Ikigai Daily
Menu
DriveAccessible design fact

Tactile paving, the raised studs and bars set into pavements and station platforms, lets blind and partially sighted people feel their way. Underfoot or through a cane, the pattern warns of a crossing or platform edge, or shows the way ahead.

UK Department for Transport

TechnologyHealthDesign

The story behind the card

Tactile paving was invented in Japan in 1965 by Seiichi Miyake, who was inspired by braille. The first blocks were laid in 1967 on a street in Okayama, near a school for the blind, and they spread across Japan's streets and stations. Other countries followed; Australia fitted them at every venue of the 2000 Sydney Olympics. In the most common system, rows of rounded studs mean 'stop and take care', while long parallel bars mean 'walk this way'. Countries use their own variations, so consistent layout matters: tiles in the wrong place can mislead the people they are meant to guide.

Türkçe oku
Kaldırımlara ve peronlara döşenen kabartmalı yüzeyler, görme engelli ve az gören insanların yollarını hissederek bulmasını sağlar. Desen ayakla ya da bastonla hissedilir; yaya geçidini ya da peron kenarını haber verir veya gidilecek yönü gösterir.

Kabartmalı yer döşemesini 1965'te Japonya'da Seiichi Miyake, Braille alfabesinden esinlenerek geliştirdi. İlk bloklar 1967'de Okayama'da, bir görme engelliler okulunun yakınındaki bir caddeye döşendi; sonra Japonya'nın sokaklarına ve istasyonlarına yayıldı. Başka ülkeler de ardından geldi; Avustralya, 2000 Sidney Olimpiyatları'nın bütün mekânlarına bu döşemeleri uyguladı. En yaygın sistemde sıra sıra yuvarlak kabartmalar “dur ve dikkat et”, uzun paralel çizgiler ise “bu yönden yürü” anlamına gelir. Her ülkenin kendine göre farkları olduğu için döşemelerin tutarlı yerleştirilmesi önemlidir: Yanlış yere konan bir döşeme, yol göstermesi gereken kişiyi yanıltabilir.

Sources and further reading

Background reading: Tactile paving
Get the mobile appAbout our cards

Related cards

These cards share a subject or reading mode with the card above.

DriveHealth

OXO Good Grips kitchen tools, launched in 1990, were designed with thick, soft handles for people whose hands hurt or grip weakly, and proved easier for everyone to use.

Sam Farber, a housewares entrepreneur who had retired, noticed that his wife Betsey, who had arthritis in her hands, struggled to hold an ordinary metal vegetable peeler. He worked with the New York design firm Smart Design, and the first 15 OXO Good Grips tools, including a swivel peeler, were introduced at the Gourmet Products Show in San Francisco in 1990. Their handles were made of soft, non-slip synthetic rubber, wide and oval so they would not twist in a wet or weak hand. The line sold far beyond people with arthritis and became a textbook example of universal design: making everyday things usable by as many people as possible without special adaptation.

Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design MuseumRead card
DriveHealth

The Jaipur Foot, a low-cost artificial foot of rubber and wood made in India since 1968, lets people who have lost a leg walk barefoot, squat and sit cross-legged.

It was designed in 1968 in Jaipur by P. K. Sethi, head of orthopaedics at Sawai Man Singh Medical College, and Ram Chandra Sharma, a local craftsman. Imported artificial feet were expensive and made for people who wore shoes and sat on chairs; they did not let wearers go barefoot, squat, sit cross-legged or work in muddy fields, all part of daily life for many poorer Indians. The Jaipur Foot has a wooden ankle and a rubber core under a vulcanised rubber skin shaped like a real foot. It costs about 45 US dollars to make and lasts roughly two to five years. The charity Bhagwan Mahaveer Viklang Sahayata Samiti (BMVSS) fits it free of charge, with financial help from the Indian government.

Science Museum / SmithsonianRead card
DriveTechnology

A QR code, the black-and-white square your phone scans, was invented in Japan in 1994 to track car parts in factories.

Masahiro Hara led the small team at the Japanese car-parts company Denso Wave that created the QR code. An ordinary barcode held only about 20 characters, and workers had to scan several of them on each box of parts, so the team wanted a code that held far more and could be read quickly from any angle. Hara has said the grid of black and white squares was inspired by the stones on a Go board. The three large squares in the corners use a pattern of black and white bands chosen because it almost never appears in print, so a scanner can find the code instantly and tell which way up it is. Denso Wave chose not to enforce its patent for standard codes, so anyone could use them, and phone cameras later carried them onto menus, tickets and payment screens.

DENSO WAVERead card
WonderTechnology

Unicode is the shared standard that gives every letter, symbol and emoji its own fixed number, so text written on one device reads the same on another.

Before Unicode, computers used hundreds of separate encodings, so the same number could stand for different letters on different systems, and text in another language often turned into strings of nonsense symbols. In 1987 Joe Becker of Xerox and Lee Collins and Mark Davis of Apple began planning a single universal character set. The Unicode Consortium was incorporated in California in January 1991, and the first volume of the standard appeared that October. Unicode 2.0, in 1996, broke the original 16-bit limit and made room for over a million code points, as the numbers are called, so that historic scripts such as Egyptian hieroglyphs could be added. Today it covers more than 170,000 characters in 175 scripts, though each one still needs a font that can draw it.

Unicode ConsortiumRead card
DriveArt

In 1931 Harry Beck, a draughtsman who had worked for the London Underground, redrew the Tube map as a diagram: straight lines, fixed angles and evenly spaced stations, ignoring real distances. Passengers found it far easier to read, and most metro maps today follow his idea.

Beck had worked as an engineering draughtsman in the Underground's signals office, drawing electrical circuit diagrams, and he designed the map in 1931 while laid off from that job. The Underground's managers were at first sceptical of an uncommissioned design that did not show real distances, and tried it only in a small pamphlet in 1933. Passengers liked it at once. Beck was paid ten guineas for the artwork and five more for the poster version (a guinea was one pound and one shilling), and he went on revising the map until 1960. Every Tube map now carries a line crediting his original 1931 design.

London Transport Museum / TfLRead card
Next card in the archiveA desire path is the unofficial track people wear into grass or soil by taking the same shortcut again and again. It often shows where planners put a path in the wrong place.Read next →