It’s been a wild May month so far for Outlook and we were off doing some cool things earlier in it.

This week on the podcast, we share the details of our May weekend in Toronto as a part of the Architecture & Film Symposium, 2023, which took place on May 6th and 7th, hosted by Toronto Metropolitan University Creative School’s Interior Design department. The theme this year was Intense Interiors and our exhibit was titled Outlook - A Multi-Sensory Installation, all based around the concept of mental mapping, a way of understanding and navigating one’s surroundings and of spacial awareness for blind people. And, in our exhibit, we displayed a number of tactile maps of interiors and exterior city layouts, a box of inclusive and accessible mixed chocolates with a braille legend to help demonstrate the point of our Outlook installation, along with a number of 3D objects and other materials explaining the real life lived experience of blindness, with a focus on other sensory modalities for understanding the world around us, to counteract the misconceptions of blindness which can be found in one of this event’s supplemental films: Blindness, 2008 (book authored by Jose Saramago).

In this episode, we describe how we traveled to and within Toronto for the weekend and how we navigated the hotel and other accessibility features such as braille on doors and in hotel elevators, our Friday night spent with the founder and assistant of accessible braille fashion company Aille Design after Kerry decided to rent the Blue Braille Dress, a bit about some of the keynote presenters and panels on the Saturday at The Ace Hotel, and about our installation and discussions we had with interested parties who stopped by to find out more about us and our maps and other assorted accessible items; along with the showcasing of inclusive companies such as Aille Design, Purdys Chocolatier, and See3D.

Thanks to the co-chairs of the symposium: Lorella Di Cintio, PhD and Vahid Vahdat, PhD.

This event was a year in the making, a few times remnants of Covid made us think it wouldn’t actually happen, and we were so glad to be in attendance. We finish off this week finally airing the audio paper we initially submitted for consideration in this year’s proceedings to wrap up this one. (We will be posting the audio paper (nearly 10 minutes in length, as its own segment in this podcast feed in the coming weeks.)

So for more on the symposium, check out the link below:

http://architectureandfilm.org

And make sure to check out and support the companies who graciously contributed to our installation:

https://ailledesign.com

https://www.purdys.com

https://see3d.org