please see more details on:
http://www.tc-response.com/award/samsung/touchableink/ci/
Samsung, as the leading company in Consumer Electronics & Innovation in the world, always aims to make things that can make living better for people in society under our belief “Accelerating discoveries and possibilities”.
In Thailand, visually impaired people have been usually perceived to be incompetent. However, in reality, they have their own strength and ability to do, learn and create many things by themselves. They just need little helping hands.
Touchable Ink is unlocking this barrier and freeing their visualization to be able to read by themselves. This is not just to promote the corporate image. We do the work that brings impact and improves people’s lives. This will help change how people view blindness from a perspective of gain rather than loss, action rather than reaction and taking care rather than being cared. Last but not least, this goodwill will also enhance the image of corporate brand.
Background:
Nowadays, many different kinds of technology have been innovated to help blind people to visualize the world, from mobile apps, virtual pencil, watches to glasses. However, these technologies have limitation to provide the simple requirement that they truly want: to be able to read by themselves with their fingers. The only basic device that allows them to do this is‘braille embosser’ and print on a special paper to produce Braille text based documents, but it’s incredibly expensive and limited to access. Therefore, is there any possibility to commoditize the braille embosser, so that blind people can simply afford access to it?
Describe the idea:
Turn the normal laser printer to be a braille-embossed printer and make the blind people be able to print braille documents by themselves and read at home with no limitation. To make this happen, Touchable Ink, the world's first printing ink invented exclusively for blind people is the game changer.
Describe the strategy:
Touchable Ink is not made just for building a corporate image! Samsung, as the leading company in Consumer Electronics & Innovation in the world, always aims to make things that can make living better for people in society under our belief “Accelerating discoveries and possibilities”. For this case, we would like to make change to the life of visually impaired people by unlocking their barrier and freeing their visualization to be able to read by themselves.
Describe the execution:
Samsung, the Chemistry professor from Thammasat University and Thailand Association of the Blind are collaborating to research, develop and come up with an innovative solution called “Touchable Ink” by adding embossing powder to the laser printing ink through a chemical process. The users just simply replace the Touchable Ink cartridge with the current one, change the selected document to braille font type, print out and heat it with normal household heating devices like a microwave or hair dryer. This special link will dilate and give an embossed effect, just like if it's printed out from the braille embosser, and allow the blind people to be able to read through their fingers. We are now at the beginning of the journey, working hard as it is still in progress, but we never stop and we aim to complete it in order to give a better life opportunity to all blind people.
Describe the expectations/outcome:
Full of ambition and passion, we have put all our investment into the R&D process rather than media investment ($0 spent on media). However, since the news has been spread out first, we have gotten very positive attention and feedback with over 225 million impressions; $560,944 of free PR value within the first week. People still keep mentioning us and we thank them for all the support and will continue to complete our highest goal.