Push to Walk
From heartbeats to brainwaves, economic cycles to cosmic orbits, oscillations can be found everywhere. This podcast takes artists and listeners deep into the Powerhouse Collection of half a million objects to unearth stories about the vibrations, fluctuations, and movements woven through our world – and beyond it.
The PB/5 pedestrian crossing button is a celebrated icon of Australian design. Its renowned sound became part of an independent movement for social change, and the audio tactile pedestrian button became an irreplaceable feature in our neighbourhoods.
In Push to Walk: A People’s History of the Pedestrian Button, John Jacobs and Jane Curtis find out how the PB/5 pedestrian button came to be a fixture on Australian streets from the people who helped make it happen: engineers, Vision Australia advocates and the blind and vision impaired communities.
‘By 1984, the pedestrian button we know, and love was designed and installed on Sydney streets. The rest of Australia followed and these days it's hard to find a crossing without one.’
Transcript
Bill Jolley Now if you walk around Australia and you come up to a pedestrian crossing in Sydney, Melbourne or most other cities, you'll come up to a pedestrian crossing that goes beep, beep, beep, beep.
Graham Innis You don't just use those signals to tell you when to cross the road. As a blind person, you also use them to keep in your mind where it is that you're going.
