Cemento Sol SightWalks Turns Lima Pavements Into a Navigation System for the Blind
SightWalks is a tactile cement tile system developed by Cemento Sol and Circus Grey Peru that embeds numbered line codes into standard pavement tiles, enabling visually impaired pedestrians in Lima, Peru, to identify adjacent businesses and services independently by counting lines with their walking sticks.
Cemento Sol, the cement brand of UNACEM, introduced SightWalks in 2024 as a public service innovation rooted in genuine urban infrastructure. The tiles form a coded language pressed into the surface of the pavement itself: horizontal lines indicate the category of an adjacent establishment — whether a bank, hospital, grocery store, bus stop, drugstore, or accommodation — while vertical lines above and below the horizontal set communicate directional information. The system requires no digital device, no connectivity, and no third-party assistance. A person navigating Lima's Miraflores district with a walking stick can read the street the same way a sighted person reads a shopfront sign.
The campaign launched in Miraflores, one of Lima's most commercially active districts, where the tiles were physically installed in public pavements. Cemento Sol collaborated with three of Peru's largest visually impaired associations — UNCP, Cercil, and Yo Soy Sus Ojos — to co-develop and validate the system, ensuring the tactile code met real navigational needs. As reported by Storyboard18, testing involved more than 500 participants. Creative agency Circus Grey Peru, part of Grey Worldwide, produced a commercial demonstrating the system's mechanics, bringing the public health and public interest dimensions of the project to a broader audience. Critically, Cemento Sol released the tile designs copyright-free, enabling any city, organisation, or individual worldwide to replicate and implement SightWalks without licensing barriers. The Clapboard Score for this campaign is 88 out of 100, reflecting its exceptional integration of industrial design, public utility, and communicable creative strategy.
Cemento Sol identified a persistent gap in urban accessibility infrastructure across Peru that neither digital wayfinding tools nor existing tactile paving systems had resolved.
Standard tactile paving, used in many cities globally, communicates basic directional cues — stop, go, turn — but provides no information about the commercial or civic character of a street. For visually impaired pedestrians navigating Lima's Miraflores district, that silence represents a significant reduction in independence. By encoding business-category information directly into a material that Cemento Sol already manufactures and that municipalities already install, the brand transformed an existing product category into a public health and public interest intervention. José Rivera y Piérola, Creative Chairman and CEO of Circus Grey Peru, stated in Muse by Clios that the goal was to ensure greater attention was paid to making life in the real world better for everyone. The strategic insight was that the tile, not the app, is already on the ground.
UNACEM, Cemento Sol's parent company, held 46.5% of Peru's domestic cement market in full-year 2024, according to filings with the Superintendencia del Mercado de Valores of Peru. That market position gave Cemento Sol both the production infrastructure to manufacture SightWalks at scale and a credible platform from which to propose a national standard. In a category where competitors compete primarily on structural performance and price, a public utility innovation offered differentiation on entirely different terms. Cemento Sol's earlier 2019 campaign, Ponte en mi Silla, had already established a lineage of accessibility advocacy by enabling the construction of nearly 1,000 wheelchair ramps in Lima, according to UNACEM's own published records. SightWalks extended that positioning from ramps — a reactive infrastructure fix — to proactive sensory navigation, deepening the brand's association with inclusive urban design across Peru.
SightWalks succeeded as a creative work because its design system is inseparable from its function as a public service artefact.
The tactile code embossed into each cement tile operates on a logic simple enough to learn in minutes yet precise enough to distinguish more than a dozen establishment categories. Horizontal lines indicate establishment type; vertical lines positioned above or below the horizontal set indicate direction. The system asks nothing of the user beyond the walking stick technique already practised by most visually impaired pedestrians. That economy of learning was not accidental. José Rivera y Piérola, Creative Chairman and CEO of Circus Grey Peru, confirmed in Muse by Clios that the three largest visually impaired associations in Peru were involved throughout the industrial design process, defining which venue categories mattered most and validating each tactile code before production. That co-creation process — which Rivera y Piérola identified as the most critical phase of the project — transformed what could have been a well-intentioned but impractical design exercise into a tested, deployable infrastructure product.
The commercial produced by Circus Grey Peru to communicate SightWalks demonstrates the tile system in use on actual Miraflores pavements, following a visually impaired individual as the coded lines beneath a walking stick resolve into a destination. The film's strength lies in its restraint: it explains the system through demonstration rather than narration, trusting the visual logic of counting lines to communicate the concept without requiring the viewer to understand Spanish. Rivera y Piérola noted in Muse by Clios that the project required persistence through two successive mayoral administrations to secure implementation approvals, identifying government paperwork and tile development timelines as the principal production challenges. As reported by Fast Company in June 2025, SightWalks was described as a tactile-coded cement marking system developed in direct collaboration with organisations serving visually impaired communities, underscoring the depth of the co-design process behind a campaign that presents, on its surface, as deceptively simple.
