Client

Altos Tequila is a prominent brand known for producing high-quality tequila. The brand is recognized for its dedication to tradition, quality, sustainability, and its ability to produce versatile tequilas suitable for both sipping and mixing in cocktails.

Team

Camilo Montoya, Product Designer.
David Giraldo, Product Designer / Industrial Designer.

Context

In the city of Cali, Colombia, there are around ten thousand blind people walking the streets and sharing with their friends everyday.

They recognize that there are difficulties when they want to do tourism activities because the city infrastructure isn’t ready for them due to the lack of accessibility.

The “Zoológico de Cali” is one of the most important touristic places in Cali, but unfortunately, the experience doesn’t have the accessibility needed for blind or partially sighted visitors. And the aquarium is the most critical point, only offers visual stimuli to learn about the animals and don’t have accessible guides to walk around as a blind.

Objective

Design an interactive and accessible tourist experience for blind individuals visiting the exhibits at the “Zoológico de Cali” aquarium, enabling them to participate in the activity independently and satisfactorily.

Field work

The fieldwork involved 16 interviewed individuals, among whom in-depth and semi-structured interviews, focus groups, on-site observations, draw-it-yourself exercises, thinking aloud, and empathy exercises were conducted.

This work was divided into 4 stages: Understanding blindness within the context of Santiago de Cali, Illustrating the lifestyle of a blind person (motivations for tourism), Characterizing the accessible tourist offerings in Cali, and Analyzing the direct experience of a blind person in a tourist space.

As a result, the “Zoológico de Cali” aquarium, located in the eastern part of the city, was chosen as the intervention point for implementing the proposed system.

Main research

We visited the zoo with two blind people and one partially sighted person to tour the place and study the experience. We told them to think aloud their ideas and impressions in every exhibition, specially in the aquarium. Also, we did an immersive experience covering our eyes in the butterflies and birds exhibition to understand the experience as a blind person.

Discoveries

After the experience, we use all of the results to create design principles related to what we found:

Design principle
Seek of haptic stimuli

Haptic stimuli represents in blind people the creation of a cognitive image to understand their surrounding. That's why they love to touch statues or animals replicas in the tour, cause it represents, as they said, a valuable and remarkable experience.

Design principle
Engage thru sound

Blind people use their phones with screen readers such as “VoiceOver” and “TalkBack” to give them information about their navigation inside an app. This makes that they always want to get sound feedback in the experience, creating context of the exhibition, as the narrative stories do in some of them.

Design principle
High tech literacy for mobile apps

The use of social applications like Facebook, Whatsapp or Instagram, in the blind context, help them to keep close their friends to create blind community as they can do activities together like blind soccer, hiking, hear tv narrated series and more.

Design process

Considering that the aquarium is conceived as a space for learning about fish, our project focused on strengthening that connection. Thus, the concept of "Hictio" was born, inspired by the word "Hictiología", which refers to the study of fish.

Guided by this concept, we created various sketches and proposals for applications or interactive environments related to the study of fish. These proposals aim to provide users with the opportunity to learn more about these fascinating creatures: their lifestyles, diets, and habitats.

Final design

Hictio is a system of objects that offers an accessible interactive museography service to blind individuals at the Cali Zoo's aquarium. It allows them to enjoy a meaningful and autonomous experience while exploring the aquarium's exhibits, getting to know the displayed fish, and interacting with haptic interfaces and sound elements that enhance their learning.

The system of objects consists of: a mobile point of furniture with a compact computer inside, a mobile app, an RFID-tagged bracelet, and several BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy) units arranged in the space.

Product userflow

Hictio works using the smartphone app as a intelligent guide that will give you instructions to navigate the aquarium based on your position inside the different sections of the exhibition using proximity events.

After the user opens the app, Aurora (The assistant of Hictio) appears talking about the aquarium experience and how she will help the user to navigate thru the exhibition.

Then when the user will walk into the exhibition, they will start gathering the fishes by proximity. After gathering the information of 3 fishes, they can explore the facts of the fish in the main installation located in the middle of the aquarium.

In the Hictio installation, the user can connect the app to and specific fish using an NFC band that is the entry ticket to the zoo. When the connection is done, the user can start touching the fish to activate the narrative points that will show in the app part of the fish illustration and narrate a fact about it.

These features can be seen below.

Impact

The Hictio prototype was tested with blind individuals to assess their satisfaction and learning experience through a post-interaction survey. The survey results were then compared with their initial experiences during their visit to the aquarium.

In addition to meeting the evaluation criteria based on design principles, such as haptic stimulation for discovery, contextualized sound, autonomous interaction localization, and multi-user capability, Hictio outperformed various interactive installations used in 2018 for blind individuals in terms of accessibility.

The project was presented to the “Zoológico de Cali” for potential inclusion in the aquarium; however, despite our efforts, no conclusive meetings were held to secure approval for the project. Consequently, the project remained a case study, focused on enhancing the tourism experience for the blind community in Cali.

Conclusion

Implementing interactive design solutions that allow the blind population to enjoy the tourist offerings provided by the zoo contributes to the formulation of citizenship and fosters a culture of accessibility. It is crucial for this type of accessible tourism to continue growing in the city of Cali to cater to this underserved market.

The need of these individuals to feel part of society is evident in the way they use technology and social media as a means to feel included. The design of interactive products can leverage the familiarity these individuals have with technology to enhance the tourist experience within a particular place. This goes beyond recreational aspects and extends to offering information, facilitating movement, aiding spatial orientation, and assisting in emergency situations.