Thinking about Inclusive Design Research, with Ashley Peacock from AbilityNet.

Design research is tricky.  When you work with a great design researcher you get to see the skill and subtlety involved in executing research that avoids biases and reveals fresh insights.  

When your research participants are neurodiverse the task of the design researcher becomes even more complex, but this is where this episode's guest, Ashley Peacock has developed her expertise. 

Ashley shares her career story and talks about the tactics that make design research more inclusive.  Key take-aways are that there's no perfect approach and you need to  be kind to yourself as there will be mis-steps to learn from.  We hear about the power of Autemojis and fall in love with  Weird Pride. 

About Ashley

Ashley works primarily on AbilityNet’s inclusive user-research practices. Her expertise lies at the intersection of cognitive science, AI and technology.

Ashley previously led a company for four years, specialising in tailored assistive solutions for governments, businesses, and charities. This included creating 3D autism simulations, collaborating with the NHS on a mental health triaging tool during the COVID pandemic and engineering custom software to help people with neurodegenerative conditions to read again, working in partnership with UCL.

As a neurodivergent professional she continues to make an impact in this field through public speaking, writing and research.

Episode Links

Damian Milton's Double Empathy Gap Article. 

Ability Net 

Weird Pride

Learn about Dinah Murray

Service Design YAP is developed and produced by the Service Design Network UK Chapter.
Its aim is to engage and connect the wider Service Design community.

• Episode Host: Stephen Wood
• Production Assistance: Jean Watanya

Transcript

Ashley Peacock 5 - 17:07:2025, 09.43

[00:00:00] Hello and welcome to another episode of Service Design, yap. I'm your host, Stephen Wood. Back in the spring, we hosted an event focused on accessible design. Given the fact that regulations were changing and were gonna be impacting businesses and public sector organizations, it felt like the right time to be looking at this topic.

At that event, I met Ashley Peacock. Ashley was talking about the tools and tactics she's developed to help her practice of inclusive design and more specifically how it helped to engage with research participants who are neuro divergent. This session went down incredibly well. Phones were out snapping her slides, pens were out capturing her content.

So we knew that we had to invite Ashley onto service, design the app so that more people could hear what she had to say.

So today I [00:01:00] am joined by Ashley Peacock, who's senior accessibility consultant at AbilityNet, and she spent her career focused on inclusive design research. Hey Ashley, how you doing? Hey, Steven. Doing good. How are you? Happy Friday. Oh, happy Friday's. You and, uh, I'd just like to say that only one of us has a drummer next door during the recording of a podcast, which is a first for service design app.

We have some really nice speed bumps. When we talked to Amy from JP Morgan, which we had fantastic. But drumming, yeah, it's a first. Do you get on well with your neighbors? Well, I did.

Oh, there we go. But let's dive in. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and where your design career started? Yeah, absolutely. So in terms of where my early career started, it was very much at university, uh, around 15 years ago now. And I've got lots of family members who are [00:02:00] disabled.

Neurodivergent. My mom's got nine siblings. Which makes Christmas really fun. And there were a lot of challenges that, um, I'd seen my family experience, um, and sibling experience as well growing up and at university, decided that, okay, I'm gonna build a piece of tech that's gonna support the autistic community.

And then realized, uh, I don't actually know what to build. I've got about 10 ideas, so. As you do. I start off with a survey to work out what I get. But then I also realized that, hang on, if I can't work out what people need, then how is anyone like a teacher, social worker, researcher, gonna be able to work out what they need?

Because I, at that point, I thought I knew everything, right? I thought I had like 10 years of experience around autistic people. I thought, yeah, I fucking know everything. I realized I didn't. And so I thought, I know I'll build a 3D autism simulation tool [00:03:00] co-created, and through that I'll be able to work out what it's that people need.

So that was the start of my journey, essentially. And when I co-created this with people. I learn so much about what I didn't know. I learned where I was interviewing people to understand their experience, but I was unable to get a kind of image or understanding of their experience. And I then got support with co-creating the questions to help me unlock more people's experience.

And that's when I started to see this depth and color come through in the research that enabled me to start. Prototyping and then co-creating what eventually was this sensory simulation? Very grounded in cognitive science as well. There's lots of literature review along with the co-creation, and I would give it to people and they would say, no, make it worse.

