Team leader
Adrian Berry - Factory Design
Team members
Toshiba Corporation (medical/healthcare products), Canon Inc. (industrial design), Clarion Co. Ltd (product design), Panasonic/Matsushita (product design), Toyota Motor Corporation (automobile design), Fujitsu Ltd (product design).
Lead user
Mrs Shirasaka, a blind housewife.
The issue
Like many visually impaired people, Mrs Shirasaka finds clothes shopping a chore - she must depend on the variable taste of others for advice on the colour, size and style of each garment and whether it suits her or not. At home, classifying her clothes and selecting an outfit poses problems. How can she tell what goes with what?
Seeing with Feeling - Tag Wear
The Tag Wear system is based on one already in use throughout Japan whereby differently shaped notches on prepaid travel and telephone cards indicate the value and type of card. As applied to clothing, the swing tag on a garment would have similar coded notches to indicate its size, colour and the context of wear - formal, casual, street, extreme sports and so on with the same information given in Braille. The barcode would deliver additional information and stores would hold a reference set of all the variations to enable them to give advice to their customers.
Importantly the tag could exist as a decorative feature in its own right as a single, double or triple loop of ribbon with the Tag Wear mark to show a brand's buy-in to the idea and its implementation in their clothing ranges. An RFID embedded in the Tag Wear sign outside a store would signal to shoppers that the system is in place.
