The aim of this study was to determine whether urban environments with different prominent sensory inputs have an impact on the way-finding strategies of blind people and to identify these impacts, where applicable. We specifically investigated how blind people use their senses to compensate for the lack of visual information and how the priority of senses changes according to the urban context. The participants of the study consisted of nine congenitally blind individuals and the study took place in two urban settings: a dense urban district, Kemeralti district in İzmir; and an urban park, the İzmir Fair Park. During the learning phase, a first trial along the selected routes was conducted for each participant individually along with one of the researchers. In the test phase, the participants were requested to re-walk the route and verbally report the environmental cues they attended to. The participants' verbal reports were recorded and transcripts of the recordings were coded according to the environmental sensory inputs. In addition, the short-term memory of each participant was also evaluated. The results show that the characteristics of the urban environment seem to have an impact on way-finding strategies of blind individuals. It was found that the sound of the city and the echo from the environment are the most important factors for blind participants in the dense urban environment. Environmental boundaries provided echoes and gave a sense of enclosure that helped them orient themselves, whereas, in the park environment, the sense of enclosure was not enhanced due to a lack of boundaries in the environment.

Blind individuals' wayfinding performance in complex urban environments is a complex phenomenon. This study investigates the wayfinding strategies of congenitally blind individuals in an urban context. The aim of the study was to assess the extent to which the environmental auditory cues are of primary importance for their wayfinding strategies. The study was conducted in Lisbon, Portugal. Results suggest that auditory information was the most used environmental cue and that a feeling of enclosure is the most important environmental feature during wayfinding. These results corroborate previous findings suggesting that increased familiarity with the environment results in more efficient wayfinding strategies, and that lack of environmental auditory cues could be compensated by a robust cognitive map. The study highlights multidimensional sensory experiences of urban environments and nonvisual aspects of spatial perception.

“ACT FOR”, a social responsibility project unit is a sustainable solidarity platform that was established at the design faculty for the aim of creating collective act between designers and people in need. The main aim of this project is to enhance design students’ critical perspectives on how to prepare a social responsibility project for their local environment and work collaboratively with other disciplines. The design students are expected to understand the importance of social responsibility activities and its’ role for the universities and the community. They are also expected to learn how their attitudes translate into behaviour and action while they are questioning what just and unjust is in their local environment. This study reports on Container Kindergarten Project as a social responsibility project. Believing that the success of social responsibility projects should be in harmony with the needs of the community, “ACT FOR” designers firstly analysed the needs of their local environment. Later, we developed the project for a chosen primary school where 25 children were trained in a space that could not meet the ventilation, heating and spatial organization requirements and continued to provide education as an unhealthy living space for children. After the conceptual phase, we prepared the necessary drawings and found sponsorships for the implementation. With this project, the design students learned how to solve problems and make design management to finalize the project. They learned how to work as a team with different disciplines to ensure homogeneous distribution of tasks. At the end, the design students discovered the healing aspect of the design. With all difficulties and contributions, it taught the multi-dimensional education method that they never experienced before. As a result, the community-university relationship is one of the most important points in determining and meeting the needs of a community. Therefore, universities play a major role in raising awareness in this subject.