Innovation
Impaired vision does not prevent you from enjoying the music at Roskilde Festival, but it can make your toilet visit more challenging. DTU students have come up with an idea which will improve your comfort when nature calls at a festival.
In the development process, the group received valuable input from a person with visual impairment, and it has been great to have the idea tested at this year’s festival:
“We plan to use the collected data to create an improved version of our product that incorporates the aspects of our prototypes that worked best,” Christian Stampe says.
The group would like to have a final version ready for next year’s festival—an initiative which is welcomed by 33-year-old Kenneth Schack Banner, who is a board member of the youth organization of the Danish Association of the Blind and a Roskilde festivalgoer for the past three years. He is blind and believes the map has great potential, because as he says:
“No one wants to feel their way in a toilet where you cannot be sure how how clean it is.”
Since there are no standard icons for common toilet fixture and fittings—such as a flush button or a toilet seat as well as the optional extras found in a disabled toilet—Kenneth Schack Banner believes the key to success will be to design icons that make it easy to both quickly and accurately decode the various elements.
Once the group has cracked the code to make a well-functioning toilet map, the members hope to develop a standard library of icons that can be combined on tactile maps for other types of rooms.
“We found out that this does not currently exist,” Christian Stampe says.
This is the 13th year that DTU students have used Roskilde Festival as a laboratory to test their innovative and sustainable technical solutions to challenges in relation to everything from water supply and waste sorting to acoustics and accessibility, to energy consumption and recycling.
At this year’s festival, a total of 20 projects participated, all aiming to improve the festival experience.
Facts
The latest research shows that there are approximately 32,000 citizens in Denmark who live with a visual impairment. Of this group, approximately 12,500 are blind or severely visually impaired, which corresponds to the Danish Association of the Blind’s membership criterion of a maximum of 10 per cent of normal vision when corrected by optics.
Source: Danish Association of the Blind