Per Axbom
From time to time, we will bring you a repeat show. This is an episode from our extensive back catalogue resurfacing some of the ideas and thoughts from the past that we believe are still relevant and well worth revisiting. In this UX podcast classic with sensory-design consultant Alastair Somerville, we talk about what human centred design truly means. By using your senses and perception to take in the world around you. You can become more attuned to considering how our humanity fits into the often misguided struggle of repeatedly simplifying interfaces.

Computer voice
UX Podcast episode 306.

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James Royal-Lawson
You’re listening to UX Podcast coming to you from Stockholm, Sweden. I’m James Royal-Lawson.

Per Axbom
I’m Per Axbom.

James Royal-Lawson
With listeners in 172 countries from France to Hong Kong.

Per Axbom
And today we are talking to one of my favourite thinkers, Alastair Somerville. He’s a sensory design consultant, usability researcher and workshop facilitator.

James Royal-Lawson
Alastair joined us for a brief interview back in episode 105, about sensory design.

Per Axbom
And in this show, we talked around human centred design and how we as humans, perceive everything through a lens, also described in the show as a threshold when experiencing the world around us.

Per Axbom
So your workshop Alastair, it was really, really physical. Not only in the sense that we walked outside a lot, but also the work we did with the Jenga blocks. So as you were speaking, we were arranging Jenga blocks, in a way to help us understand what you were saying about spaces and the physicality of our world and how we make decisions, how we move around. It was like, it was insanely powerful. So tell us more about this thing of being present in the moment, the importance of being outside and taking in the world.

Alastair Somerville
Yeah, I think when… The Jenga blocks were purchased for the later on in the workshop originally, in terms of using them for a model, which was able to actually create a three dimensional representation of how we perceive information and what meaning information content has. Which came out of accessibility projects, which I’ve worked on, where we’ve had to find a way of describing to people how there is a difference between how people with different sensory and cognitive capacities, encounter and perceive information and how the actuals of meaning exists, and that you need to be able to move the two things apart.

But when I was designing the workshop, and when I was looking at the necessity of having a model to talk about how a human-centred concept of human perception works. There was this issue that I was looking at workshop where there was going to be about 20 to 30 minutes of me pointing at PowerPoint and people writing diagrams. And I knew that wasn’t going to work in a sense that it was, it was neither going to be interesting, nor was it going to actually achieve a useful purpose in trying to guide people to understanding how being embodied in a space surrounded by information, which I mean, the workshop was called “Walking through information”, how that sense worked. And so at given I was surrounded by 11 boxes of Jenga at the time, I began to realise that there might be a way of building the diagram out of the blocks. So it was only about last week or two that I started.

Per Axbom
Okay, this was completely new.

Alastair Somerville
It was about a week or two. Yes, it was completely new, in the sense that previously the diagrams had been literally just two dimensional diagrams. Actually, there are some 3D models, which I worked with, and which did sort of, if anyone watches my Twitter, they will see there are 3D models, which I did build paper prototypes. But they were all too complex, and they were too hard to construct during a workshop. So the Jenga, it was, I was to say, I already have it. So it was staring and thinking actually, we can or I can easily create a diagram in the blocks. And it therefore means that I can enable the participants of the workshop to build the model with me and physically see the meaning of what I’m talking about. Because the strongest images and the sort of the images, which most interest me was the images where people are looking through the thresholds.

James Royal-Lawson
And the thresholds you built with the.. So you basically, you’ve made doorways, from the Jenga blocks to represent thresholds and see through.

Per Axbom
And had a Lego figure to actually represent the person looking through.

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, I thought that was, compared to just a two dimensional sketch it was, it was a very good way of making you think and understand about spaces, because this was something that’s stuck up from your paper, and represented, literally, a portal into into somewhere else you look through.

Alastair Somerville
This idea that we’re permanently moving through information, whether it be the information be in a threshold, which is a physical doorway, and you know, in a physical space, or wherever it’d be a threshold, which is framed as a device in our hand. It doesn’t, you know, it’s all perception, it doesn’t matter. But humans move through these thresholds, they look for information, they look for meaning, and they choose to go through and again, that sort of whole idea of the figure moving through, moving across the table, moving through the spaces of information, that was what I was trying to get out. Because sort of most of the way in which the two dimensional use of post-it notes, the two dimensional use of diagrams, doesn’t truly represent a useful way of explaining embodied movement through information. And so yes… but it was very late on in the process of designing the workshop that it came to me.

