Visionary | designing new age schools for blind students

TIMELINE:
Registration Deadline: 16th August 2021
Submission Deadline: 17th August 2021
Result Announcement: 14th October 2021
BRIEF:
Premise
The dawn of new-age progressive schools was started around the 1900s by John Dewey as a movement of bringing up kids in lab-like schools where they learn by doing. The model helped break the stereotypes of traditional conservative methods of education which belief in teaching through books and preset lessons.
But with passing time, the curiosity of children is far by leaps and bounds. Questions raised in the classes today are far more expansive as a generation compared to previous centuries. From being students following a certain curriculum, their rigour is challenging every dimension of learning. These times push for new means to learn constantly, no matter what the subject is.
This becomes a privilege for schools that have people who are able and can be provided such exploratory means of teaching.
But children who are differently/specially-abled and the facilities available to them are never pushed so far – nor even looked at in the same light.
Evolution
School for the blind has been around for a while in various informal to retrofitted scenarios. The first formal educational institute was established in 1795.
Before formally schooling blind children, only asylums were sought for these kids as the civilization did not know how to handle them. These schools had bare minimum braille scripts that only taught them manual crafts and menial work at large.
Today a lot of these blind children go to the same schools in their neighbourhoodsthat abled kids go to and are assisted by special faculties but still have the same environment and means.
The design attention that goes into such spaces is fairly limited to the users they are catering to.
What if we could bring equal curiosity and attention to the issue to this uncharted territory of barrier-freedesign? How would be a tailormade school for the blind be? How would the open/liberal values of today imbibe into the built fabric of these educational institutions?
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