Design in the dark 3

March 17 2009 / 18:00

The architecture school Sint-Lucas Gent has an international project called "Design in the dark" which focuses on design and architecture for blind persons. One of the tasks within the project was to create a scale model of the new city centre of Gent.
The scale model is made to be touched by blind people so they can feel how the centre will change for them. One of the challenges was to create a better experience for blind people that want to get all information. We came with the solution to add buttons in the scale model that either activates lights (for the ones that can see contrasts) and / or sound.
The final result was tested and approved by blind persons. The city of Gent also saw the result and presented it on a press conference with lots of positive feedback. All details about the project you can find here: http://www.gent.be/eCache/WBS/1/37/084.cmVjPTE0Njg4OQ.html
We wired the scale model as you can see on the pictures and used led lights and push buttons. All the wires go to a central point and are connected to a Velleman experiment board which is then again connected through USB to the computer.
We wrote software that reads the inputs of the buttons and processes it. The software can then play a movie, presentation, sound or activate lights.