MACHINE INNOVATION
Innovation opens doors for blind baristas R
The initiative to break down the barriers of disability by investing in the training of disabled people to become baristas, started in Shanghai with the Bear Paw Café
hea, which has always been committed to social sustainability, has developed a coffee machine for the new Seed of Inspiration project, designing and building an interface that allows blind or visually impaired people to prepare coffee managing through touch the selections’ choice. The Hinichijou (meaning “extraordinary”) café chain is best known
as Bear Paw Café because of the bear paw that serves coffee and interacts with customers through a hole in the wall. This initially served to protect the privacy of disabled people who
were learning the barista trade. With an original new way of serving coffee and an exciting story of social entrepreneurship, Bear Paw opened its first coffee shop in downtown Shanghai on December 3rd 2020, the same day as International Day of Persons with Disabilities. Thanks to the popularity of the project, nine cafés and more than 10 pop-up stores have sprung up in Shanghai, Hangzhou, Nanjing and Wuhan, and in December 2021, the wall was knocked down as a sign of confidence gained by the workers to finally show their faces to customers. The project further evolved into Seed of Inspiration, with the opening of the first shop in Shanghai Times Square. The seed
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represents birth and hope; in fact, Seed of Inspiration was created to give blind people (a community of more than 12 million people in China) the opportunity to develop their skills, to be masters of their own destiny and even to become co-owners of the coffee shop itself. Rhea developed an interface to make the machine easy to use
for Tian Bao, the visually impaired barista at the Bear Paw Café, who was able to test the machine’s ease of use and fulfill his dream of becoming a barista. In designing the blind-friendly interface, Rhea integrated a simple technology to the existing machine. A touch panel with six embossed forms, each corresponding to a
different recipe, substitutes the digital screen: a square for espresso, a circle for double espresso, a triangle for hot Americano, a diamond for Americano at room temperature, a star for hot water and a heart for water at room temperature. Born in 1999, Tian Bao graduated together with his older twin
brother Tian You from the Shanghai School for the Blind. His dream was to own a coffee shop and become a full-time barista. A goal he managed to achieve through this project, becoming a role model for the blind community and an inspiration for those who want to become small business owners.
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