The students presented their proposals in front of a panel in the Student Centre

Emma Pearce, Tia Hodges and Siân Ramm impressed the judges with their design

The winning design uses symbols and/or texture so that people can feel them

As part of their Design Techniques in Practice module led by Dr Alexandre Rodrigues’, second-year undergraduate Product Design students were challenged to design new concepts for campus commercial signage. The new signs had to be accessible, sustainable, upgradable and mobile.

Nine groups of two to three students each presented their projects in front of a panel chaired by the Head of Commercial Services, Helen-Power-Hosking. Other members of the panel included:

• Emily Huns (Head of Careers, Employability & Entrepreneurship), 
• Nadia Pattenden (Policy Manager, Student Experiential Services) 
• and Wendy Ashall (Senior Lecturer in Anthropology, Global School).

The project, with a focus on inclusivity, revealed that people with various degrees of disability found the current campus navigation system challenging and, in some cases, impossible to follow.

The winning team, Emma Pearce, Tia Hodges and Siân Ramm, focused on accessibility for people with colour deficiency and visual impairment. They noticed that the current signs on campus are sporadic, which makes them difficult to find, and that the information on them is mostly visual (e.g. maps and texts).

As an alternative, their design works as a continuous system of pathways leading from key points across campus to each commercial services and with directional signs at every major intersection. Both signs and pathways use symbols and/or texture so that people can feel them with their feet or walking sticks and are easily differentiated. 

Emma, Tia and Siân impressed the judges with their extensive user-focused primary research which informed the criteria for their solution, and by having accessibility and inclusivity at the very heart of their innovative and feasible design.

 When asked how taking part in this competition had helped them to develop as product designers, Emma Pierce said: “This project has allowed us to learn how to work effectively as a team to come up with the best solution to a problem. It allowed us to combine our ideas as well as learn to compromise and overcome challenges. Working together, we’ve learnt new styles of working and new perspectives on how to design.”