Drishti

This began as a project for Design for Special Needs, a course at the National Institute of Design. Along with a coursemate, Mrudul Chilmawar, I spent time at the Blind People's Association of India and a few schools for the blind in Ahmedabad, not to test a solution, but to sit in on ordinary days.

Most of what we saw were people who had already adapted: folding notes a certain way, keeping a reference note in a separate pocket, asking a shopkeeper they trusted. The one problem nobody had adapted their way out of was the new notes. That was the thread we pulled on.

Across interviews at the association and the schools, six ways of reading a note by hand came up again and again: using a palm as a ruler, comparing an unfamiliar note against a known one, reading the paper's texture, folding it a specific way, holding it between two fingers, or, for people with some vision, reading colour.

None of these were things we taught anyone. They were things people had already worked out, mostly through trial and error, and mostly alone. We weren't designing for a blank slate; we were designing for a set of working habits that a currency redesign had quietly broken.

The Reserve Bank had added raised tactile marks (squares, triangles, circles) to the new notes as the intended fix. Several people told us the marks wore smooth within months of a note entering circulation, and were faint even when new.

We laid out every note in circulation as of January 2018 and measured them. Width, not the printed marks, was the one dimension that stayed physically consistent for the life of a note. The catch: a bigger note no longer meant a higher value the way it used to, because old and new series notes of different values were now similar widths. People's old instinct, bigger note means bigger value, had quietly stopped being reliable.

The earliest versions were paper and cardboard, cut to the exact width of each note category, just to prove the size logic held before investing in anything more precise. From there we moved to PP sheet models cut on a laser cutter, which held tolerances tight enough that the tool, not the note, could be trusted.

Seven major iterations followed, mostly arguing over placement: where the measuring slot should sit so a blind user could find it by feel on the first try, with nobody sighted to point it out. The version that stuck folds flat to about the size of a credit card, so it lives in a wallet instead of announcing itself as an aid.

Drishti sorts every note into one of three groups by width, old low-denomination notes, old high-denomination notes, and the new series, then uses height within that group to confirm the exact note.

It has no battery, no app and nothing to update, so it can't fail at the exact moment someone needs it, and it doesn't mark its user out in a queue the way holding a phone up to a note might.

Ranchod Soni, who heads the technology department at the Blind People's Association, called it the best workable solution available at the time. Vikram, who teaches at a blind school in Ahmedabad, valued that it taught easily because it built on knowledge people already had. Rahul, principal at a college for the blind in the same city, saw it as something young blind people would actually carry around, not leave in a drawer.

The work was later granted an Indian design patent (IN 305630, 2019), named a national runner-up for the James Dyson Award (2020), and the thinking behind it was published as “Designing for Inclusive Learning Experience” at the E3 Universal Design Conference in Florence. It also picked up local and national press coverage, including Times News Network and regional Gujarati and Hindi outlets.

What stayed with me longer than any of that was something one of the men we interviewed said, almost as an aside, while we set up yet another conversation: “But who will think about this small community?” I've carried that question into every enterprise project since. Design for the person with the least support, and the result tends to hold up for everyone else too.