Sensory Pathways

A solution by Royal College of Art submitted to Tourism for all

An open data set of Inclusive Tourism routes around Angers that heighten different sensory experiences for integration into popular tourism apps and specialist accessibility apps

(Pitched: 15/04/2018)

One Page Summary

Part of the excitement of tourism and travel is the multi-sensory experience of being in a completely new destination. The historic sights and beautiful sunsets, the sounds of chatter and daily life in the marketplace, the textures of cobbled streets and ancient buildings or the smells and tastes of street food or fine cuisine.

Yet much of the detail of these sensory experiences is lost in many modern-day tourist services that focus on mobility and the visual aspects of experiencing a city. Tools for disabled people predominantly focus on accessibility issues. Whilst important, these very practical mobility concerns mean the whole sensory experience involved in visiting new places is overlooked.

This project is a partnership between the Helen Hamlyn Centre for Design at the Royal College of Art in London and the Girobussola Association based in Bologna. The Helen Hamlyn Centre for Design who will lead the project have a 26-year history in Inclusive Design – creating products, services and environments that meet the needs of the widest number of people possible, without the need for specialist design or adaptation. The Girobussola Association was founded in 2013 by Marta Giacomoni who has helped her visually impaired father and uncle travel the world over the last few decades. The Association organises tours of European and international destinations for visually impaired people. These tours are created with devices that bring the city to life through heightening the experience of the other senses apart from sight.

The aim of this collaboration will be to further develop these sensory toolkits for all senses to create a digital output, ‘sensory pathways’. For example, a visually impaired person may choose a route that heightens the tactility of the city such as walking on the cobbled streets and feeling the different textures of the city, whilst a wheelchair user may avoid the cobbled streets and instead opt to heighten the visual aspects of their trip – seeking accessible points with great views.

In practical terms, this will be delivered in the form of a developer-ready dataset, available under open licence, of tourist routes around the city of Angers and other tourism destinations within the Pays de la Loire that heighten particular senses.

As described in the challenge, attempts to capture the accessibility data of all buildings (accommodation, eateries and tourist destinations, to name a few) are rarely complete or up-to-date; nor does this address how people move between places and really experience their geography. By focusing on sensory pathways; co-designed with disabled people; we aim to deliver high quality accessibility and sensory data for the built environment and buildings surrounding each pathway. This will result in a high value output for the user, and raise awareness of the need for tourism infrastructure that considers different abilities.

Additionally, by creating an open dataset rather than another app, we avoid both duplicating the functionality aspects of products already out there, and competing with them when we could be helping to improve them. Our dataset can instead be incorporated into existing apps
such as Citymapper, Google maps or specialist disability apps to allow people to choose a route around the city that benefits them and their abilities.

To realise our solution, we would engage with the end users of our dataset to include people with a range of different abilities such as mental health conditions, sight loss, hearing loss and mobility issues. We would identify the pathways with these groups before developing these insights into prototypes that can then be tested with the same group.

This approach has been successfully realised in a physical form by our partner Marta Giacomoni through her business The Giacomoni Association. In order to successfully translate The Giacomoni Association’s approach to tourism into a scalable digital output, Marta will advise The Helen Hamlyn Centre for Design (HHCD) so that the project benefits from her invaluable experience of developing tourist itineraries and tools.

HHCD have a long history of working with disabled people on projects. The last project, The Great British Public Toilet Map came out of a similar proposal where existing apps and websites were incomplete and the data not available. By combining available data, direct requests for data and working with the public to generate new information, the map has reached a critical mass of data to be not only sustainable but the largest database of toilet information in the UK, soon to be available under open licence so it can be incorporated into apps and reach the end users through their preferred interfaces.

By bringing the same approach to Sensory Pathways, we are also allowing the data to be used by apps which may be tailored to specific disabled groups through their interface, ensuring no one is excluded at the point of delivery.