Sensorial Tableware – Blind, Deafblind, Disability Pride Project

The brief from the Australian Ceramics Association is a collaboration between ceramic designers-potters and chefs about the shared respect for their crafts, exploring function, community, and culture. The two chefs in the Sensorial Plate Project contributed valuable lived experience working and adapting in commercial kitchens with blindness and deaf-blindness. Improving plating up for service, with locatable tactile elements in interior, sides and base to assist with positioning plating food on the plate. Designs with deep recesses reducing dining accidents, for dining independence. Edges designed for less tipping accidents and also for eligence. Tactile fonts for disability language identification and pride.

The slip-cast porcelain tableware features braille and tactile English Atkinson hyper-legible font for low vision, following international guidelines. It was created using 3D-printed mother moulds, then daughter moulds, to plaster in a 4-step moulding process, including porcelain slip. We ensure absolute consistency and quality across multiple plate designs for disability tactile language access and joy, connecting the chefs, tableware and the dining experience.

Elegant slip-cast porcelain tableware featuring braille and tactile Atkinson hyper-legible fonts, following international guidelines. Encapsulating fonts in 3D-designed mother moulds, designed to manufacture ceramic (daughter) moulds for slip-casting Australian porcelain. With absolute consistency and quality across multiple plate designs, allowing people with blindness worldwide to access the tactile language and joy in connecting the chefs, tableware and the dining experience. Elements from each chef’s brand are also incorporated into the work. Yet, the style remains visually unified across the series, ready for expansion with more chefs with disabilities and tableware designs. The series also creates awareness of endangered disability languages.

Because of the tactile sensory needs of blind chefs, braille and Atkinson extruded fonts are on either one, two, or four sides of the various plate designs. This accessibility of tactile feedback for the chef to plate up food for diners resulted in the design of mother moulds, that is, moulds that make moulds to (small) batch manufacture porcelain tableware—needed to have up to six mould pieces with very complex demolding facilities, piece by piece, from the four very different materials involved, and taking into account the different material behaviours of each one. Flexible, non-flexible, hard or soft. Plaster mould making in itself is very complicated as various amounts of water to plaster vary mould hardness and porosity, etc. One must also consider the mould life span and the ability to pour multiple porcelain objects, but the imitations of time are taken to de-mould. Porcelain also needs support in firing due to the shape warping.