SightWalks earned one Grand Prix in Design at Cannes Lions 2024, alongside four Gold Lions across Outdoor, Brand Experience and Activation, Media, and Sustainable Development Goals categories, two Silver Lions in Outdoor and Direct, and one Bronze Lion in Design.
That Cannes Lions haul positioned SightWalks among the most-awarded public service campaigns of 2024 in a year where the Design Grand Prix carried particular weight given the judging emphasis on functional, real-world application. The London International Awards 2024 added a further Grand Prix, six Gold, three Silver, and one Bronze, according to publicly available results. At El Ojo de Iberoamérica 2024, the campaign won two Grand Prix and five Gold, cementing its standing as the dominant Latin American campaign of the year across public interest and design categories. The One Show reported a Grand Prix win in 2025, though the category has not been publicly confirmed. Award recognition at this scale across independent international juries is itself a verified performance metric: it documents that practitioners across industrial design, outdoor media, and direct communication disciplines judged SightWalks to be the most effective work in its class.
Beyond awards, the structural effectiveness of SightWalks rests on three verifiable conditions. First, the tiles are physically installed in Miraflores, Lima, Peru, making the campaign a live public utility rather than a speculative concept. Second, as reported by Storyboard18, more than 500 visually impaired participants validated the system before deployment. Third, Cemento Sol's decision to release the design copyright-free, as covered by Design Indaba, creates a replication mechanism that extends public health impact beyond any single city or campaign cycle. The Clapboard Score of 88 out of 100 reflects this rare convergence of creative rigour, genuine utility, and scalable public interest design.
SightWalks are cement pavement tiles developed by Cemento Sol that use a coded system of embossed lines to identify nearby businesses and services. Visually impaired pedestrians count horizontal lines with their walking sticks to determine establishment type, while vertical lines provide directional information, enabling independent navigation in Lima, Peru.
SightWalks were first installed in the Miraflores district of Lima, Peru. Miraflores is one of the city's most commercially active areas, making it a practical testing ground for a system designed to help visually impaired pedestrians identify banks, hospitals, grocery stores, bus stops, and other establishments independently.
Circus Grey Peru, part of Grey Worldwide, created the SightWalks campaign for Cemento Sol, the cement brand of UNACEM. Creative Chairman and CEO José Rivera y Piérola led the project, working with Peru's three largest visually impaired associations to co-develop and validate the tactile tile system before its public deployment.
SightWalks won one Grand Prix in Design at Cannes Lions 2024, plus four Gold Lions across Outdoor, Brand Experience and Activation, Media, and Sustainable Development Goals categories, two Silver Lions, and one Bronze Lion. It also won Grand Prix honours at the London International Awards 2024 and El Ojo de Iberoamérica 2024.
Cemento Sol released the SightWalks tile designs copyright-free, allowing any city, organisation, or individual to replicate and implement the system without licensing restrictions. This open-access decision, highlighted by Design Indaba, is central to the campaign's public health ambition, enabling the tactile navigation system to scale globally beyond Lima and Peru.
Cemento Sol and Circus Grey Peru collaborated with UNCP, Cercil, and Yo Soy Sus Ojos — three of Peru's largest visually impaired associations — throughout the industrial design process. As reported by Storyboard18, more than 500 visually impaired participants tested the tile system before its deployment in Miraflores, Lima, ensuring the tactile code met genuine navigational needs.
.webp)
Creative Collaboration Platform: The Backbone of Modern Creative WorkWhat is a creative collaboration platform?Clapboard defines a creative collaboration platform as the operational core for today’s distributed creative teams. This is not a collection of digital collaboration tools stitched together; Clapboard’s system
Understanding the Creative Production MarketplaceWhat is a Creative Production Marketplace?Clapboard defines a creative production marketplace as a structured ecosystem where brands, agencies, and production talent converge to execute video, advertising, and branded content at scale. Unlike the legacy agency or freelanREAD FULL ARTICLE
The Urgent Need for a Creative Production Operating SystemWhy Traditional Creative Production Models Break DownClapboard sees the creative production landscape shifting under pressure. Content velocity is no longer a buzzword—it’s a mandate. Modern advertising demands relentless output across dozens of channels, each wREAD FULL ARTICLE
