Touching the Stars: Designing Tactile Symbols for Space Flight and Beyond

Cooper Hewitt’s Give Me a Sign exhibition explores the history of graphic symbols as documented by industrial designer Henry Dreyfuss in his Symbol Sourcebook: An Authoritative Guide to International Graphic Symbols (1972). This program expands upon the symbol lexicon covered in the Symbol Sourcebook to include tactile symbols, used by people who are blind or have low vision, as well as people with other complex disabilities. Like their 2D counterparts, these symbols quickly convey important information, and they are often developed through collaborative and iterative design processes.
AstroAccess, a project dedicated to promoting disability inclusion in human space exploration, collaboratively designed a tactile symbol system to be used by blind astronauts. Join Dr. Sheri Wells-Jensen, linguist and participant in AstroAccess, and Steve Landau, founder of Touch Graphics, in conversation with blind tech educator and activist Chancey Fleet to learn more about the design process for this project and for tactile symbol systems in general.
Panelist's:
Chancey Fleet -
Chancey Fleet is a blind tech educator and activist based in Brooklyn. She is the founding Assistive Technology Coordinator at the New York Public Library, where she runs a free peer-powered tech coaching service that connects library patrons with print-reading disabilities to 150 hours of one-to-one coaching each month; curates a rotating selection of workshops on tech topics with accessibility in mind; and runs the Dimensions Lab for free and open tactile graphics creation. Fleet is a 2017 Library Journal Mover and Shaker.
Steve Landau -
Steve Landau first learned about how raised line diagrams are used by the blind as a substitute for visual graphics from working with Karen Luxton Gourgey of City University of New York in 1998. Soon after that, Landau founded Touch Graphics to develop new methods for printing tactile graphics. Today, Landau has assembled a group of skillful and energetic collaborators to create tactile signs, exhibits, maps, and classroom aids, which communicate spatial information through the sense of touch.
Dr. Sheri Wells-Jensen -
Dr. Sheri Wells-Jensen is an associate professor of Linguistics at Bowling Green State University in Bowling Green, Ohio. She served as the Library of Congress / NASA 2023 Baruch S. Blumberg Chair in Astrobiology. Her research focuses on disability representation in aerospace, tactile design for  wayfinding in zero G, and cognition and language.