Change this, change that. And I thought, what man, this, this can't be the case. But it [00:04:00] was, and it completely blew my mind. And so that was my first experience of having. World challenged and yeah, that was the start of that early phase of career. And then I went into University College London was fortunate enough to work with Dementia Research Institute there with some of the, uh, most renowned researchers in the field.

Was able to get lectures from, I guess we would call her the mother of psychology. And I had a lot of flexibility and freedom to learn, go to various different courses. I worked part-time. We had to build a reader for people with a condition, which is a right form of dementia, poster stereo, cortical atrophy.

And with this condition, their memory is intact, but the visual processing system is, the variance is really high. So you'd also have conflicting guidelines where, for example, a person might be able to, they couldn't read large text, they could only read small text. So neurologically that would be the case.[00:05:00] 

But if you combine that with physically, their physical needs would be that they would need to read larger text versus smaller text. And getting an understanding of this group's experience and co-creating a reader to enable people to read again was again. A big challenge because there were only 25 people registered in the country thing with this decision.

Terry PR had it. It's worth doing for just him alone. Isn't it really fantastic trying to, we managed to co-create a reader that enable some people to read again, so. Anyway, hard design challenges with groups and big challenges has always been the case. And then ran a company for several years building assisted tech as well, so.

So from that point, you've focused on inclusive research. What do you mean by inclusive research? Okay. So for me, inclusive research is really about being able to get as close as possible to someone's direct experience. Mm-hmm. Through whatever means that might [00:06:00] be to really understand. And to be on a equal plane of communication if it's something like entities.

And through that, it's ensuring that we're not excluding people from the research, but also therefore not collecting data, which is just plain inaccurate or wrong. A good example is I think one of the hypothesis behind the scientific replication crisis of 2010. We obviously uncovered all these psychological and so theories and behavioral economics theories were actually not replicable.

And one of those theories is the fact that a lot of the groups used in the research were known as what you'd call wi. So while the educated in industry or in jobs and, uh. I can't remember the other two parts of that, but it was the lack of diversity essentially was in the samples that [00:07:00] meant we came up with theories that actually were not accurate for particularly neurodivergent groups, from my understanding.

Right. So the weird people were, in fact, not weird enough. They were all quite homogenous. But do you think that the irony was, uh, was spotted by the person picking the acronym? I think the person who spotted the replication crisis must have had a great time when they realized that they could put this into an acronym.

Fantastic. Yeah. Yeah, that, that's a, it's always a win, isn't it? So let's talk a little bit about how we can engage with people who have a, some form of neurodivergence when we think about design research. If we think about designing inclusive research for, uh, neurodivergent folks, if divergent is the important word in that sentence, aren't we all divergent to an extent?

So do we really have to change the approaches and tools that we use when doing design research? Yeah, we are all divergent [00:08:00] to a degree and there are things that we can take from an inclusive research that improve research practice for many people. For example, if I'm running a focus group, people who are blind or partially cited, the visual cues that people might pick up if they want to be able to talk in a focus group isn't necessarily going to be there.

And so you need to design or really try to design the group with a whole variety of different factors in mind and ensure that people's needs don't clash. So for example, if I have a person with a DH, ADHD in a focus group. And maybe someone who gets, let's say, triggered by some A DHD traits. We as a group tend to speak a lot.

We can interrupt, we can get excited, and that could accidentally mean that someone else feels that they have to be quieter or they could get triggered in that particular way. So if you're running those groups like this, you have to be aware of how different access needs are gonna intersect in order to ensure that everyone feels, let's say, [00:09:00] psychologically safe to speak.

Or that there are different boundaries or group boundaries in place, and that people have awareness also, how you speak to people. Because if I'm doing research with, particularly say neurodivergent groups, there might have been a lot of negativity growing up about being different and not necessarily knowing why.

So if they're uncertain of their behavior or when you are interviewing them, there's a lot of reassurance that might be needed that it's okay. There's no right or wrong answer. A lot more than it might be for groups who maybe didn't grow up with so much negativity. It might be if I'm doing research again, let's say with someone with a ADHD and they're speaking a lot, and then they keep stopping because they're worried that they're over speaking.

Whereas actually I want 'em to speak more so I can direct the conversation. Mm-hmm. And then of course, there's all sorts of different.

