 WayBand WearWorks. My name is Keith Kirkland and I'm the CEO and co-founder of WearWorks. We design products and experiences that communicate information through touch. Our first product is called WayBand. A computer animation illustrates the inner layers of the small curved wrist device. And it's a wearable tactile navigation device for the blind and visually impaired. Basically, we figured out a way to guide people to an end destination using only vibration without the need for visual or audio cues at all. Profounder Kevin Yu approaches a closed road with a map on his cell phone. We started with the use case of navigation. Initially, we just wanted to get people out of their phones and back into the real world. But the more we dug into it, the more we realized that the power of the blind use case was so profound because no one had come up with a solution really to address. The first person that we met who was blind was Marcus Ingle. He walks with a guide dog. When I first started using the device, I wasn't really sure what to expect. I really ended up turning out to be even better than what I was imagining. The ability to convey information to me just through vibrations and vibration patterns was really amazing. And not only that, but when it wasn't vibrating, it's still giving information that I am on the right path and navigating in the right direction. It was completely intuitive. While I was out using the device, there were two or three motorcycles that drove by. If I was using the voiceover feature on the iPhone to navigate, I wouldn't be able to hear that over the outside sound. That was an ability to bring in another one of my senses and be able to navigate with that sense of touch. We worked with Marcus and then ultimately Simon, who's our blind marathon runner, he reached out to us. Simon trains with Kevin and said that if we could have a device ready for him, he would run a New York City marathon with it this year. We knew it could work, but it had a lot of kinks that needed to be worked out. So over the six months, we worked with Simon. We sent him the devices to test. We broke devices. He broke devices. We sent them new devices to test. Within a few weeks of the marathon, we finally had a product that we thought really could do what it needed to do to get Simon through the entire race. And so on November 5th, 2017, Simon got to make history as the first blind person to run a New York City marathon unassisted. Running beside Simon, Kevin gets a present. Footage provided by WearWorks. Video edited and produced by Chris J. Gautier. In conjunction with the exhibition Access Plusability, on view December 15th, 2017, through September 3rd, 2018.