I work in sensory design; in particular interpreting information for people with cognitive and physical impairments. A lot of time is spent trying to understand how people seek and sense the meaning they want and need from places and products. 

In order to do this, I run sensory audits with project stakeholders: the people who are financing it all, the people who are providing it all and the people who are expected to experience it all as visitors or consumers.

This is at core what sensory design is about. Trying to explore and discover how people use their personal sensory capacities to enrich their own experiences and how we can support that sensemaking.

I also run workshops to help people understand how important multisensory design is. It’s so easy to forget the broadness of our individual experiences when thinking about the user interface of a new app. The visual is a powerful trap for humans who are seeking patterns and meanings.

This week, I’m doing something new. I know people can’t attend my workshops due to time and cost but they’d like to do something about integrating sensory design in their work now.

So on 22nd July, I’m starting an Indiegogo funded project to create Sensory Design Sticky Notes.

They’re a simple way of enabling people to think about and manage the sensory design issues that can be easily forgotten in prototyping, design and testing of new products and services.

I’m keeping it all quite open and simple because I think people can explore and discover meaning themselves with their teams and their stakeholders. I’m offering a new framing device to help nudge them to ask the sensory questions and identify the behaviours that are easy to fail to remember to ask or to record.

From $17 for a pack of 5 sticky note pads for our 5 core senses to $85 for a workshop pack of 5 packs, the Indiegogo is a way of enabling and embedding sensory design into any project at any stage.

If you want to know more, email me or search on Indiegogo from 22nd July for Sensory Design Sticky Notes and buy some so you can make sensory design part of your organisation's project work.

I did three new talks and workshops this week: for the University of Manchester Libraries' innovation group on Tuesday, for the first meetup of the Service Design Network UK group on Wednesday and finally for the Beyond the Smart City conference on Saturday.

All different audiences with their own ideas of what is needed, what can be delivered and how they can do it.

I have tried in all the talks and exercises I have run this week to help people understand how much it is their users who make meaning of their products or services.

When designing something, it's quite difficult to realise how much meaning is made when it is in the hands of the users. It is the customer, the citizen, the user who defines usability and utility and it is the meaning that they create that matters.

Watching, listening to and responding to users is how products and services are made usable. Intervention and questioning can too often prime test groups to believe in and follow the intent of the designers and not discover the meaning they would explore themselves.

Creating exercises that enable people to think about the user's viewpoint, how they find meaning and how we can support and enhance that experience is what I do in my SensoryUX workshops and in the new Innovation Lab (developed alongside Abhay Adhikari) rapid prototyping skills workshops.

Contact me to talk about how we can help you and your colleagues discover more about yourselves and the users you work with.

Last Wednesday, I ran Designing Wearable Experiences at the UX Lisbon conference.

It was a new workshop that brought in new content, exercises and stories about how wearables can be designed to be usable when our senses and emotions create interference patterns.

Here's a few photos from the day.

Thanks to everyone who came along and if you'd like to know more or run the workshop at your conference or workplace, just contact me.

The slidedeck for the workshop is available on Slideshare.

Pop over to Medium to read my post on Accessibility is good design which I've written for Global Accessibility Awareness Day and the Innovation Lab workshop I'm part of on that day.

This full day event will help culture sector professionals get a deeper understanding of new technologies and their applications in their organisations.

The day includes presentations, workshops and interactive exercises delivered by several experts.

The presentation will give you clear insight into wearables, open data and Internet of Things.

In the workshop you will learn about the benefits and challenges of using these technologies to create new experiences for your visitors.

The prototyping session will help you explore different scenarios of how exactly your organisation can benefit.

Not only will you gain cutting-edge knowledge and confidence, the session will help you avoid expensive commissioning mistakes.

Book tickets at https://www.aanmelder.nl/theinnovationlab

If you want to come along - let me know - I have Discount codes!

Do you feel happy here?

It’s not a question many accessibility audits ask but it is this sensing of comfort or discomfort and happiness or distress that is key to understanding a whole new area of accessibility.

The stress of modern life affects us all and it is new research, in books like Paul Dolan’s Designing For Happiness, that shows how we can understand it professionally and help architects and property owners create places that are not only physically accessible but cognitively accessible.

I often work in museums on interpretation and wayfinding for people with physical and cognitive impairments. Exploring museums can be a fun adventure but the size of the places, the crowds and all the new information can create problems. We all need to recognise that accessibility is also about perception and intelligibility.

A place can be accessible but not look it – maybe the ramp signage is slightly shadowed at some times and maybe the access ramp is just behind a pillar. These two events together transform the visitor’s perception of the place. It looks inaccessible and so it is inaccessible. The solution is not in building another ramp. This is about creating intelligible places with trained staff to support visitor expectations and recognise perceived problems.

The work to create cognitively accessible places is in its early days thusfar. However, there are people who are laying out the conceptual framework and researching the technology for this new area of work.

Steve Maslin (www.stevemaslin.wordpress.com) has already written about Design for the Mind and identified four core areas that need a framework of standards to be developed around.

• Sensory, Social and Spatial characteristics of an environment
• Orientation (in time and space) within an environment
• Safeguarding within an environment
• Neurological and psychological aspects of physical and sensory interactions

All of these are about creating places and spaces that do not overwhelm a person, do not leave them feeling unsafe and enable their independence in achieving their journey’s goals.

Paul Dolan notes that happiness is pleasure and purpose over time and that much unhappiness is derived from misapplied attention. The point is not to build jolly places all the time but to create appropriate surroundings for people to achieve what they need without having too much fuss and bother. In this type of work, too much signage and too many accessible routes can be as stressful as too few. It means working with people with a range of impairments to test how much is right for that space and for the types of user journeys expected there.