Oh no, no. I thought that that's a really good starting point. And I think this idea of the focus group where we have certain [00:10:00] people in that focus group that could then impact negatively on other people in the focus groups. So you, you get less rich results. Does that mean that focus groups are less productive when we are thinking about inclusive research?

Or is there a different perspective? So, I mean, the one thing I would just clarify there is I maybe wouldn't use quite the word negative. Actually, depending on the group and depending on the research, it might be that you need. So yeah, in that case, let's say I'm looking for particular type of creativity, then I might be looking at people within the ADHD groups for focus groups because I, they're gonna bounce off each other and come up with things outside of the box.

Mm-hmm. And with dyslexia as well. Versus if there are different types of information that I might need, I might set it up in a different way. But the main thing with focus groups, definitely not invaluable because you need to create a format that means that everyone is going to have that opportunity to speak.

And [00:11:00] sometimes it means you might have to do some weird things or things that feel socially awkward. I have a piece of paper that you put up to say, stop, or I need to enter, or, mm-hmm. Traffic light signs. I went to this autistic conference once, it's called Scape, and I had to have a, a label, which it was like traffic lights, colors.

So if it was red, it meant basically, don't talk to me, I'll talk to you if I, if I want to. Green meant like, you're free to talk to me, and yellow meant something else at the time, and when I went, I felt so strange. Out of place that at first me wearing this like label, I almost felt like I couldn't communicate with people or like I was gonna step on their toes or I was gonna break some rule or something like that.

But actually what happened is, 'cause I didn't have the label to start with. Obviously created a lot of confusion for people around me, and I was creating more mistakes. I was young, I was 20 years old and uncertain. And there's a [00:12:00] level of getting comfortable with being uncomfortable with inclusive research in particular, because sometimes there are things, especially if you're co-creating the research process, that might feel really weird to do.

Like as a facilitator, feeling confident enough to put boundaries in place, or ask someone to be quiet or in. You might be quiet, but these might be things that people actually want or need in order to be included. So it sounds like you're starting with like premeditation. So how do we choreograph the group so that we get the insight that we're hoping to, or that we can cover the area that might give us the insight that we're hoping to, to discover, uh, and then being more than usually sensitive to work out how you engage with the group as, as you're going through that research process, whether it's interviews or or focus groups.

I would say for most conferences, I would love to have the traffic lights because yeah, in some cases I'd love to be red. And, uh, to have no one talk to me at all at a [00:13:00] conference. But you do wonder, would everyone just want to be read though? Yeah. Please don't bother me. I just wanna be here for the conference.

And then the people would never Yeah. Come here and network. Yeah. And actually there's only one person and Yeah, they just wanna sell you something, but then the participant numbers go up and you get more people coming. Yeah. So yeah, I'm looking at it now. I love that kind of thing. That's fantastic. Well, maybe we'll try one of those at our next service design event.

We'll do some networking and we'll give people a red, amber, and green option. You talked earlier about the double empathy problem. Tell us a little bit about that. So for a long time, essentially autistic people were known, or it was kind of theorized, I believe it was in the dsm. It didn't.

There is a belief, and also from society and over time, I think it was only 2012, so not [00:14:00] that long ago, Damien, Milton Hughes, an autistic researcher, but forward that there is not a empathy issue from autistic people. There is something called a double empathy issue. So it's that autistic people can empathize within their, let's call like neurotype.

In fact, many neurotypes can communicate and empathize with their own groups fairly well. And let's call it air quote, the neuron normative groups can empathize within their groups fine. But the problem is when you mix the groups, so neuron normative groups have trouble empathizing with autistic groups and autistic groups might have trouble empathizing with neuron normative groups.

And I think you see the same with other classifications of diversity as well. And there's been various studies now at Edinburgh gaining empirical evidence of this. And from a, a research perspective, it opens up the doors to understand. First of all, [00:15:00] if someone's not able to answer a question, maybe the problem is the question, not the person.

Maybe there's another way of us communicating. Maybe there's another approach, not that. The problem is you, because you cannot empathize and therefore you cannot understand what I'm saying. Yeah. I think in any design research, there are points where actually I don't really understand the question, so you've gotta be able to reframe it in in a context where it becomes relatable and approachable.

Where do we think about the two groups? Do we think that their ability to intra empathize, so empathize with their own group, is that because of the lived experience that they have? It's an interesting question. I'm actually just gonna swing back briefly and come back to this. I was gonna give you a specific example of how the double empathy problem plays out when you're actually writing a research survey, for example.

