Designing in the Dark: How to Help Congenitally Blind People to Design

During the eight years of my experience as a product designer, I have come across many challenges in design and other aspects of problem-solving. Some were relatively easy, others required more time and effort. However, there was one problem that bothered me the most, as it remained unsolved for years. It had nothing to do with my professional career or academics, but was rather a personal call that made me feel responsible as a designer. Today, I may have opened the door towards its solution.

My name is Aren Khachatryan and four years ago I challenged myself to design a system for the visually impaired to recognize color, interact with geometric shapes and use that same technology to perform design work.

In this article, I will explain my approach, challenges that I faced, and solutions in resolving this issue. There is also a video interview at the end, where I explain what made me think about this problem and how I came up with a potential solution.

The Problem

a. Describe color to a person who was born blind.
b. Help them further, by teaching how to use that knowledge to design a poster, book cover, magazine layout, UI elements or other artwork.

Research

Over 80% of all the information we receive is visual.

Admittedly, there are visually impaired artists who create amazing works of art, but nearly…