When you walk into a retail store to buy, say a t-shirt, you head to the counter, tell them you need a t-shirt of a particular size, colour and design. You pick the one you like, ask for the price, pay and leave. Picture a similar store, except for you need to talk! Three students of National Institute of Design (NID) – Ahmedabad modelled a ‘silent retail store’ that would employ speech and hearing impaired (SHI) persons.
The model store was situated for a day on Tuesday, on the NID campus itself, where five students from Blind People’s Association (BPA), who were roped-in for executing the project, retailed t-shirts and diaries.
“As a customer walks into the store, three blocks will be placed on a counter – each describing different colours, design motifs and sizes. The customer picks up three blocks of preference and hands it over to the next counter, where a team of two people would paint the design on the t-shirt and hand it over within minutes,” said Aishwarya Narvekar, a seventh semester product design student at NID- Ahmedabad, one of the three participants.
The project was implemented as part of a compulsory course – Design for special needs – by Aishwarya along with two others – Avanee Joshi and Pankaj Yadav.
“Initially, we conducted a vocational training for mentally-challenged students. That’s when the idea struck. We visited a few hotels and stores which employ SHI persons and we noticed that they’re mostly into repetitive jobs and hardly interact with customers,” explained Pankaj. “The idea was to design something which helps engage SHI persons with the customers, without any verbal interaction. This store therefore, was a concept where abled people would not need to utter a word and yet get their work done. Moreover, the idea of customising a t-shirt or a diary would not just engage the customer but even the SHI person in something meaningful and creative,” he added.
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