We met some old friends at Croome Park in Worcestershire lately. It is a National Trust property with a big mansion and a Capability Brown designed landscape. However, this property is not like the normal “aristocrats and cream teas” ideal of the National Trust. Croome Park was the centre of a Royal Air Force scientific […]
Author: Alastair Somerville
Design circles – a workshop design tool
Finding patterns in workshop activities This is a quick post on a small tool I use when designing workshops. It’s a tool to consider what any workshop activities are for and how they will affect participants. You can download a printable pdf of it from Dropbox. It’s on a Creative Commons 4.0 license so play […]
Learning From Dissent: ideas for hybrid workshop design
Generally, I facilitate experiential workshops on topics like senses and emotions in design for conferences and organisations. Being together, working closely is crucial. That all stopped suddenly in March 2020. I needed both some income and some idea of how to work in a future where in-person workshops were few and far apart (in all […]
Losing control to offer comfort
I was sending some Etsy orders lately and Comfort/Capacity Cards were in one package. This post is about my attempts to lose my control in workshops to offer comfort for participants. Everyone have fun (or else) I run (even now online) experiential workshops on senses and emotions and it is hard to talk about those subjects […]
Making tools useless
I’ve made a Perceivoscope. It’s a tool for understanding how information needs to be perceivable, intelligible and actionable by a user for the experience to be meaningful. I’ve also made a Autonoetiscope. It’s seeing how anticipation and imagination frame and predict the experiences that people choose and have. UX (User Experience) obsesses about tools. I […]
Workshop On A Card
I am offering 5 new skills workshops using a new hybrid “Workshop On A Card” format. Each workshop has the same structure: A greetings card with some new ideas and space for notes A 20 – 30 minute podcast with more detail on those ideas A 60 minute Zoom encounter to explore ideas and actions […]
Aligning Ourselves
This post is a few notes on some ideas raised during the Unlearning Design Thinking workshop at the 2021 Information Architecture Conference. They do not replace the basic ideas of Design Thinking (popularised in the Stanford/Google/Double Diamond models). What I am attempting is to use the idea of Alignment to bring system thinking models closer […]
Making Tactile Maps Together
Maps help people both create a sense of anticipation and reduce a sense of anxiety about going to a new place. Offering different maps to people with differing physical and cognitive capabilities is offering a better welcome to more people. Acuity Design creates a lot of tactile maps for blind people to use in transport […]
The ABCD of Human Centered Wayfinding
This ABCD of Wayfinding is based both on published professional research (the neuroscience of Wayfinding is extremely interesting and I can provide references to great researchers if you want) and my experiences of making and testing maps with a range of users. It is simply a way of thinking about some of the issues of […]
New Next
Introduction This is the text of a Lightning Talk about Post Normal design I gave in early 2021. Welcome Hello, my name is Alastair Somerville. I run Acuity Design, which does accessible design for museums and public bodies, as well as facilitating workshops for companies and government agencies. Edge Users One of the things which […]