Designed to be accessible: reading art through touch
The Panels FORMAL TACTILE WORKS aim to give all visitors access to direct knowledge of the cultural heritage, through solutions specifically designed and tested to facilitate users’ aesthetic experience and encourage enjoyment of the pictorial artistic heritage.
The exciting experience of also “seeing” through touch artistic works has guided and inspired the design and shape of these panels, adopting original solutions developed through the fruit of the work and experience gained by our team over many years of working on these issues.
I PTactile Rings proposed by CITISLAB are presented as an innovative solution in the long-standing search for methods and supports that can promote theaccessibility within museums and exhibition areas and offer opportunities for inclusiveness in visitor paths. Our products, in fact, do not specifically target users with special needs but are by their very nature created for any type of visitor using easily understandable forms and language.
The implementation of panels of formal tactile works within exhibition routes also facilitates the inclusiveness of students with disabilities during school trips by encouraging class collaboration and constructive discussion among pupils. These tools, made available to teachers of schools of all levels, can become a useful support in the study of art history, architecture and drawing.
The transposition of works of art
I PANELS FORMAL TACTILE WORKS are the ideal tool for the tactile transposition of pictorial works through relief drawing. This type of panel is particularly suitable for works of art such as portraits or compositions consisting of a few figures or elements placed in space.
The relief drawing makes accessible to all representation of the painting, allowing anyone to easily relate to the artwork. Through lines, dots and textures perceptible by touch it is possible to represent and, therefore, understand and interpret even complex, three-dimensional objects/subjects according to the same approach as reading a text with the hands via Braille writing.
The tactile panels that CITISLAB develops possess all the characteristics dictated by the rules of good execution of tiflological tools that make them effective and universally accessible the sign, such as: correct implementation of the reliefs and braille writing, preparation of simplified drawings but with non-superficial content, clarity in the contour lines of the figures, and respect for the proportions of the elements. In addition, the tactile panels we propose comply with current laws and regulations regarding the usability of places and overcoming and eliminating the architectural barriers.
Accessibility and Inclusion in Museums
In designing our tactile panels the challenge we set ourselves was to study an accessible language able to return, as far as possible, the narrative, emotion, specificities and values of the individual paintings. The preparation of the design of each panel is always preceded by the critical reading of the painting in question, carried out in close collaboration with the curators and art historians of the museums in order to identify those elements and/or figures capable of conveying in an immediately comprehensible way the meaning of thework of art and its symbolic, and which at the same time lend themselves most effectively to tactile communication.
Our panels take advantage of different heights in relief to deconstruct the image into its main elements or depth planes (foreground, background and background) rendered, in the case of FORMAL TACTUAL WORK PANELS through simplified relief drawing. The foreground elements have a greater thickness than the background elements, which are identified through relief textures. Each thickness in relief is associated with a different colored background so as to facilitate the reading of the drawing even by visually impaired users. Particular care is taken in choosing the colors used, checking their level of contrast.
Through these products any visitor, whether sighted whether visually impaired whether blind, has the ability to investigate individual parts of thework of art progressively reconstructing the image in its entirety. It can also appreciate and grasp those details that often escape initial analysis.
The decomposition into levels is constituted, therefore, as a path guided reading of the perspective spatiality of the work, simplified in the succession of planes, aimed at inclusively approaching visitors to the knowledge of the artistic heritage housed within a museum.
The tactile exploration of the panels through a process of discovery and analysis by parts allows: the blind the progressive construction of the mental image of the drawing and the sighted the deepening of the global image acquired by sight.