Per Axbom
It was also, I think, forcing us to slow down and actually take in the information because it was like, you could have walked us through it in PowerPoint, and in five minutes, basically. But it was like you talked one minute, then we worked for two minutes on the blocks then you talk to so we were really focusing on what you were saying. And really, by being represented in 3D as well, really understanding it. I would not have understood it as well, if you just told us about it, obviously. That was an amazing experience, actually. I’m gonna steal it.

James Royal-Lawson
There’s one thing that was interesting, many things interesting. One thing I took away from working on, looking at the workshop was how it doesn’t immediately come across as something practically useful. So the exercise of exploring spaces. When you think about your work anyway, that you explore these spaces, and making a 3D diagram of forces and thresholds, that didn’t immediately come across as something I can apply to my work. But what I did find incredibly refreshing and enlightening was the practising being in the moment, practising going out and exploring spaces. So heightening my curiosity and observation skills. That was maybe a bit more unexpected from the workshop. Because we’re just so used to workshop delivering: “concrete skills, concrete, this is the thing, you now, applying to your daily work”.

Alastair Somerville
Yeah, I mean, I generally… I mean, certainly, with all the sensory user experience workshops, and the emotional design workshops, which I do. In general, I mostly warn people that no workshop anyone comes to with me will be of use to them at work on Monday after the conference. And, and that’s fine, because for the most part, most conferences, have a habit of teaching people, tools and processes which are relevant to the work process, and relevant to the workplace on Monday, I try to operate in a slightly different space in the sense that I’m trying to talk to people about their individual sense of themselves, to change their sense of how they exist, and how they think about how they are in order that then they can go back and share that sense of being with other people.

So it’s, and that’s why you have these things like sending people out to just listen to the waves and kick the leaves around and all the rest of it. Because, for the most part, people don’t have time for that because it’s not part, I mean, it’s a really important part of being human. And yet it’s not something which is part of most work processes. So you’ve got to find time and work you know, this is one of the reasons I do conference workshops. It’s a good time to give people time to do the things that matter, but don’t have value as far as corporations are concerned.

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, my favourite slide from the presentation was the “Be like the dog”.

Alastair Somerville
Yes, I mean…

James Royal-Lawson
The “Be more like the dog”.

Alastair Somerville
Yes, the photo… I amean that was a bit again, when I was doing the reconnaissance walks the day before to try and work out where, where people could go. Yeah, so I was following this guy. And it was very clear, he was just staring at his phone, but his dog was just wandering around sniffing, kicking the gravel, all the things that the dog was in his moment of experience taking in the environment, while the man was distracted by his mobile. And it’s that that thing of, can you actually recapture the sense of being a person in an environment? Because you need that baseline of being in the world, before you can start talking about how the overlays of information that we place both badly and well into the environment work?

Per Axbom
So are you saying that we’re forgetting to be human, almost?

Alastair Somerville
I find that we are minimising the experience of what it is to be human. Because by minimising what it is to be human, it enables us to test products more cheaply. Because if you if you reduce humans only to tool users, therefore you are able to ignore large swathes of what it is actually to be a human being. So this delimitation of, what it is to be human means that it’s a very inward looking sense. And it’s creating, and I do find, I mean, certainly the more I work on a lot of the perception and sensing stuff, that the world of what it is to be human is vast, extraordinarily vast. And that was one of the end themes of yesterday’s workshop. And that’s that we really need to properly consider our humanity.

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, so it’s almost like we’ve made it simple for ourselves to survive within some of our working environments, that it’s just too complex sometimes. So some of these narrowing, it’s a narrowing strategy to allow us to get through.

Alastair Somerville
Oh, it’s… You know, and again, it’s an entirely practical response to the way in which design and UX and all these events, service guides are all viewed within the context of corporate product management and corporate product creation. That’s the messy things to do with user research to do with research before product, the things to do with agile in terms of are you asking the right question, all of these things which are messy and difficult to fund, and therefore some of the reaction is to reduce them down, in order to minimise friction with other parts of the departments of the corporation. And yet, in each of those tiny steps back, you start building a wall between what it is that you are testing as a user, and what you are testing as a human.

Per Axbom
Exactly. And we’re so focused on interfaces, usually forgetting about the thresholds in between them, but also forgetting that humans are so used to shifting between ways of looking at the world. I think that’s one of your core messages that I took away from it was we context shift all the time constantly. And this is something that we don’t really think about when we’re designing.

