Navigating bustling public transit spaces can be a challenge for individuals with visual impairments, particularly if the place is unfamiliar or the usual routine has been altered. This fall, Ustwo, the digital-product design studio behind the popular Escher-inspired app Monument Valley, recently teamed team with the Royal London Society for Blind People's (RSLB) Youth Forum to create Wayfindr. The nonprofit joint venture aims to develop a first-of-its-kind open standard for use by third-party developers to build better audio wayfinding tools. This month, the pair announced a trial of the Wayfindr standard in London's Euston Underground station; in March 2015, they'd tested the system using Bluetooth beacons and a companion smartphone app in the city's smaller Pimlico station. The larger trial, coupled with a recent $1 million grant from Google's Global Impact Challenge: Disabilities, will help to facilitate the standard's planned 2016 launch as well as expand its scope to include healthcare and retail applications. "These standards will aim to build consistency into a complicated environment, similar to what Massimo Vignelli’s Graphics Standards Manual did for New York’s subway system in 1970," Wired explains. "The guidelines will focus on technical aspects (how many beacons per square foot, what’s the proper placement, that sort of thing), but also define the language and phrasing used in audio directions."[Wired + Ustwo]
ICYMI: Our picks of the best holiday and year-end gifts for the design-minded in your life. [ARCHITECT]
Architects and designers sound off on how the profession could help to mitigate the built environment's contributions to and the effects of climate change in light of this week's climate summit in Paris. [Curbed]
Frank Lloyd Wright is known for his work across the Windy City and its nearby suburbs, so it seems fitting that a map of Chicago's elevated train system—which neatly deposits riders in the Wright havens of Oak Park, Ill., and Hyde Park, Chicago, among others—would be designed using the 20th-century architect’s trademark color palette and geometries. [CityLab]
If the athletes in the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro look a bit sluggish during competition, it could be because their home countries didn't pay to air condition their rooms. The Games needs to cut roughly $520 million in spending due primarily to Brazil's nation-wide economic recession and the fact that the host country typically foots the bill for cost overages. Although temperatures during the winter in the Southern Hemisphere can reach into the 90s F in Rio, mechanical air cooling has been deemed expendable. [ESPN]
Swiss designer Yves Béhar, who leads the San Francisco and New York–based industrial design firm Fuseproject, was honored with the second-annual Design Miami Design Visionary Award for his humanitarian design work, which includes the One Laptop Per Child and See Better To Learn Better campaigns. [Design Miami 2015]
