Reading With Your Hands: Robotic Braille and Tactile Narratives

We use our senses to form an understanding of ourselves and the world. Vision and tactility inform cognition and perception of objects and environments. Yet there exist differentiations as to how perception is processed and formed, depending on unique and personal abilities for sensory cues. For people with low vision or blindness, tactile information processing posits a key approach to engage with and understand spaces, activities and interactions. And whereas a sighted person takes in the whole and details in parallel, a partially sighted or blind person feels details first and then assembles piece by piece and section by section, so that a mental representation or map can be formed. Described here is empirical research into establishing an understanding of tactility through transfers of images and information, towards surface patterns and textures, and integration of Braille text. In support of tactile literacy for reading and assessing images and letters, the research develops a surface archive of tactile patterns. It uses GH Grasshopper code to explore design variability for points, grids and line configurations and a six-axis ABB robot equipped with different routing tools for milling in timber. This surface archive is further extended towards a prototype series of ‘hyperartifacts’; multi-functional furniture objects that integrate different sets of visual or pictorial information that can be ‘decoded’ by sight, and tactile information to be deciphered by Braille experienced readers. This book documents a collaboration between Arkitektskolen Aarhus and The Institute for the Blind and Partially Sighted (IBOS). The exhibition shows high-end manufacturing using robots allowing us to produce patterns, textures and Braille text for storytelling. The book accompanies the exhibition at DOKKX, AArhus (Dec 10th to Jan 6th 2020), where visitors were invited to explore secret messages engraved in tactile plates, raised maps and wooden stools and could decode them by using touch and sight.