Yeah. As an example, um, putting together a survey and I might have a question that says Yes no, [00:16:00] and knowing that the double M is at play, I'm assuming that there's gonna be yes and no answers to my question. And because of course I want to prevent people from just simply giving an answer, which might be incorrect near enough each time I'll always have something that says other, and it means that if there is a problem or there is something not understood, or there is another dimension, I'm not considering, it will surface itself in the other.

Luckily, it doesn't happen too often with practice, but yeah, creating those allowances, creating open text boxes that people can give you feedback. Say literally, I don't understand the question. Maybe this is just good research practice. If you need to get a hundred respondents, start with 10. Just make sure you can test your survey first.

Yeah, yeah, no, absolutely. And if you get lots of others, that's a laggy indication for that group that, that maybe you might need to sort of reframe or recontextualize the question. Or maybe [00:17:00] the question just isn't relatable at all. Exactly, and And that's also great finding as well. Exactly. Cool. We're talking about the double the problem and, and how we could apply that in design research.

So we've got this idea of doing a binary yes no, but, um, what are the other tactics that you think are not suitable for including when we're thinking about more inclusive research methods? So there's something that over time I have tended to do more, which scares the shit out of scientists. Um, but it's, it's, it's, it's grounded in something called a focusing psychotherapy.

But because it feels a bit more like an art to the observer than a science, does it not give good graphs? It can give excellent graphs. So essentially, instead of, let's say I'm designing a usability test and having very fixed tasks and very fixed questions. Instead, it might be keeping it extremely open that as a [00:18:00] person's going through an application, most of what I'm doing is reflecting their experience and describing their experience to make sure I'm on the same page as them.

And there might be points where I'll ask or reflect something actually slightly incorrect because gives this opportunity for correct me and provide the. Process, we get closer and closer with the person. They're not being, uh, boxed. And so at this point, the questions and the insights you uncover become a lot more unexpected and a lot more useful.

So you're starting with almost like a straw man and then hoping that people will interject and say, actually it's not like that at all. Or are you starting with something that you know is blatantly false to, uh, understand that people are gonna interject and course correct. So it won't just be that I'll open up and say, away any session, here's this thing, which is me wrong.

It might be [00:19:00] that I just use a different term. So if they're describing and they're saying, I feel very confused about this, I might say, okay, I'm getting a sense of is it frustration? And they'll say, no, it's confusion. But no, it's that. It's confusion. This is really confusing in this system. They can feel confused.

I could reflect back that it, it looks that you're a little bit frustrated. They say, no, I'm confused. But actually do you know what? I'm getting really angry. Um, it's not frustrated. It's a real rate because why is this happening? And so I've been corrected and we found something new. And that's different to if someone says, okay, I'm fully confused, and you nod along and you write that down and go to the next question.

Because confusion might not actually be the depth of their experience or the words that they need. I'm not sure if that quite makes sense. So, so you're starting off with a, a statement. So is, is it this, and it means that you're not just asking them something that, that could be seen as like a blank page.

You're [00:20:00] giving them something to react against, which might make it easier people to give answer.

Dynamic shift because they're correcting me as the researcher, and I want that. Yeah. You're the author. I'm listening to you rather than you listening to me. Right. And you want them to have the confidence to say, you know what? Your question makes no sense. And I'm like, cool, let's have a conversation about that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think when you spoke at Citi, you gave the example of people telling the researcher what they felt the researcher wanted to hear. Oh, that's never a good thing. It's so common across neurodivergent groups, but also groups who might have experienced trauma or have been through various mental health systems, and I just wanna answer, or they want you to get lost, really.

So it's part of this gentle reflection approach. It can help with that. And this is where it can freak people out, right? Because it feels like you, it's more of an art. It's not something I would [00:21:00] prescribe and say, you do this in every session. Once you've built a level of rapport with someone, there's things that can help get you closer to their experience.

And how do you build rapport? What are the tactics that you bake in for the basic interview? So maybe the first time you've spoken to a research participant, I'm, I would say quite myself. I am willing to follow the direction of the participants, so, mm-hmm We can meander together and there might be things that we can direct and the questions will be answered.

