SOL CEMENT | SIGHTWALKS | 2024
Cement that lets you read the street / SOL CEMENT "SIGHTWALKS"
This is what happened when a cement company thought hard about what cement could actually do. Tap your cane on the ground, and the number of lines carved into the tile tells you what's there: "this is a bank," "this is a pharmacy." Two lines mean a bank, three mean a grocery store, four mean a pharmacy. Laid across the streets of Lima, Peru, it lets blind people walk the city on their own.
The problem
Peru has about 950,000 people who are blind or visually impaired, making it the most common physical disability in the country. Existing tactile paving could only tell you "go straight" or "stop"—it couldn't tell you what was actually around you. The brief given to the cement company Cemento Sol was simple: could cement help build a more inclusive city?
The insight
The company's main product becomes the sidewalk itself, and that same sidewalk becomes tactile paving. It's an idea where the product's own nature lines up directly with a real social problem. The Cannes jury described it as "a simple answer to a complex problem" and "a language that needs no translation."
The idea
It took two years to develop. The team tested prototypes together with organizations for the blind to make sure it would actually work on real streets. What they came up with: tiles where horizontal lines show the type of place, and vertical lines show which side of the street you're on. Two lines for a bank, three for a grocery store, four for a pharmacy. Just by counting the lines with a cane, you can tell what the shop next door is. The local mayor also backed bringing it to the city.
What happened
It won the Grand Prix in the Design category at Cannes Lions 2024, and also took Grand Prix honors at the London International Awards and the One Show. The design and patent have been made open source and released for free, so it can be copied and built anywhere in the world.
Afterthought
What's amazing is that this didn't just end as a campaign—it keeps living on as part of the city's actual infrastructure. Making it open source so anyone can use it shows just how serious this work really was. The necessity of the material, the urgency of the social problem, and the seriousness of actually building it—when all three come together, that's when a Grand Prix is born.
Awards
- Cannes Lions Grand Prix 2024
Featured in
- What Was Already There Became the MediumFrom chalk to banknotes: 11 media nobody had to buy
- The Ad Is Gone, But the System RemainsFrom a university for taxi drivers to a sidewalk you can read with a cane
