Paolo Favaretto, Architect and President of IIDD, the Italian Institute for Design andDisability

IIDD’s Paolo Favaretto was commissioned by the Provincial Administration of Catania, Sicily, to install a Tactile Museum
in the city’s beautiful Le Ciminiere Cultural and Trade Fair Centre. He describes the project in this extract from his original design statement.

A Braille panel at the entrance to the ‘Le Ciminiere’ centre details the route to the museum, while also describing the other features of interest in the centre.

This museum is designed for all, to provide all visitors to Catania with a ‘pre-visit guide’ to the city: so it is not ‘just’ for blind visitors and not ‘just’ for other visitors and tourists. That means that it has to be physically accessible, of course: as the museum itself is on the first floor, a lift is a must.

The ground floor houses a service that provides information about visual disability, intended to link in with other comparable points in Europe. The intention is for this centre to house a library with all the latest information about visual disability and equipped with technology that enables blind or partially sighted people complete access to all printed material.

The museum itself is on the first floor and feature an electronic routing system coupled with passageways and other routing spaces identified by colour coding. The cables embedded under this floor provide impulses to a decoder connected to an earpiece and constitute the induction loop supplying information in various languages.

Visitors can choose the type of information they want to receive from the walk assistant, or they can choose to read the information in Braille.

Inside the museum is a series of displays and panels, featuring two and three-dimensional objects that can all be perceived by touch. In some cases the original objects are too delicate to be handled. In these cases, full-scale reproductions made of wood, plaster or other materials are provided, next to the source of an audio description, so that visitors can find out what they want to know about important architectural and historical pieces.

The museum will also contain a set of models of the city’s parks and public open spaces, featuring the seasonal smell of the plants and flowers that visitors will then experience ‘live’ when they go to the parks.

Published in Crisp & Clear No. 4, December 2000