Unsee’ing came up at CampDigital yesterday while taking about walking around places like an alien, perception and human-centred design. Perception seeks usability – we sense and remember what is useful to our purposes and intents. This means we unsee what is there but not useful to us. We do not perceive what is useful to […]
Author: Alastair Somerville
Playing With Attention
I have just finished Attensity. It is a book created by the American collective The Friends of Attention. I found the idea of deliberately making Attention Sanctuaries interesting. More particularly, the advice to work explicitly and deliberately with people to agree what they are. A new zine I often make zines for projects and workshops. […]
The subtleties of being human
The rush to AI is built on top of an idea that digitalisation and data can replicate and comprehend being human. The big datasets and models now coming with personalities and fluent conversations. Yet this smooth completeness is superficial. It ignores the subtleties that actually make up human experiences. Embodiment matters There are two ways […]
Losing Human Being with AI
Guy Deutscher’s book The Unfolding of Language talks about how, over time, humans streamline their languages. Words are blurred and shortened. Grammar compacts and lose rules. Humans want to communicate but they also want to do it more efficiently and more lazily. This linguistic ‘degradation’ has led to centuries of complaints about the failure of […]
Fixing Problems by Mapping Perception and Intent
Mapping perception and intent is what I do with people in their places on walking workshops. It is because the place and the movement are what keep shifting the perception, usability and intent of the visitors or users. Perception is embodied and split into two key parts. What is sensed (the physical accessibility of information) […]
AI and Facilitation at Facilitate 2026
I was at the International Association of Facilitators (IAF) annual meeting in UK on Saturday. This post is about the ideas and conversations raised in one session: Co-write the Future with Al – facilitated by Hideyuki Yoshioka and Linmin Zhang. The Terminal Decline slide above is from their presentation and gives some sense of the […]
AI as Cognitive Ramp
The use of ramps, instead of stairs, made the physical environment accessible. Destinations could be reached. Agency enabled. Personal capacities matched with better institutional capabilities. Artificial Intelligence (Al) offers the possibility of a cognitive equivalent. Intents and journeys that were blocked by complexity and complication smoothed out. New ideas and new skills accessible as the […]
Breach – transgression not empathy in design
BREACH is something I think about when people are talking about using empathy, codesign and living experience in design projects. It’s a word from China Mieville’s The City and The City. It’s a terrible offence in an imaginary city where two communities, two cultures, two groups of people live in the same physical space but […]
Beyond Marketing: Designing Invitations and Welcomes in Cultural Organisations
In cultural organisations, we tend to treat the beginning of an initiative as a marketing challenge. A new exhibition, public programme, co-creation project, or community partnership appears on the horizon and we focus on the invite: the campaign, the poster, the carefully crafted press release. If the numbers at the door look good, we assume the […]
On the efficient product management of Panto
I went to our local Panto tonight. For the non-UK reader, panto is short for pantomime and it is theatre show for kids that also has risqué jokes for adults. It generally follows a fairy story, like Cinderella or Snow White, but can have British historical characters, like Robin Hood or Dick Whittington. All roles […]