”A lot of what it takes to build a better city for the blind and visually impaired is simply the act of building better cities,” says Daniel Solomon ’26, a poly sci and urban studies student who has been legally blind since birth.
Solomon and his collaborators Zoe Goldemberg ’27 and Rishika Kartik ’26 are trying to bring attention to that through their project The Blind Urban Subject, a public art installation on Thayer Street and a research initiative that seeks to raise awareness and challenge misconceptions.
“The dream,” says Solomon, is that “the next time some change is proposed to the built environment of Thayer Street, people might think for a moment how this would impact blind people.” The installation at the corner of Thayer and Angell features the kind of binocular tower viewer you’d find at a scenic lookout—minus the quarter slot. “A tower viewer is a ubiquitous feature of sight-seeing,” says Solomon. When people see one, “they know they are supposed to look in it.”
Instead of augmenting the view, however, it purposefully impairs it. Goldemberg, a Brown-RISD dual-degree student, and her team of engineering and industrial design concentrators adjusted it to create four settings, one for each of the most common eye diseases in the U.S.: cataracts, glaucoma, macular degeneration, and diabetic retinopathy.
Solomon drew inspiration for the project from a course with Professor Lauren Yapp, for which he was tasked with examining how someone’s lived experience shapes the way they interact with urban life. He decided to pay a visit to bustling Thayer. “Will the car stop? Will the pedestrians walk when they’re supposed to walk, therefore I know that I can walk?” Solomon lists the questions he has to ask himself while navigating urban spaces. “It requires everyone to do what they’re supposed to be doing for blind and visually impaired people to go about urban life,” he explains.
Kartik, who is completing an independent concentration in disability design, connected with Solomon the summer before starting at Brown. The two friends have made great strides in creating spaces for the blind community, founding student group Blind@Brown, hosting panel discussions on blindness, and creating a group independent study project (GISP) titled “Blindness, Arts and Media.” When Solomon thought of the idea for the installation, he turned to Kartik; the two enlisted Goldemberg, a former GISP member, to handle the mechanics.
Until the installation is taken down on February 1, Solomon will be surveying participants under Yapp’s supervision and turning the data into a research paper. But it’s already clear the installation has had an impact. One morning, Kartik and Solomon saw a woman tearing up while peering into the tower viewer. Her mom had cataracts. “This whole time I was trying to help her, I didn’t know what she was seeing,” she told Kartik. “This was the first time I got to step in her shoes.”