top of page

Fingerprints on Water

Sameh Emam, Ahmed Hamdi El Metwaly, Samar Helmy Alii & Asmaa Ibrahim Mahmoud
Egypt

How can you leave your fingerprint on water?!

Seems impossible, right?

Everyday people are struggling to leave their fingerprints and their own mark on any path in life, it seems hard, but how hard can it be for any visually impaired person to leave a fingerprint?!

In this museum you can experience the daily struggles of any visually impaired person, as you level up and coordinate all your other senses, you'll know in the end that dealing with all these problems on a daily basis is your true fingerprint.

Using the game theory and gamification, the museum's journey is all about exploring and completing different tasks in a game matter, beginning with using only one sense, and then levelling up until using all the other 4 senses.

The form of the museum came from abstraction of a pentagon representing the 5 senses, each sense represents an angle in the Pentagon, and as the spaces and experiences go, the shape of the space increases another angle in its shape. The museum built from green concrete to be environmental friendly, water elements and waterfalls are in every corner, each zone has a different waterfall height so the user may identify the difference between zones with hearing, moreover, there are lavender, mint and lemon trees that placed to spread diverse smells.

In the first zone, the person will have to depend on hearing to find the guiding line after it's interruption by using a walking stick, and then in the second zone, the user will have to identify a certain fragrance from 4 sprays, when choosing the right fragrance, the user will take a card from the hatch under the spray. Then the user will have to obey certain orders to fold papers with unique texture and smell to 3 origami shapes (A boat, Dove and a flower -their names are engraved on the concrete bases with braille language-). Finally, the user will use all the senses, taking 9 cards from 3 hatches (3 from each) every 3 cards have a unique smell, texture and taste. Then the user will be asked to give back a certain number of each group, for example: 1 lavender card, 2 perforated cards and 1 salty card. If the user did it right, then they will have another card.

The guiding line of this project is a wet or soaked handrail, it will have dyed water so that every time the user uses it and then takes paper cards or makes origami, the user will leave coloured fingerprints on the paper. The dyed water on the guiding line will be coloured according to each zone and each task, for example the smell task in the second zone will have yellow dyed water handrail, if the user picked the right smell, then the cards beneath it will be white, but all the other cards will be yellow (So, no fingerprint will be shown on paper if you picked wrong!)

At the end, the user shall know from the coloured cards and fingerprinted cards how many tasks were done right. And then the user may return over and over again to the museum to reach the level of mastering all senses.

bottom of page