Seiichi Miyake was a Japanese inventor who in the 1960s worked to develop systems that would improve the safety of the visually impaired as they navigated the city. In particular, he was interested in developing directional cues that could help people understand when they were approaching a potentially dangerous or trafficked area, such as busy intersections or the edge of a train platform.

In 1965, he invented the ‘braille block’, the first set of tactile paving tiles, which would eventually be adopted around the world as a way of aiding navigation for the visually impaired. These tactile paving tiles, or ‘Tenji blocks’ as they are a known in Japan, consisted of tiles with raised lines or domes (sometimes truncated) which are used predominately as ground surface indicators to aid blind and visually impaired pedestrians to stop and navigate crosswalks. The raised line pattern indicates a safe path along which a person can walk, while the dome pattern indicates that the person should stop. It was also decided to colour the tiles yellow so that they could also aid the partially blind.

In 1975, all Japan Railway platforms were modified to include these tactile surfaces and in the following years its use spread to cities and government buildings across Japan. Eventually, similar systems were adopted worldwide. It was first introduced in the United Kingdom in 1990. The United States also picked up the standard in the early 1990s, after passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).

This tile is a contemporary version of Miyake’s 1965 design, which was produced in 2016 by the company he founded in 1974. It is made of polyurethane as opposed to the original cast-cement version.

This tile was acquired as part of the Shekou Project, an international partnership between the V&A and China Merchant Shekou Holdings (CMSK) to open a new cultural platform called Design Society in Shekou. The tile was included in the inaugural exhibition, ‘Values of Design’, in the V&A Gallery at Design Society in a section looking at the design issue of improving the lives of those with disabilities.