Alastair Somerville
Yeah, I mean, when I wanted to reframe to the human focus and human centred perspective on information. The reason I want to do that was because I keep seeing all of these diagrams and all of these sort of discussions of the sort of the the massive complexity of information in terms of what we have both now and what we’re looking at in terms of augmented and virtual reality and all oher mixed realities. And yet, from a human perspective, these kind of apparently impossible situations is something that humans have done forever. In terms of moving between that book, you’re reading, that daydream you’re having, that walk you go on, that phone, you look at. These are all switches between different forms of reality, and we choose. And we have good choice systems, we manage it. From a human perspective, this is quite normal, we adapt, we change.

James Royal-Lawson
I was also thinking, you brought up yesterday, the, the notion of hyperreality.

Alastair Somerville
Hyporeality.

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, hyporeality. And that made me think a lot about how we spend most of our time adding information elements, adding interface elements or information, signage, and so on, to things to try and make them more understandable. So we’re adding, making things more, to try and communicate better. When you started talking about hyporeality, where you take, potentially take things away. So I started wondering about the future of design that some of the aspects of future design would be maybe helping blur so it’s helping turn things down? That would you take away things to make it more understandable?

Alastair Somerville
Yes, I mean… you know, I have many friends who use different forms of headphones and different forms of coloured lens. Some analogue solutions, to actually adjust their perception of the world. Because they need to control and have a sense of control and agency, over how they see and perceive the world around them. Because it’s too loud, it’s too bright. And therefore, you know, there are many ways in which people are already doing this. To some extent, it’s just that those purposes and those people, for the most part, these are people with cognitive impairments, they’re not viewed, well, they’re not seen by the industry. And therefore there is a whole behaviour area of you know, ways in which we deal with this, and ways in which we manage this, which are just… The design industry is unavailable, you know… is unaware of, and yet it’s there, and it will become probably more important over time.

Alastair Somerville
And now, I suddenly thought of an episode of “Black Mirror”.

Per Axbom
Oh, really.

James Royal-Lawson
An episode of “Black Mirror” where they effectively use augmented reality to block people. Basically, if someone, you can get angry with them, and you basically mute them. And you can’t see them or hear them or anything, they become just basically a whited out figure in their world.

Alastair Somerville
It’s like there’s, China Miéville’s novel, “The City & The City”, which is a nice, I mean, it’s a detective novel, but it’s a novel, which is nice, because it talks of a city… Well it talks of two cities where, who are very close to each other, and which people travel between. And they’re different cities. But, and there is a spoiler warning in this. But actually, they all live in the same city. It’s just the two groups of people dress in different forms of clothing. And they are trained from birth, not to see people wearing certain types of clothing. The two cities literally, physically are co located. But the populations cannot see each other, they cannot perceive each other. It’s a beautiful conceit.

Per Axbom
That’s scary.

Alastair Somerville
It is, yes.

James Royal-Lawson
Similar to when I think about multiple dimensions. So if you get into like, fifth dimensions, and so on, where there can be beings existing on a dimension that we can’t perceive.

Alastair Somerville
Yes, I mean, sort of the intersectionality, sometimes there’s a whole area of stuff which got cut from the workshop to do with homological space, which is a much larger sense of information design over space and time, which got deleted because it would be too much.

James Royal-Lawson
Yes, I think that was probably a sensible decision.

Alastair Somerville
It’s really interesting, but it is something which it’s a way of actually reframing a lot of the way we think about information by actually really understanding how objects and artefacts move through time. And it’s a bit yes, too much for three hours.

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah. I think so.

Per Axbom
So, in a sense, you’re not part of the UX design industry, and in a big sense you really are as well, because you’re constantly being invited by the UX industry to speak. Why do you think that is? And if you put your critical glasses on, what is your perception of the UX industry?

Alastair Somerville
I came across the UX industry, what, 2013? And sort of have sort of been working with projects and with companies, and certainly in conferences, since then. I think on one level, I’m invited along because, simply because I come out to sensory and accessibility design. I do have very, very strong opinions on what being human centred actually means. And, secondarily, I think it’s because I’m also, both willing to, and to a certain extent, now permitted to talk and workshop through subjects that have no meaningful benefit in the next two weeks of people’s careers. And yes, I get feedback from people months down the line, telling me that they actually understood what I was trying to get at.

In a sense that I don’t want to talk about, and I can’t talk about practical processes and stuff, because I don’t work, you know, I do not work in the industry in that sense. But I intersect with it enough to be able to know the sorts of issues which are around and the sort of tools. And I’m therefore aware of where there are gaps. Because I am from a slightly askew angle on the whole thing. And therefore I’m interested in trying to describe the spaces which look like they will be something the industry will be coming across at some point in the next two years. And that’s mostly what I try. And that’s, I think, why I get invited to do conferences. I’m willing to put people through experiential workshops, because I believe experiential is the way to be able to make people and enable people to understand, you know, I need people to understand the thing themself. I can’t just tell people, they need to actually live the experience to understand what the heck’s going on.

