Mace participates in BBC's 'The Big Life Fix' for blind school student

London-headquartered consultancy Mace has created a sound based system to allow a completely blind primary school student to traverse the school playground with his friends. The construction and professional services firm has built the innovative new apparatus as part of BBC television’s programme ‘The Big Life Fix’.

The Big Life Fix is a popular television show that offers a solution to every-day problems faced by those with disabilities, or who are in need. The show asks various innovators to come up with “ingenious new solutions” as a means of developing life-changing solutions.

One of the show’s episodes, which was a “Children In Need’ special edition, involved supporting an eight year old boy, who is completely blind. The episode, which was broadcast in November, resulted in a project that enabled him to use the playground at his primary school in London, allowing him to enjoy playtime with the other children at the school. Leveraging the firm’s broad expertise and the creativity of its consultants, a number of solutions were considered. Eventually, the team selected a dual-purpose system, placing various electronic and tactile touchpads throughout the playground, which, when touched, produce various sounds,  allowing Josh,to navigate his way around the playground. In addition, the touchpads provide entertainment and activities for the other school children.

Mace, as well as sub-contractors Realtime Civil Engineering and Dornan Engineering, provided their services pro bono to the project, for both the development and implementation phase of the system. The episode itself covered the development and installation of the new technology.

Commenting on the outcome of the project, Nick Abbey, Mace’s Project Director, said, “This has been a wonderful project to work on – it’s been great to help bring ‘The Big Life Fix’ designs to life. The final system will allow Josh to navigate around the playground with far more ease than before. The real reward was seeing Josh using the playground once the system was complete and working; he and the other pupils were thrilled and it was nice to see the results of our hard work making a real difference.”

Mace have donated their time and effort to a plethora of different charitable causes over the course of 2017. Alongside naming four new charity partners in March, the firm raised funds for Alzheimer’s Research UK and Mind’s Blue Light programme. Elsewhere in the consulting industry, notable corporate responsibility efforts included cross-country bicycle tours by both PwC and Mazars, as well as an intercontinental ambulance drive by QVARTZ on behalf of a Mongolian health care NGO.