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 […]
Modeling spaces of Accessibility
Agency And Autonomy User Experience, and design more generally, is interested in enabling the individual to do the thing they want to do. However, this can be unhelpful when discussing accessibility because it ignores much wider social and poltical ideas of personal independence and autonomy. “Doing the thing I want to do…” is a tightly […]
EasyJet and the inconvenience of travellers with disabilities
I ran a workshop at UX Bristol on designing forgettable experiences and used the EasyJet airline ticket booking system as a core element in workshop exercise.I asked people to consider: It’s the latter point that I’ll deal with here. What does the booking experience look like? In a one hour workshop, I needed to provide clear […]
Accessibility is where you start
Accessibility is where all design projects need to start because it is the only way of avoiding huge mistakes and huge costs. Accessibility is how you recognise the vast breadth of human capacities and needs. Without it, the design space may seem small and manageable but that’s a trick you play upon yourself in the […]
Empathy exercises don’t work
Eyeware is a new immersive app, just released by RNIB and the UK’s Transport Systems Catapult. It simulates different types of visual impairment. Microsoft Design tweeted (later deleted) that it enabled you to feel like what it is to live with a serious eye condition. This is very, very wrong. It is at the core […]