Can This Striking High-Contrast Furniture Design from Thai Homeware Brand to Help the Visually Impaired?

According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), over 1,300 million people worldwide currently have visual impairment problems. In Thailand alone more than three million are affected. Visual impairment is one of the most common disabilities, caused by a variety of factors including injury, family history and health-related complications, and most commonly affecting people in their old age. Those who suffer from this condition find that it affects their daily lives, even in their own home, as everyday items are blurred out such as kitchen sinks, cutting boards, toilets, chairs and lamps. When their eyes cannot identify each furniture and its function, all the furniture in the home is rendered useless and a hazard.

HomePro is a home furniture and white goods retailer in Thailand. As part of their mission to ensure help people live a better quality home life, they want to help everyone 'live fully' in their own home. And that includes people with visual impairment.

That's why HomePro collaborated with BBDO Bangkok, the creative agency who helped to develop a new type of furniture that helps those affected by impaired vision.

When developing furniture for people with a vision impairment, BBDO discovered that 90% of all the furniture in the world uses similar colour shades in their components, resulting in very low colour contrast in each piece. To people with lower visual ability, the furniture would just blend into the environment and become unrecognisable.

They created the 7:1 Furniture Collection – the furniture made to be seen by the vision-impaired. The collection uses a 7:1 colour contrast ratio; a contrast level that makes a object most accessible to people with this disability. BBDO used an international vision enhancement method by the organisation W3C, which makes a content or object visible at Level AAA standard (a highest level of visibility).

In addition to the colour contrast, a specially-designed outline system was developed to provide the furniture with a particular shape that identifies the function to its user. Combined with color-contrast design, the design system brings what was barely visible back into full vision.

7:1 Furniture Collection visually erases impairment at home for the visually-impaired, while still appealing to people with normal vision, allowing everyone to be living fully in their own home.