The percussionist who hears through her feet
Evelyn Glennie began losing her hearing at eight. By twelve she was profoundly deaf. Every doctor and music teacher told her the same thing: a deaf person cannot have a career in music.
Her school percussion teacher, Ron Forbes, disagreed. He asked her to take off her hearing aids and put her hands on the classroom wall while he played. She felt the notes through the wall. He played two timpani and asked which was higher. She could tell. He moved her around the room to find where different frequencies arrived — low ones through her legs and feet, higher ones across her face and neck.
Glennie has since won two Grammy Awards and plays over a hundred concerts a year. She performs barefoot, so nothing sits between her and the floor.
She did not find a workaround for deafness. She found a way of knowing music that most hearing musicians never develop, because they never had to.
Source: Hearing Essay — Evelyn Glennie
The lieutenant who did not know why
A fire in a one-storey house, in the kitchen at the back. The lieutenant took his hose crew in and sprayed it. The fire roared back at them. Odd — the water should have done more than that. They tried again. Same result. They stepped back to regroup.
Then he started to feel that something was wrong. No clue he could point to, no alarm, nothing visibly out of place in an ordinary house. He just did not feel right about being in it. He ordered his men out.
Moments later the living room floor collapsed into the basement.
He called it extrasensory perception. When the researcher Gary Klein interviewed him afterwards and worked through it, the explanation was simpler and more interesting. The fire was underneath them, in the basement. That made the room hotter than a kitchen fire should have made it, and it made the fire quieter than it should have been. His skin and his ears both registered the discrepancy. He acted on it several seconds before he could have explained any of it.
He was not psychic. He was reading two pieces of physical information that had not yet turned into a sentence.
Source: Spotting the Gaps — Gary Klein, Psychology Today
The clients who paused
In the 1950s the psychologist Eugene Gendlin was trying to work out why some people improved in therapy and others did not. He went through the recordings looking for what separated them.
It was not intelligence, insight, or willingness to talk. It was pausing. The people who got better would stop mid-sentence, turn their attention inward, and wait — sensing something below the level of words that had not yet found language. A tightness, a heaviness, a quality of something unresolved.
Gendlin called it the felt sense. When someone could locate it in the body and then find words that matched it precisely, something shifted — often physically first. A breath. A change in posture. Then the insight.
He published the technique, called Focusing, in 1978.
The information was there the whole time. What separated the two groups was whether anyone stopped long enough to read it.
Source: Focusing — Eugene Gendlin's method explained
Six minutes of ceiling
A design team at IDEO was working on the experience of being a patient in hospital. Rather than interview patients, one of the designers checked himself in as one, with a camera.
What he brought back included several minutes of unedited footage of a ceiling tile. That was the view. Lying on his back, waiting, that was what a patient looked at for hours.
When the footage was played to hospital executives, the room went quiet. Everybody in it had spent a career in hospitals. Nobody had ever lain in one of the beds.
They had all studied the patient. Not one of them had been the patient, and the difference was six minutes of ceiling.
Source: IDEO on the patient experience
The suit that makes you old
In early 1994 Ford went to the Ergonomics and Safety Research Institute at Loughborough University with a problem. Their customers were getting older. Their designers and ergonomists were not.
Sharon Cook, one of the ergonomists there, put the reasoning plainly: Ford knew that simply telling their designers about the problems older drivers faced was not enough. They needed to experience them in order to understand.
The suit arrived at the end of that year. Stiffened joints at the knees, elbows, hips and neck. Gloves that dull touch and grip. Goggles that cloud vision and narrow the field. Braces on the feet of the kind used after surgery.
An engineer wearing it does not read about the difficulty of getting into a car. He gets into the car. He finds where the door pillar is in the way, how far the seat is, what he has to twist to reach, what he cannot see. The first Ford Focus was developed with it.
You can be told about a problem a thousand times. Putting on the suit is a different kind of knowing, and it happens immediately.
Source: Ford Third Age Suit — Think Human
Buses that smell of coffee
In Seoul, Dunkin' Donuts wanted people to connect their radio advertising with actually wanting a coffee.
They installed atomisers on city buses, wired to release a fine coffee aroma at the exact moment the Dunkin' jingle played on the bus radio. Passengers heard the tune and smelled the coffee together, without necessarily noticing why. Then they got off the bus, often near a Dunkin' store.
Visits to stores near those bus stops rose by about sixteen percent.
The advertising industry works almost entirely in sight and sound. The sense that connects most directly to memory and appetite was sitting unused.
Source: Dunkin' Donuts Flavor Radio — Ads of the World
The restaurant with no light
At Dans le Noir, you eat in complete darkness. Not dim lighting — no light at all. You cannot see the plate, the table, the food, or the person across from you.
The waiters are blind or visually impaired. In that room the usual arrangement inverts: they move confidently, and the sighted guests hold onto their shoulders in a line to reach the table.
What people report afterwards is not that eating in the dark is difficult, though it is. It is that the food tastes different. Texture, temperature and smell come forward and carry information they normally never have to. Guests routinely cannot identify what they have just eaten. Some cannot identify the colour of wine they have drunk.
Nothing about the food changed. One sense was removed, and the remaining ones had to do work they are usually excused from.
Sight is not the most accurate sense. It is the loudest, and it drowns out the others until somebody switches it off.
Source: Dans le Noir
The alarm clock that made a designer feel stupid
Donald Norman, the cognitive scientist who wrote Emotional Design, bought a beautifully designed alarm clock. Clean, minimal, clearly serious work.
He could not figure out how to set the alarm.
What the clock produced in its owner was confusion, and then something worse than confusion — the sense of not being clever enough for an object built to serve him. It looked sophisticated. Nobody had asked what it should feel like to use, or what it should make its owner feel about themselves.
Norman's framework came out of exactly this gap: how a thing looks, how it behaves, and what it makes you feel about yourself are three separate questions, and most design only answers the first two.
The question was never asked at the start, so the feeling the clock produced was an accident. It usually is.
Sources: Emotional Design: People and Things · Attractive Things Work Better — Don Norman