What I learn with Sensory Design Workshop with Alastair Somerville

The idea for this workshop came to me after I finished reading an article on Medium written by Alastair. I was utterly blown away by his article, “3 ways of thinking about accessibility”. As a result of this newfound inspiration, I reached out to see if we could interview him on Adan’s and my podcast, Ramblings of a Designer. We exchanged a few emails, and by some coincidence, it turned out that Alastair would be on the west coast between his other conferences. We were so delighted to find out that he had an available date open on Oct 30, 2019.

Once the workshop date was set, we then took steps to find a place to host the workshop and kick-off marketing the event. This was the first workshop I was personally set up, and I wanted to bring some value to the individuals that would be taking the workshop. I also wanted to make sure Alastair was set up and taken care of. After this experience, I now understand how hard setting up a workshop on your own can be, and I must give kudos to others who run the whole dang full conferences themselves. Setting up and running a workshop takes a tremendous amount of work and knowledge of hidden gems that I was not even vaguely aware of.

As Alastair was setting up, he put out many types of items on display, and I asked myself how this might play out?

Once everyone was settled in, he started, and the first request that he asked the audience was, “Please write down the most annoying thing that ever happened on one of your holidays” Which was a great request as I had a lot of annoying things happen on many of my vacations. He also requested that we only write down one annoying occurrence. Everyone wrote down their annoying events, and we shared what bugged us. It was entertaining to hear what everyone had to say and their associated stories. On each table, there was a card, and on each card, there were four bullet points written as follows:

• Do your senses feel overwhelmed?
• How do you feel today?
• Are you happy with the number of people here?
• Do you feel comfortable here?

As everyone was sharing, I was looking at this card and started to think about what they were saying and did it match? In some way, yes, it did. What most people were talking about was their feelings, and what state their mind was in at the time. The state of you being happy is such an important thing, and it does matter.

We started the workshop exploring Alastair’s central question based on his fundamental work,

“How do humans perceive and act on the information?”

He then continued with the question, “how can we design for different senses?”. Alastair stated that we have the following feelings:

• Touch
• Smell
• Taste
• Sight
• Hearing

As human beings, we have all of these senses at once. We think this happens at all once, right? Well, let’s shed a little light on this subject. As Alastair continued, he explained that this perception is not valid. If it is not valid, then what is right? He said that the timing is off from our senses, meaning that the timing is off when it happens. We do not correctly understand the amount of sensory data that is being processed and how quickly each sensory data is processed. Do you want to know what is the fastest of the senses? The fastest processed sensory data is hearing. We hear things faster than anything else as Alastairs shows us in this slide:

What I like about Alastair’s explanation of hearing is that it is our frame for our senses. I have never thought about it this way before. I have always believed that it was our sight that was the most important one. He continued to explain more about the senses, such as balance, acceleration, temperature, Kinaesthetic sense, and other internal senses such as pain and time. As he told more, each reason was fascinating. The more I think about it, the more I believe that our minds go hand in hand with our emotions. Everything is tied together. Not only should we ask about what we feel, but what are our associated choices. He explained how these choices give us additional options.

“The problem with sensory design is that too many things are happening at once in the design work. This apparent complexity can confuse people about where the design might be going. The complication is natural, and complexity is design.”

We started a session in the afternoon by doing some role-playing and were tasked with selecting someone from our group to guess what we’re trying to do. As a group, we were not allowed to talk, and the person selected was blindfolded. This visual hindrance made it so that the individual was only allowed to feel things and were able to speak their thoughts to us but not receive a verbal response from the group. Before the exercise began, our group thought it would be easy. Oh gosh, we were wrong, oh, so wrong! The greatest lesson from that experience is that we should never assume what they might think of an object or what it could mean to them. That object may be interpreted as something completely different. How we reflect what we feel or what we might think of something has defined what others perceive it to be and will also give others the same notion. Different symbols mean different things to other people. The overall experience was something that I will never forget, and I will continue to learn about sensory design. This is such a growing field that anyone would benefit from it. Emotions are essential to everyone and everywhere.

Here is a video of how the event unfolded!