An orientation system designed by four Taiwanese students to help the visually impaired keep track of their direction while on the move was selected late last month as one of the eight best concepts submitted for this year’s iF Student Design Award.
The system, called “Blind Guider,” was designed and developed by four students at the National Taiwan University of Science and Technology. It was one of 16 Taiwanese projects awarded the iF Label, one of the world’s influential marks for young design talent.
The “Blind Guider” uses radio-frequency identification (RFID) technology to announce street names and the direction as the users walk on city streets.
If the orientation modules installed in guide tiles on streets are touched by a white cane, the location-related information is emitted over earphones and gives users audible directions.
One of the device’s developers, Ma Hui-chuan (馬彗娟), said she and her classmates came up with the idea after her dog scared a blind pedestrian off his course while she was walking the dog.
Ma and her teammates Cheng Yan-jang (程彥彰), Wang Chih-hao (王志皓) and Lee Yin-kai (李胤愷) jointly shared the prize money of 3,750 euros (US$4,213) given to each of the eight best designs among the 100 winning teams.
“A very simple design idea developed to build on and enhance an already existing system. The earphones can be quickly and easily used to provide guidance. With Blind Guider, visually-impaired users will experience a huge increase in quality of life,” the 73-member judging panel said in its evaluation of the orientation system.
About 12,000 works from 68 countries were admitted to the iF Student Design Award competition this year.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
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