How do people with visual impairment move and commute through the city?
Meld Studios was an Australian strategic design studio with a simple mission: designing better futures together.
This research was part of a broader internal initiative exploring what a city and its services might look like if they were designed by Meld Studios.
- An in-depth user journey capturing how people with visual impairments (VI) navigate a city.
- The work highlighted a key insight: boosting an individual’s confidence often has more impact than redesigning the physical environment.
Desktop Research
Recruitment of interview participants
Conducted User Research, interviewing six people; gathering their sight-loss story as well as focussing on and documenting their journey to the interview
Synthesis of the individual journeys into a single, representative user experience
A detailed, illustrated user journey showing how people with VI move through Melbourne—revealing their mental models of the city, orientation strategies, and the challenges they face. The research uncovered a strong link between someone’s confidence in commuting and when/how they lost their vision, as well as their desire for independence.
The findings point toward the need for deeper research into how individuals and families can be guided and trained to commute independently. Building confidence proved more transformative than redesigning the city, especially since not all cities offer the same support systems.
This was a deeply inspiring project. I’m grateful for the stories and experiences shared by each participant, and for the chance to learn how they navigate life with limited vision. I’ve had the opportunity to work with people with visual impairments across three countries (Scotland, India, and Australia) and it’s work I’m passionate about continuing.
