UX STRAT Interview: Alastair Somerville, Acuity Design

Paul: Thanks for taking time out to talk with me today. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself your current job role, some biographical background?

Alastair: I currently call myself a sensory design consultant but my background is in accessibility. The reason I switched to being called a sensory design consultant is that I discovered that very few people want to pay for accessibility, because they always think about it as being somebody else, somebody who is not them. However, everybody has senses, and therefore it’s much easier to discuss designing for inclusion when everyone says, “Well, I have senses and I understand that creating the best possible sensory experience is good for all of us.” So, it’s a way of trying to make accessibility accessible to everyone by sharing ideas of capacities and enjoyable experiences.

In terms of work, I originally come from making physical objects, like maps and exhibits, for museums and galleries. In particular I am a specialist in transmodal design: translating visual to tactile for people with visual impairments. I changed track in 2013, when it became obvious that wearables were coming in and the UX industry was becoming interested in a more broad sense of what a user experience was, beyond just the screen. It was in that period it that it became very clear that people were designing and engineering beautiful objects but they didn’t really understand how humans worked in terms of how human perception affects senses and memory.

So I suddenly crashed into a career in user experience: I started doing workshops for UX conferences and digital product companies in order to help people understand the fundamentals of how humans sense and find meaning. Later on I worked on how feelings affect the way in which we understand what we need to do using a mixture of neuroscience, psychology and accessibility. So, that’s how I ended up helping companies like Google and Fjord. Helping them nudge the usability of their products. Helping them up skill their staff to understand more about themselves and how this can create better designs for their users.

Currently much of the work I’m doing is in a new area known as cognitive accessibility or design for cognitive diversity. It’s a growing market area, partially because of the rising number of people with dementia and partially because of the increasing recognition of how many people perceive the world in different ways, for example autistic people. It’s early days so there are very open discussions of how do we design products and services which are intelligible to so many people when we now understand that people have a remarkably broad sense of how they think and how they understand.

This work is now, ironically, pulling me back into physical product design. I’m now working on projects where we’re designing large architectural environments to be usable by people with cognitive impairments. For example, a London project with over two million visitors a week where we’re working on ideas of how do we actually architect a space to be usable and open to people with dementia and autistic people. Asking questions and seeking answers on how do we create products and services which work for a much broader sense of what it is to be human than previously.

Paul: Let’s talk for a moment about your upcoming talk at UX STRAT, “Mixed Reality Design Framework.” Can you tell us a little bit about that?

Alastair: Certainly. As well as the sensory design and perception work, I’ve worked on a number of augmented reality and virtual reality projects.. In all of these projects, one of the things that kept turning up was how do we actually frame this product experience within the experiences of the user as a human being? How can we frame journeys, and understand those journeys, when people are shifting between information sources? Shifting, as such, between realities?

Nowadays, people are naturally moving and sifting through quite large amounts of information. So how do we help product designers understand how their product can be situated within this sort of environment? Your users moving through physical environments that are full of signs and full of people talking to them which are collocated with digital environments on mobile devices. All of which is then, within the next few years, overlaid with augmented environments and fully virtual environments. All of this seems overwhelmingly complicated.

It was in the cognitive accessibility work that framework started to make sense. It was discovering that the person-centered perspective, and the ideas of user-centered design, could enable us to find a strategic way of thinking about all of these mixed realities. From a top-down systems view of mapping, all of these things were too complicated. But from a human perspective, using human perception, it becomes clearer. It becomes easier to understand how to design and situate your product so that people will use it: even when they have got all of these choices in front of them: the apps, the signs, the staff, the wearables. When they have all of these choices in front of them, it is using the user perspective that is a way in which you can frame and understand how to design and strategically place your product. That is what the mixed reality framework is for. It’s a way of finding clarity from a human viewpoint in situations that are very full of technologies.

Paul: A lot of UX professionals from traditional companies feel like augmented reality and virtual reality are a long way off. It’s like, “It’s coming some time in the future, but today I’m working on an e-commerce project and I have to get these things ready for my sprint,” or whatever. And yet the skills gap I think is already starting to be felt as industry learns about the advantages of augmented reality, that it’s going to be a competitive disadvantage to not be using augmented reality in some context. It just feels to me like it’s time for people to at least become aware of some of the attributes of augmented reality.

Alastair: Yes, certainly I agree with you that augmented reality is the most practical technology that is heading towards us with immediate effect. Virtual reality, I think, is too hard to plan for at the moment. The number of choices you have to make in terms of technology or where you have to go to to have the virtual experience are much, much greater. VR is more like cinema and theatre: it’s a very specific place one chooses to go to. Within the mixed reality framework, there is a difference between humans choosing augmented and virtual experiences. Much as there is between choosing to read a book or go to the movies.

That’s the other side of this: trying to make designers and business people aware that humans have spent centuries choosing which reality they want to be in and to trust human beings. We have all spent years moving into different realities. Sit on any train and you’ll see people moving between realities as they look around, or as they look at their phone, or as they look at a book, or a newspaper. Each of those shift is a person moving into a different reality because they’re choosing where they wish to put their attention. This is why attentional design matters. How do you help frame the movement through one of these mixed reality thresholds? People are always looking for someone who’s offering something that’s going to deliver them value in that time, in that place. How do we provide that?

Mixed reality design can be thought of as multi-reality design and that has many of the same strategic choices as multi-channel. There are choices to be made in terms of how do you think about which realities, and therefore which technologies, you wish to apply your budgets to. Too many realities and you stretch budgets and technical capacities in ways that may not deliver profit. Choose your realities. Trying to be in all of them is very hard.

Paul: You mentioned cognitive accessibility, and part of that might be cognitive impairment, but another part might be we just have different ways of understanding our world, different learning styles, different perceptions. You and I walking down the same street, we might not consider ourselves cognitively impaired, but we’re not coming from the same perspective cognitively. So, it seems like in terms of cognitive accessibility, that we’re all on the scale. Your work could ultimately branch out beyond accessibility into designing for multiple cognitive styles or personal realities.

Alastair: Yes. I think of how IBM talk of hyper-personalization. Designing technologies respecting how we all perceive stuff differently. Given human perception is based upon senses, emotion, memory, and imagination that means certain experiences will work for certain people at certain times, and it won’t for other people, and that’s entirely natural. It’s not failure, it’s respecting human diversity. Cognitive diversity accepts the diversity of realities humans can perceive and thus the design problem is at the threshold moments of switching between realities. How do we successfully enable products that meet both the diversity of people and places?

Some of the work I was doing last year, at the more extreme end of this kind of design, was on transcendent human experience. Working on ways in which we can design for extremely vast human experience: transcendent experiences which can alter people fundamentally in moments. There’s a whole raft of work coming through now, in both technology and pharmacology, which is interesting in terms of personal perception and experiences. There are very, very big things going to happen in terms of what user experience means.

Paul: I don’t know if you care to take out your crystal ball, but any thoughts on how that might play out in the next few years? Any perspective that you’d like to share about, beyond today, where you think that’s going?

Alastair: I was talking at a healthcare conference last week, and we were discussing cognitive impairment. In terms of dementia, it is still mostly about illness. However, look at the work of DARPA and cognitive accessibility transforms into cognitive augmentation. We have already seen successful projects in terms of memory enhancement using implants. So where we could end up are is very different. With advances in pharmacological and technological development, how we, as humans, experience and understand realities changes. My final point is this: maintain a human-centered perspective as what it is to be human and what it means to design user experiences changes radically over the next 10 to 20 years. Our humanity is the root in all this, as technology and change swirls around us, it’s trust in humans, your staff and your users, that maintains clarity.