And then I’m allowed to do weird crap. I am permitted, because because I’m, I am known for doing it. Therefore, there is a relationship in that sense that I can go and make people go for walks, I can have people play with Jenga in a way that, you know, many people probably are not permitted. Because there is this sense that the process and the tool must be concretely connected to work process as it exists now, and that very specific connection to “it has to be locked against what we are already doing” means that the industry can only move very incrementally forward on certain subjects. Yet, sometimes you actually need to be able to bound over to be able to say: “but the space you’re entering, is extraordinarily huge”. And we at least need to have some idea of what that space might be. You know, a lot of the time, I don’t have answers on a lot of this stuff. But at least people may have a better way of considering the possibilities.

Per Axbom
I think you’re actually allowing us to understand ourselves better and the world we’re in better, ourselves as humans, allowing us then to make these leaps when we have to in the industry. Now we need to start looking at it this way because now we’ve done this already. Now we need to start looking at it in another way. I think that lasting impression is really what I love about what you do, it’s fantastic. Thank you so much for sitting down with us, Alastair.

Alastair Somerville
Certainly, thank you.

James Royal-Lawson
During the interview of Alastair, we mentioned the wonderful picture he took and actually incorporate into his slides about “Be the dog”. But… I want to describe that a little bit more to the listeners that, Alastair beeing Alastair, he was wandering around in the area surrounding the hotel that the conference was being held up. And he’d spotted a man. And this was a man walking his dog. And the dog was having a really good sniff, it was sniffing everything around it, it was taking in the world that it was experiencing and giving the world time to share its experiences. And, of course, the dog is connected by a lead to its owner, and the man, he’s stood by the side of the dog, waiting for his dog. But he’s just staring at his telephone.

In the actual picture, you can see that there’s a path, it’s a gravel path, there’s a curb, there’s a bush, it was across a dog, there’s a small boat, there’s a waterway, there’s a railing, there’s a rock face, I think it’s even a building or it might even be… I think that office building in the background, or on a high rise bridge, there’s a car. There’s so much going on in this picture, the guy is looking into his telephone. So Alastair, put some labels on this, and there’s a big arrow sign that says: “Don’t be this!” pointing to the man… “Be the dog!” pointing to the dog. And just that one picture I think sums up so much of what Alistair was trying to or is teaching and trying to get us to understand.

Per Axbom
I agree. It’s amazing. And that’s what he really forced us to do. To actually be the dog and and go out and listen to sounds in a way that usually don’t do and look around, smell, look at colours, the sizes of different things.

James Royal-Lawson
Listen, listen to things.

Per Axbom
There’s so much we miss that is going on out there. And the funny thing about one of your… I listened to the subtext sort of what Alistair is saying he’s almost mocking us because you’re calling yourself a human centred designer as a UX designer. But I mean, you almost have no idea of what human centred is because you’re working with the screens, and there’s interfaces, but you don’t work with the whole complete human being. So he’s saying that he’s looking two years into the future. And he’s looking at, this is where you have to go. So he’s preparing us for that movement towards understanding humans, in a more broad sense.

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, we’ve got the user experience designers, and we’re talking about users. And as Alastair said, we’ve reduced humans to users. And we’ve cut off our senses we’ve boxed ourselves in. And to do human centred design, you have to be a more human designer. And part of being a more human designer is properly considering the real world around you.

Per Axbom
Exactly. Well, understanding of what it means to be human because the danger is that we’re forgetting when we’re categorising people into these or compartmentalising them into these groups, we’re forgetting what it means to be a human with the full experience of what is going on throughout the day. And people have these thresholds, they’re filtering out some stuff looking at other stuff. I was thinking of actually, there’s been a campaign in Sweden, where you have ADHD children who want to wear baseball caps inside. And usually that’s considered rude usually, in most Western cultures, but for them for the people who are struggling in school, or the children are struggling in school, wearing these it helps them filter out parts of their environment that keep them from concentrating well.

So in my reality, wearing a baseball cap indoors may be perceived as rude, but in their reality, it’s a coping mechanism to manage their life. And we need to be able to see these differences in how we approach reality and what we are experiencing differently as different individuals. Going throughout a day and going through your city, you’re seeing different stuff, depending who you are. Usually, people just ignore and filter out aspects of city life like the homeless people, or the people who are trying to sell you stuff, things that you think are for tourists, and we’re filtering out stuff all the time. But sometimes we can become conscious of them. If somebody forces us to.

