At this school in Bangkok, Thailand, every surface is a learning experience. The Pattaya Redemptorist School For the Blind enrolls students with varying levels of vision ability. Its goal is to help teach those students how to read and navigate the world around them.
The school enlisted Bangkok design studio Creative Crews to transform the building into a tactile experience where walls and floors become spaces for play and learning. Designed around the “pre-braille curriculum,” which helps young children develop tactile awareness and prepare for reading and writing braille, the school’s new additions include several perforated and magnetized walls onto which objects can be inserted and attached.
The tactile surfaces are in effect a white board, where kids can feel different types of “learning pins” including geometric shaped blocks and animal pegs. In the main classroom, the designers made all four walls and the floor into a “sensory cube” that students follow like a curriculum, where they learn tactile skills like the relationship between shapes, sizes, and weights.
According to Designboom, lighting in the main learning room is also calibrated to stimulate visibility in children with low vision, sound is piped in to simulate real-world environments, scented capsules teach students to identify smells like gas and fire, and the floor’s tiles are designed with Braille letters and numbers in English and Thai, turning the entire room into a brilliant multi-sensory experience. Neat!