tactile media | School of Industrial Design

Stangl Gathers Artists, Designers, Community to Champion Tactile Design

Video: College of Design

Abigale Stangl, Myrsini Mamoli, and Alexandria Smith discuss tactile design at the College of Design.

Abigale Stangl teaches Industrial Design students to use paper as a life-changing design material. Paper has an essential role in tactile and embodied interaction design, Stangl, an Assistant Professor in the School of Industrial Design, said. "It’s a powerful medium for storytelling, for learning, and for connection."

Stangl connects her students with members of the local blind community. Through these new relationships, she facilitated an exploration of touch in design to develop non-visual assistance tools, and enhance tactile experiences through interdisciplinary research and co-design research opportunities for undergraduate and graduate students.

Stangl won a Transformative Teaching and Learning Innovation Incubator Grant from the Georgia Tech Center for Teaching and Learning to establish the Inclusive Tactile Media Design undergraduate course. The grant supports the development, implementation, and evaluation of transformative teaching projects in undergraduate courses.

The Inclusive Tactile Media Design course was developed with strong emphasis on collaboration, introducing blind people as co-designers in the class.

"It's not that we're designing for them, it's that we're designing with them. And that's not a trivial or an expected thing, it's a brand new endeavor," Stangl said.

"I wanted to make sure that I was working with blind people to design and implement the course as well. We had six blind co-designers in the class, who live here in Atlanta and who participated remotely. At the beginning, some of them didn’t identify as designers, but as they engaged in the design process, they were leading through example, steering the activity design and discussions,” Stangl said.

For example, one of the co-designers, Ka Li, is very interested in making comic books accessible and supporting access to leisure activities and learning materials. He developed a project brief for the GT students and was instrumental in co-designing the course, Stangl said. Together with Industrial Design Student Marina Espy, they transformed a classic comic Peanuts, featuring “Good ol’ Charlie Brown” by Charles M. Schulz, into a tactile version.”

A Peanuts comic strip on the left, a tactile learning project that teaches blind people to read that comic on the right. — Left: In this comic strip, originally by Charles M. Schulz, Snoopy waits excitedly for his food, only to have snow fall into his bowl. He grumbles, “I hate it when it snows on my French toast,” turning an everyday inconvenience into a funny, relatable moment. The joke works because Snoopy imagines his simple meal as something special—French toast—and reacts like a person might. This is typical of Schulz’s *Peanuts* style: using small, quiet scenes to show big feelings like disappointment and frustration in a way that’s both humorous and emotionally real. (Comic strip from Charles M. Schulz)
Right: A tactically designed version of the comic strip produced by Ka Li and Marina Espy. (Photo: Abigale Stangl/Georgia Tech College of Design)

The co-designer and Industrial Design students discussed all the current ways to make printed or visual information accessible, within the context of facilitating access to published works for persons who are blind, visually impaired, or otherwise print-disabled as established by the Marrakesh Treaty, Stangl said.

The Marrakesh Treaty allows special versions of books and other published materials—like audiobooks, braille, large print, or image descriptions—to be made and shared with people who are blind, have low vision, or can’t use regular print. These versions can be made without asking the copyright owner, so more people can have equal access to reading and learning, she said. The United States agreed to this treaty and made it law in 2018.

Projects from the Inclusive Tactile Media Design Course

A tactile instruction book to solve Rubic's Cubes.

Tactile Learning: How to Solve a Rubic's Cube

By Minh Ha and Leah Lockhart

A tactile braille booklet that teaches users how to solve a Rubik’s Cube, combining embossed braille, red-font visual text, and directional diagrams, with a design process that includes digital illustration, accessible formatting, and booklet assembly.

A tactile music theory learning tool diagram.

The TactiTone

By Minh Ha and Chinedu Nwakanma

A tactile music theory learning tool that uses raised textures made from swell form paper and hot glue to represent chord shapes and fret patterns, helping BLV users learn music through touch.

A tactile station that teaches blind people to differentiate species of bats.

What is it like to Touch a Bat?

By Lindsey Yazzolino and Victoria Gamez

A tactile learning kit titled designed for Blind and Low Vision (BLV) learners. The kit includes a life-size model of a Little Brown Bat, a raised-line anatomy board with braille labels, and 3D-printed bat head sculptures representing different species.

Stangl’s student Marina Espy explained how another project differed in focus from the comic project to focusing on multimodal instructions using 3D models.

"One topic of discussion [introduced by project brief designer Grecia Ramirez] was about how blind people learn to read the instruction manuals for choosing the right type of earbuds, because if you're blind, you want to make sure you have good audio access. But you can't see the pictures in the instructions to see how earbuds fit, and you can't try them on,” Espy said.

“That was an authentic problem for the co-designers," Stangl said.

Other design problems from the Inclusive Tactile Media Design course included: How do you teach ukulele non-visually? How do you teach Rubik's Cube non-visually? How do you distinguish between the sounds that two thousand different types of bats make without pictures of bats?

Stangl's students worked with communicators from the Georgia Fish and Wildlife Service, a stenographer, a relief sculpture expert, and members of the blind community that their co-designers introduced, to design products and solutions. The project to make bats more accessible won first prize at the Student Design Competition that was part of Georgia Tech’s Workshop on Tactile and Embodied Design.

Tactile Media Research

"We have this motto at Georgia Tech, 'Progress and Service,' which is really inspiring. But learning how to do that in practice takes additional skill sets–for educators, students, and community collaborators alike– and that's what we get through these transformative learning experiences," Stangl said.

An important part of Stangl's research is the launch of the Tactile Media Alliance, which brings together international scholars, educators, practitioners, and technologists to collaborate on transformative projects and research.

The Alliance fosters cross-network collaboration and advances research in inclusive, multimodal, and accessible teaching and learning experiences—inspired through her Ph.D. research and the Build a Better Book Initiative she helped found at CU Boulder.

By February of this year, Stangl's Tactile Media Alliance was able to host a kickoff event at the Robert C. Williams Museum of Papermaking, to present Alliance member Ann Cunningham's work as well as the communicative capacity of the Center for Inclusive Design and Innovation's braille production unit.

Along with paper-making workshops, interactive embossed printing experiences, and custom-made tactile maps of the night's exhibits were on-hand for sighted and non-sighted visitors.

The event and the Alliance are supported by an Arts at Tech Catalyst Grant. Stangl was one of nine faculty members at Georgia Tech to win the grant in the 2025 Spring semester to develop a class on designing accessible museum exhibits in partnership with the Museum of Papermaking, Director Virginia Howell, and College of Design Faculty Dr. Myrsini Mamoli, Dr. Alexandria Smith and CIDI Associate Director, Research Operations & Braille Production Manager Guy Toles.