Interaction - Bachelor

CORE Basket

CORE explores how tangible and digital interactions can create inclusive shopping experiences for people with low vision. The project combines haptic and visual feedback through a smart basket system, allowing users to navigate and confirm products independently. It challenges how accessibility is integrated into retail design, turning assistance into empowerment.

Rhianna Ward

CORE Basket

CReating opportunities for retail equality

CORE (Creating Opportunities for Retail Equality) is an inclusive interaction design project that reimagines the grocery shopping experience for people with low vision. The project explores how multisensory feedback, through touch, sound, and light, can create a more autonomous, dignified, and intuitive experience in retail environments. The CORE Basket acts as both a functional prototype and a speculative vision for the future of retail, where accessibility is seamlessly embedded into everyday systems rather than treated as an afterthought. Designed under a white-label model, CORE represents a universal assistive technology adaptable across all retail settings, encouraging a shared standard of equality in the shopping experience.

A chart showing different types of low vision

Project Context

In Australia, more than 575,000 people live with low vision, with conditions such as age-related macular degeneration, cataracts, or glaucoma affecting independence and confidence in daily tasks (Vision 2020 Australia). Grocery shopping, a routine, sensory-heavy activity, can become disorienting, frustrating, and reliant on assistance from others. Many individuals experience challenges with navigation, product identification, and reading price or label information, often leading to feelings of anxiety or loss of autonomy. CORE responds to this gap by exploring how interaction design can restore dignity through subtle, empowering feedback systems that allow users to shop independently and confidently. Rather than focusing on impairment, CORE celebrates design’s potential to make accessibility universal and invisible.
A close up of the CORE Basket, showing the user ID card, and the phone app that connects to the basket

Technical Specifications

The CORE Basket combines tangible interaction and digital communication to simulate an intelligent shopping experience. The prototype features an Arduino Uno microcontroller, an MFRC522 RFID reader for item recognition, a coin vibration motor for haptic feedback, and an LED light strip for real-time visual cues. Each grocery item is embedded with NFC tags that trigger specific vibration and colour sequences, communicating correct and incorrect items, phone connection, and complete list sequences. The basket connects conceptually to a smartphone interface designed in Figma, which displays the user’s shopping list and preferences. Together, these systems simulate a unified multisensory feedback loop that promotes independence and clarity for low-vision users, embodying CORE’s mission to create dignity through retail equality.

Rhianna Ward

Rhianna is an emerging interaction and visual communication designer passionate about the future of retail, accessibility, and human-centred innovation. She creates thoughtful, experience-driven design solutions that aim to foster positive change and enhance the way people interact with everyday environments. Her capstone project, CORE, explores how multisensory interaction design can promote inclusion, autonomy, and dignity within retail spaces.