Seiichi Miyake had a friend who was losing his sight. In 1965, the engineer from Japan’s Okayama Prefecture spent his own money developing a solution, according to CNN. Today, that solution is under your feet in countless cities worldwide.
The problem Miyake set out to solve was that cities gave blind pedestrians almost no warning before something dangerous. A curb leading into traffic. The edge of a train platform. A stairwell. None of it announced itself to someone navigating with a cane or by touch.
Photo credit: Serhat Beyazkaya/Unsplash
His answer had two parts. Raised dots meant stop—danger ahead. Long, parallel bars meant keep going—this path is safe. Both could be felt through the sole of a shoe or the tip of a cane. He called them Tenji blocks, after the Japanese word for braille.
The first installation went in on March 18, 1967, on a street outside the Okayama School for the Blind, as Newsweek reported. It was just one street in one city. Tokyo and Osaka adopted the idea soon after. Within about a decade, Japan National Railways required tactile paving on every platform in the country.
The yellow was a deliberate choice. Miyake was designing for people with partial sight as well as total blindness, and the high-contrast color is easier to see for someone who can still make out shapes and colors.
Miyake was born in 1926 and died in 1982 at age 56. The United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, and India didn’t adopt tactile paving until the 1990s, so he never lived to see most of its impact. The Americans with Disabilities Act now requires warning tiles on sidewalks, crosswalks, curb ramps, and rail platforms nationwide. In London, they run outside the British Museum and Buckingham Palace.
Google marked the 52nd anniversary of the first installation with a Doodle on March 18, 2019. For many people outside Japan, it was the first time they learned Miyake’s name.
The friend’s name was never made public. According to the CDC, roughly 7 million Americans live with vision loss, about 1 million of them blind. Every one of them walks on something a man created for one person he knew.
