THE RUBIK CUBE FOR BLIND
Year of completion: 2004
Designer: Mahendra Chauhan
Award: Best design product
Rado Design Excellence Award
The product helps the blind person to recollect and relive the memories. It is similar to a photo album, which helps one to travel back in different points in our life. For the blind, tactile and auditory responses were used to replay memories instead of visual imagery of a photo album. hence, instead of pictures product has a different tactile and auditory responses to recollect and replay memories.
The product is a time traversing device for the blind, preserving all the intuitive, elegant and aesthetic qualities of interacting with a purely vision based time traversing products. Using the construction of a 'Rubik's Cube' , the system is designed to understand the actions and intentions of the person using it.
Concept Direction:
Product is a Rubic cube with braille format push-pull tactile button in all the six faces. These tactile buttons can be pushed or pulled to create a word in braille. Since product is for blind, instead of colours product has a different tactile and auditory response to collect memories. It is a cube of 8 cm, which is made of 26 smaller cubes which are fixed to rotatable central spindle.
PROCESS:
- Select a texture from the face of the cube. Each texture describes a feeling of that moment.
- Punch in the word that describes the moment- Eg: Happy/anxious
- Record the surrounding sound.
Sound gets recorded and associated with those specific braille alphabets.
It can be only played back when same word is formed again. The captured memories are relived when the sound is played back.
TECHNOLOGY:
Sound is recorded and stored in its internal memory and cloud based system using Wifi.. On the press of the central record button, the circuit is activated.