Dr. Eiman Kanjo at Nottingham Trent University is using wearable technology (a form of watch that monitors heart rate and skin conductivity) in her research on Mobile Affective Sensing and Urban City Mood. This work is about testing how to collect huge amounts of personal data to understand the stress of a shop or a mall for a visitor. It is not about feeding back that stress to the individual but more about creating a mass of datasets that show how, on average, different people choose the move through buildings in different ways because of their mood and how the place affects them.

This research is building new tools for auditing places and understanding how they have emotional effects that were previously undiscoverable. It will allow us to design and redesign indoor and outdoor spaces to make them meet the standards of cognitive accessibility that Steve Maslin has begun to map out.

Within this framework and these new technologies, the solution I find most helpful now is training staff to be proactive in assisting people who have problems with the cognitive accessibility of their building or site.

I now run workshops for access professionals, museums and visitor attraction staff and architects to build awareness of the issues of cognitive accessibility and to provide them with the basic tools for auditing places and enabling effective assistance and management by staff.

It is early days in this area of accessibility but people are already working on understanding the problems, creating the tools and formatting the frameworks and solutions to enable better places that feel accessible and happy.

I spoke at SouthBySouthWest Interactive (SxSWi) in March 2015 about emotion and inclusion in wearable technology design.

It was a 1 hour talk to explore how work in assistive technology for people with physical or cognitive capacities is relevant to the creation of future wearable devices that are more than watches and more than about fitness and notifications.

I brought together the work I do in sensory user experience, assistive products that are already in use and research on what may happen both in technical and neuroscientific terms.

The theme that was most important was emotion. More particularly, positive emotion and how it is part of what we describe as happiness.

Happiness seemed to be core idea I came across in other SxSW sessions and conversations I had with other festival goers.

I think there's three reasons that happiness is back on the agenda.

Firstly, we have a more nuanced view of what comprises happiness. It's not just about sentiment and joy.

As Paul Dolan describes in his book, Happiness By Design, there's also purposefulness, misdirected attention and time. A sense of purpose is what supports our sense of contentment in doing things that are boring but worthwhile. Having our attention drawn to annoying or painful things is how we can be destabilised from our sense of wellbeing. Finally, time is how all of these ideas are settled in our minds, both the conscious and unconscious parts.

Secondly, fractures are appearing in the concepts of Behavioural Design (or Nudge Theory).

The ideas of manipulating user behaviour through design has a clarity that was appealing to business and politics. Yet, like the Focus Groups of the 1990's, that simplicity is not quite enough. Understanding individual emotions, not just group behaviours, becomes more important as the devices we use become more intimate and more personalised. Behavioural Design bypasses these areas and thus is valid but not sufficient for future design.

Finally, I think that there is finally a settling down of the ideas of Physical and Digital.

Societies, especially Western ones, bounce between dichotomies of binary, apparently oppositional, ideas before settling into a calmer synthesis. The last 10 years have been filled with all digital and all physical ideas that cannot cope with the fact that we live in a world where ideas and products can simply transmute and transition from and to either state. Accepting that flexibility means that ideas of core meaning, like happiness, become relevant. The manufacture of the product, its physicality or not, is irrelevant. We can do it all. Now, it's better to ask why? Questions of metaphysics and phenomenology are relevant when the How and What of a product cease to be questions.

Happiness matters and we do now have the tools to examine its meaning for users. This will mean a greater depth to product testing but that's not something to be afraid of.

Rediscovering our complexity and our humanity is a good thing. We can be more content, more purposeful and happier that what we make makes others happy too.

Thanks to an invite from Joe Welinske, I ran the Making More Senses of UX workshop at ConveyUX in Seattle last Saturday (24th Jan).

It was fun and I think the participants got new ideas and ways of thinking about their senses and future technology. Thanks to everyone who came and experienced it.

I changed the workshop for a couple of reasons. One was I knew that a sensory subsitution exercise I often use could not work in the space available. The other was listening to conference speakers, like Eric Reiss and Dan Saffer, on creativity and usability.

The first meant I had a gap in the workshop content. The second that I had some inspiration to design something new which would help people think of future UX in terms of multimodal design.

Between the 9 hour flight to Seattle and jetlag, I had time to create the new section but it needed (as noted by Dan Saffer) quite a lot of procrastination to get the right moment to really understand what to say.

What I created was a model for thinking about usability in terms of senses and emotions.

I've been trying to integrate a number of pieces of research, design work and books into a coherent form for a while.

I've used Nir Eyal's Hooked model of behaviuoral design for a while as a very useful framework. The ideas of sensory design are, in many ways, parallel to behavioural design but with slightly different moments when meaning is made and slightly different vocabulary.

I drew many, many diagrams trying to integrate ideas but needed a form that could be shown in a workshop.

I talk a lot about memory being held both in our minds and our physical movement. So, creating a large diagram seemed a good option. I found 12 foot of paper for $9 at a local Office Depot.

The model is new.

It brings together behavioural ideas about getting attention, sensory ideas about desire for experience balanced by perceptual filters and emotional ideas about arousal and pleasure.

I used it in the workshop just to open up those moments (whether micro or macro interaction) in design that are not simply about screens but about the totality of sensory experience.

It's a first draft model in the slides you can read above and I'll build on it as I do more workshops this year in London and Lisbon.

If you would like to know more, email me or come along to one of the workshops. I run them in some cities, for UX, technology and academic conferences and for both companies and government organisations.