James Royal-Lawson
Yes, exactly. And by Alastair’s workshop when he forced us to create portals, thresholds related to a world close by to us. So then we went outside and experienced those portals and thresholds in real life. So you know, the route I have followed, we went into…We were outside the hotel, but then made went back into the hotel because we were going to we went to have lunch with the task that we tried to follow. So then each time you go through one of the portals, whether is the door to the hotel or the door into the restaurant, and so on, you really kind of think about what happens. What am I… what information am I taking in? What information do I need, at this point in order to make it successfully through the portal?

Per Axbom
And there’s things happening between the portals as well and your may take up your phone, and that becomes a portal. So I mean, it’s just all those… you might call them touch points. I don’t know if we can use other stuff that we can relate to, but I think you mentioned that.

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, well seems, we talked to Andrea Resmini in Episode 144. He talks a lot about cross channel ecosystems. And he and he’s mentioned thresholds, of course, but he also talked about scenes where thresholds touch each other. But that’s, I think it’s similar to as the same with portals and thresholds that you go from one space into another space.

Per Axbom
And just that, I mean what Alastair did was he actually created a portal for us within the workshop, because he worked with experiential workshops. He made the workshop very physical, he made the participants a part of the presentation. So if we didn’t do our part in the presentation, as he was moving along, the presentation couldn’t continue. So we were learning what he was doing to us, he was designing the workshop so that we would be able to understand the information better, by using our senses more. And I think that’s what we need to take away as designers that we can do what Alastair does, in designing experiences as well, using more of what it is to be human.

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, I love the whole kind of reverse thinking of some of this because we were focused so much on kind of, like, I suppose pimping, puffing up and and making experiences more delightful, kind of more exciting, exhilarating, entertaining, all these things. Whereas Alastair talks about deaugmenting, so reducing, so you can allow focus. Like you said, about, you know, maybe putting the cap on to help you focus, or you put the kind of noise cancelling headphones on to reduce noise. So you can actually focus on the person you’re actually trying to talk to, or trying to listen to. There’s ways in which we could work better maybe as designers to reduce noise in designs in order to allow people to survive, I guess, survive experiences. There’s also some additional content, from our chat with Alastair. We recorded a special event clip called “Journey number six”.

Per Axbom
Oh, yeah, of course!

James Royal-Lawson
Where we geek out a little bit on one of these experiential journeys to do with taking bus number 53, from the hotel into town. It’s really good fun to listen to.

Per Axbom
They’re obviously aware of all these problems, because there are many, many problems. And everybody’s talking about them at the conference.

James Royal-Lawson
Must be awful having a kind of 250 UXers and information architects at your hotel.

Per Axbom
Why do you fail to see that there is a solution to the frustration that guests are expressing? This is what interests me, how why don’t they see? Or why aren’t they interested in solving that? Because well, it’s now becoming just part of this experience of the hotel.

Alastair Somerville
But I mean, people become habituated to environments. I mean, this is, when I do sensory audits for museums and visitor attraction places, one of the key things about that is taking management around the place, and slowing them down enough to actually notice the things which are paining their customers. And yet they walk through those buildings day-in and day-out, but they can’t see it. And again, this is the thing about perception and the way that sort of human beings can delete out aggravating things if they see it enough. And so it is natural, and again, it is one of these things of actually sort of when trying to deliver the stuff, of really, really forcing yourself back into a state of actually being able to see stuff as a human being. Because otherwise you’re you’ll begin to lose contact with why you have an endless stream of slightly aggravated customers turning up.

James Royal-Lawson
But I think I think almost the saddest aspect of variations of “Journey number six”, I’ve put myself through this conference, is, I’ve now learnt them. So if this conference should happen, it won’t, but it should happen to come back to this hotel next year, the journey will be completely different because I know exactly how to take myself from bus number 53 down to the hotel entrance. I know exactly how to park my car. Those processes are now… I’ve assimilated them.

Alastair Somerville
Yes. And that’s of course the issue of adaptability and compliance of humans, that people will comply to a system even if the system doesn’t make sense.

James Royal-Lawson
Thank you for joining us today. As Per just mentioned, we will have show notes for this episode on the website UXpodcast.com. They should also be available in your podcast clients. If you aren’t already subscribed to us and please add us to your podcasting client of choice.

Per Axbom
Remember to keep moving.

James Royal-Lawson
See you on the other side.

[Music]

Per Axbom
Knock-knock.

James Royal-Lawson
Who’s there?

Per Axbom
Rudolph.

James Royal-Lawson
Rudolph, who?

Per Axbom
Money is the Rudolph all evil.

James Royal-Lawson
Oh, it’s not even Christmas.