Cannes Lions 2024: Design winners /

An urban wayfinding system to help blind people navigate the streets of Miraflores, Lima, has won the Grand Prix in Design at this year’s Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.

In Peru, around 950,000 people are visually impaired and another 145,000 are blind. However, there has been little in the way of inclusive urban development, leaving them to rely on constant assistance to locate basic services and nearby businesses.

Working with the Miraflores District Municipality, cement brand Cemento Sol and Circus Grey Peru transformed the pavements in Miraflores by installing a system of tactile tiles – each one with distinct bumps indicating the adjacent businesses or service.

The team taught blind and partially-sighted people how to use the SightWalks system, helping them to identify essential services and places like restaurants, banks, convenience stores, or pharmacies by counting the bumps with their canes.

The tiles were developed and co-created with associations dedicated to the visually impaired in Peru.

The project benefits over 500,000 visually impaired individuals, and so far covers over 75,000 sq m in the streets of Miraflores. The goal is to expand to different districts in Lima and other cities worldwide. The design and patent for implementation are open and free to use, available on the Cemento Sol website www.cementosol.com.pe.

Speaking about the qualities the jury was looking out for, Design jury president Fura Johannesdottir, global chief creative officer of Huge, highlighted the importance of simplicity. ‘How can we take a really complicated problem, whether it’s a business problem or a world problem, and actually bring to life a really simple solution that’s easy to understand, and really easy to engage with. And that was another thing that came out this year and we talked a lot about it… Is it simple enough? And sometimes simplicity actually means that you’re challenging the conventions and patterns that we have been stuck with and trying to reinvent, to simplify the interactions and experiences.’

On the SightWalks campaign in particular, and why it won, she said, ‘It comes to the simplicity of the solution for a problem that’s going to make lives better globally. It’s a very inclusive approach to design, you don’t have to translate anything, it’s just a global language that they’re creating, for people to be able to create signs.’ 

She added: ‘It was also the choice of medium – creating patterns in cement, to be able to create the design solution for your particular audience, that's really why we chose it as it is innovative in terms of medium. It is solving a problem, it is inclusive, and it can be applied tomorrow, globally, it's ready to be used. That's the beauty of it, it’s open source, they’re not going to try to own the solution.’

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