Accessible Experiences. Designing Synaesthetic Access to Culture

Abstract

The experiences produced using environments, physical or cultural objects, change significantly in relation to the characteristics of the users, their skills and limits, as well as change in relation to the aesthetic preferences and the context of use, chosen according to the effectiveness and/or enjoyment of use.This text intends to address the issue of accessibility to a cultural asset in a museum context [12, 13], to highlight how designing a variety of experiential ways, of experiences based on different sensory registers, leads to broadening its accessibility also to users who, by necessity or by choice, they require specific conditions of use.The paper highlights and exemplifies – taking conventional cases and experiments conducted in the teaching of communication design – synaesthetic translations from the visual/figural to the auditory/verbal, and from the visual to the tactile applied to communicative artifacts, highlighting how the concept of translation – between sensory registers, between devices, between graphic formats – is the foundation of every experience that intends to be accessible.