaces that depict specific rooms, so visually impaired people can find their way by touch.
Senseiforall
What it had to solve
Interior spaces stay closed to visually impaired people because the wayfinding in them is written for sight: signs, colours and maps. Sensei set out to make those spaces inclusive by giving each room a form people can read with touch.
How it works
Interior wayfinding usually assumes sight: signs, colours and maps say nothing to a visually impaired person arriving in an unfamiliar corridor. Sensei tackles the need for more inclusive spaces by designing a range of tactile wayfinding surfaces that depict a particular room in an interior space.
Each surface stands for one destination, and five have been designed so far: corridor, washroom, emergency exit, cafeteria and elevator. The same tactile code can be placed on walls, where a person reads it with their fingers, or on the floor, where someone with a white cane feels it underfoot.
The D&AD awards archive preserves the system under Future Impact and records no installation statistics. The case stands on the access idea: a visitor who cannot see still receives the same spatial information as everyone else, through a surface added to architecture that already exists.
Why it lands
- Touch carries the same destination information sight carries, so a blind visitor is no longer left out of the signage system.
- Walls for the hand and floors for the white cane give two ways to meet the same room-code.
- The five chosen rooms are where certainty matters most: the exit, washroom, elevator, cafeteria and corridor.
- Because the surfaces attach to existing walls and floors, inclusive wayfinding can be retrofitted rather than designed in from the start.
What it did
The D&AD awards archive files Sensei under its Future Impact work and records no installation numbers. The documented outcome is the system itself: five tactile room-codes that turn existing walls and floors into navigational aids, making inclusive wayfinding a matter of adding surfaces rather than rebuilding buildings.
What you can take
When a space excludes people by assuming sight, add a second channel for the same information, touch, instead of waiting for the building to be rebuilt.
Since then
Sensei's page in the D&AD awards archive, listed under Future Impact, reports no installation or trial numbers. The documented aftermath is the design's entry into the archive: five tactile surfaces depicting a corridor, washroom, emergency exit, cafeteria and elevator, mountable on walls for the fingers or on floors for the white cane, as a reusable answer to wayfinding that works without sight.
Sources
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