Blind-friendly aquarium displays from a sighted sculpter in N.C.

From The Winston-Salem Journal in N.C.:

Rebecca Fuller (pictured) and Bill Watkins can see, but they think about museums like people who can't.

What would there be to touch? What would there be to hear?

At an aquarium, the answer is "nothing much."

Fuller is a sculptor who started building museum displays and models 30 years ago. Watkins, her husband and a former architect, helps her. Four years ago, they landed a $426,240 grant through the U.S. Department of Education's National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research to investigate what kinds of museum displays that you can touch -- called tactile displays -- convey the most information.

They tested and interviewed 100 sighted and low-vision and blind adults and children, asking them to feel different models and textures.

Their final project using the DOE grant are 3D tactile models of fish that will be on display at the N.C. Aquarium at Pine Knoll Shores starting in early July. Some of the fish are textured with a gritty surface -- they illustrate patterns that blind people can't see, such as stripes.

The fish are not just meant to be touched -- they also talk. Watkins designed the fish to be interactive. The models are mostly made out of plastic, fiber glass and Bondo, a kind of putty often used by car body shops. Watkins laid carbon fiber fabric underneath. The fabric is hooked up to wires and a circuit board, which runs to a small speaker. When you touch the fish, electricity from your hand actives the system and the fish starts to "talk" about itself.

Fuller and Watkins picked fish as a general theme to plan an exhibit around because aquariums seem particularly inaccessible to the blind. They've made tactile aquarium displays before -- jellyfish, coral and sea anemones for the New York Aquarium in Brooklyn, for one -- but never anything with an auditory component. "Just imagine what it would be like to have low vision and go to an aquarium," Fuller said. "You'd just hear a little bubbling and that would be all you'd get."

When the Pine Knoll Shores aquarium was renovated four years ago, staff and designers tried to incorporate exhibits that low-vision and blind people could enjoy, such as large-type displays and a tactile, 3D map of North Carolina. The aquarium already had touch tanks with horseshoe crabs, whelks and spider crabs. They added one with skates and rays. There are live-animal programs where visitors can touch an alligator or a jellyfish, and there are interactive displays, like a cart stocked with local shells.

But there still wasn't anything that a blind person could do on their own. "Really, there wasn't a good experience -- if you were blind -- that you could independently learn about the fish without something telling you about it," said Georgia Minnich, the aquarium's exhibits curator.

"Fintastic! Weird and Wonderful Adaptations for Survival in the Sea" will open July 8. The exhibit will be up for two years, Minnich said. If the talking fish are successful, they'll be incorporated into other exhibits.

The grant is helping the aquarium pay for other improvements to make the exhibit accessible, including a raised map and a textured walkway. Tiles will replace carpeting so blind people can follow a path with their feet or with their cane. There will be four tanks with live fish, too, filled with examples of some of the Carolina coast's stranger inhabitants -- spiny burrfish that can puff up, and sea robins that get their name from their large pectoral fins that make them look like a bird in flight.

Fuller and Minnich hope that everyone -- blind or not -- will take away something from Fintastic.

Fintastic features eight kinds of fish, from the diminutive, so-ugly-it's-cute cowfish to a 9-foot long hammerhead shark that used to reside in the aquarium director's office. Fuller and Watkins sculpted about half of the fish -- the rest are from mounted fish models that the aquarium already owned. All are North Carolina species, and all were selected because they represent some kind of adaptation that fish have made, from the black striped pattern on the sides of a spadefish -- they act as camouflage -- to the shape of a body -- fish with flat underbellies tend to be bottom dwellers.

"It's trying to teach some principles about fish. We choose ones really quite different from each other," Minnich said. "If it works well for people of low vision, then it will work for everyone."

Fuller and Watkins want other designers to incorporate their ideas when they work on projects. "The whole idea is to make people who go to museums more independent," Watkins said. "Right now, a blind or low-vision person has to have someone with them to tell them what's there. It's really about civil rights. If the public is going to be invited into a place, they ought to be able to get information."

Building displays is a field Fuller fell into after she landed a job designing a White House model for the Gerald Ford Presidential Museum in Grand Rapids, Mich. Her company is called RAF Models, Inc.

In the early 1990s, she and her husband bid on a project for the National Park Service in Hot Springs, Ark. The park service invited artists to submit plans for a model of the Fordyce Bathhouse and other buildings in Bathhouse Row at Hot Springs National Park. But they needed to be accessible to the blind.

Fuller and Watkins are in the final stages of finishing the fish before they take them to Pine Knoll Shores for installation.

Fuller didn't know much about fish before she started this project. The Peterson Fish Guide and other field guides are scattered around their basement workshop in Washington Park, along with photos and drawings. A dead cowfish floats in a jar, posing for Fuller as she sculpts a model into clay. A small school of lookdowns, two already coated with an iridescent shimmer of purple-silver paint, wait on a table. A snaky moray eel undulates in mid-air, attached to a table saw, where Watkins has been sanding him smooth. Fuller built his body out of foam swimming noodles.

The eel was particularly tricky to research, Fuller said, because it was hard to find full-body photos. "They always show the face and the mouth. I couldn't get an idea of how their fin got thinner toward the tail. You really have to have a lot of stuff because you just keep running up against questions."

Fuller remembers one man they interviewed for the research, a man in his 50s who had been blind since birth. He didn't realize that there are different kinds of fish, thousands of species that all look very different from each other.

"That's why we go to an aquarium," Fuller said. "It's like you can open a window for people."