A project designed by Bilkent alumni Zeynep Akın (PSYC ’17), Mustafa Yazar (MAN ’19) and Melike Yüksel (IAED ’18) won an Innovation Award at the recent Digital Transformation for Disabled and Elderly People Symposium organized by the Ministry of Family, Labor and Social Services.
The award’s purpose is to promote practices that can facilitate the lives of disabled people and improve their quality of life in the digital world. The Bilkent graduates’ project, a website called PinGOin, helps disabled people participate more actively in social life.
Explaining how the project came to be, Melike, who is currently a graduate student in the Department of Interior Architecture and Environmental Design, referred to the large number of disabled people in Turkey and their lack of access to common aspects of everyday social life. The project developers, feeling this to be a huge problem, decided to contribute to its solution.
The website they created helps users find an accessible hotel, restaurant, café or bar. It offers options for not only disabled people, but also families with children and people with pets. Currently, the website covers two major cities, Ankara and İstanbul, and allows users to filter results by district, type of establishment and user category.