I was very lucky to take the course “Design For Social Change,” with Ess Mckee in the Spring of 2022. There I was placed in a group and tasked with the goal to find an issue on IUPUI’s campus and create a design to solve it. My group and I then discovered how difficult it was for visually impaired students to travel around campus, especially when it came to making their way through buildings.
We got into contact with Indiana University's Adaptive Educational Services, where we were able to talk to the lead designers of tactile maps for IU Bloomington, where we got information on what would work best to make the experience for visually impaired more pleasant. After this we found that creating interior tactile maps would better help these students navigate individual buildings. To start for our prototype we began designing the interior of Herron, the building we were most familiar with.
Initially we designed the map on Rhino 7 to prepare for 3D printing, we soon found out that this wasn’t possible in Herron’s TIMI lab, so we moved onto Adobe Illustrator to prepare for laser engraving.
While we restarted the physical design process in Illustrator and began production, we got into contact with the Accessible Education Services. There they helped us send out a newsletter out to visually impaired students in hopes to get feedback on our prototype. That’s where we met Lexi: a legally blind senior at IUPUI.
Lexi was very happy to hear that we were doing this project, especially since she is also a wheelchair user and had an even harder time navigating campus. She was able gave us great feedback on what was legible and what to fix.
While we were unsuccessful to get IUPUI to implement similar maps around campus, we hope that one day they will create an experience that makes life on campus just a little bit easier for its visually impaired students.