Raising awareness through radical empathy

Barker Langham worked with Sightsavers and a wider team of creative collaborators to develop Blink – the end is in sight, a multi-award-winning exhibition that raised awareness about trachoma, a bacterial infection that remains the leading cause of preventable blindness worldwide. Left untreated, the disease causes the eyelashes to turn inwards—until eventually, every blink brings the sufferer closer to irreversible blindness.

The exhibition offered visitors a powerful, immersive experience that reflected the emotional reality of this journey. Combining visual storytelling, interactive technology and deliberate stillness, the experience invited each visitor to consider what it truly means to blink yourself blind.

At the heart of the exhibition was a single, poignant question: What would you want your last image to be? Award winning photographers from around the world were invited to select a single work – the last image they would hope to see before going blind.

Nick Knight, the late David Goldblatt, Kate Holt, Georgina Cranston and Tommy Trenchard all contributed works. Their photographs formed the emotional core of the experience, offering moments of beauty, clarity and vulnerability. Each one invited stillness. Each one invited loss.

Each image on display was fitted with custom eye-tracking technology developed by Jason Bruges Studio. As visitors stood before a photograph, the system monitored their blinks in real time. Every blink triggered a mechanical actuator, slowly and irreversibly destroying a small part of the image—pixel by pixel.

The effect was cumulative and visible. Over time, each image degraded, mirroring the quiet progression of trachoma and turning every unconscious act of looking into a mark of damage.

The exhibition broke down the usual distance between audience and cause. Our role was to help frame an experience that would support Sightsavers’ wider mission—one that created space for reflection, empathy and response. In doing so, Blink offered a new kind of advocacy platform: one that appealed not only to the intellect but to the body, and to the senses.

The project also supported Sightsavers’ fundraising efforts, engaging new audiences and potential donors by placing them in direct, personal dialogue with the issue.

As each image was viewed, it changed. What remained after the exhibition was not only a powerful memory, but a set of altered artworks — each one shaped by the collective pattern of blinks left behind by its viewers.

In this way, Blink became not just an exhibition, but a process. It continues to inform thinking around the use of experience design in advocacy work, and has supported ongoing conversations around the intersection of public health, art and technology.