Without necessarily using those, those specific questions, but we're still getting answers to them. By doing that, it can mean that people don't feel under defense like they're in the spotlight. That's not what I want as a part of their experience. Humor is allowed within sessions, of course, and there might be times that.

I mean, honestly, when I've had session a person, um, keen to tears, we were talking about [00:22:00] discrimination in the workplace or discrimination in, in the interview process. Um, and this person had several master's degrees, spoke I think five different languages, and was being still rejected as soon as they had mentioned a diagnosis.

And it can be uncomfortable if, um, someone starts breaking down and crying in a research session, but. This kind of moment for myself, pausing and just saying, I feel really touched by what you're sharing with me today, and I feel really grateful for that. I'm just gonna take a few seconds for us both to pause together and it means we're both done.

Mm-hmm. It's a response, I think, from one extreme to the other, so to sor. Dealing with sorrow is not an easy thing to do. I think that's a great way to prevent things from spiraling from that point, just to give people that [00:23:00] time and recognize, actually, I can understand why you're there. You've talked about humor and often humor backfires.

And human backfires. Even when you are within your own tribe, often jokes fall flat, especially mine. If we think about a more diverse base of research participants, how can humor work there? It's a very good question because yes, with particular groups, maybe my humor doesn't, uh, land so well, and it just might be that humor's not the building of rapport for them.

Building of rapport might be something entirely different. It maybe doesn't help them to feel relaxed and to feel, um, yeah. Where kind of, I wanna call it meeting of minds like we're meeting together and I'm using that term in instead of, I am you and like you. 'cause it's not a part of my goal within research, I'm a different, but, um, yeah, sometimes these things aren't gonna work [00:24:00] everyone.

A toolbox. Toolbox. And I think, again, this is right sometimes can feel more of an art than a science, but, and with the goal of building the report connection and getting close to someone's experience is important and it does take trial and error. Mm-hmm. That's a fantastic statement. I think the fact you have to go in with almost like a, a situational set of methods and tactics.

To drive, uh, a, a sense of rapport and to help people to, to lead you or help you to discover new bits of, of data in the areas that you're investigating. It's not a one size fits all. Uh, and I think to do that, you've gotta be able to read the room. Which then leads us on to actually reading the room.

That's a, a very advanced level of empathy. And I mean, some of it, it really is also finding different methods. I could assume it takes a large degree of empathy, but I could take that to mean that I can empathize with all groups. But sometimes it's also, I think, [00:25:00] understanding why your own limitations are, and that's what's great with the double empathy problem because there are limitations.

And so the example I think I spoke about at Citi. Was where I needed to ask and inquire into young people's experiences at school, and lots of people had experienced severe bullying. It's really horrifying. I won't go into detail and my thought at first was, okay, I need to understand their emotions, but instead of picking happy, sad, and kind of all of these, I wanna say neuron normative boxes.

I'd asked them to, to draw three emojis to articulate their experience of school, and instead of people saying things like happy and sad, et cetera, I think one of the best examples for me was someone coming back and saying, I felt like Shrek this big Sperry over, but I was this really soft person inside.

And then another [00:26:00] person had depicted sad and happy at the same time, fractured. Just so many different terms that just were not in my vocabulary and the depth of experience, but also the rapport that got built through going through that process meant that when it came to co-designing, we've already had some shared empathy with the group.

You know, some people, interviews is not gonna be the best thing anyway. No matter what you do, no matter how many things you've got, you have to make people feel comfortable. Um, it could, writing might just be the thing that they need. Yeah, writing, drawing. I was like, how could we do things for people who might see interview or focus groupers, confrontational in, in a way that could limit their ability to participate or express themselves?

I think you also mentioned TMOs at one point, which I thought were fantastic. You tell us a little bit about the TMOs. Mm-hmm. So it came from, I guess, an autistic mentor I [00:27:00] had. Her name is Dr. Dina Murray. She was a real powerhouse in the autistic community, both from a research perspective. She's the person who developed e theory cord monoism.

That's what she's known for. Uh, but she also did a lot of political campaigning. She walked around with this badge, which said weird pride, uh, in her seventies and eighties. She's the real open-minded character. I remember when she was campaigning and fighting about care homes and people not having access to internet within Care Homes.

And she's obviously challenging why that that wasn't allowed. And she said that, you know, they come back with this answer, which is like, oh, but Johnny's gonna watch porn. And I'm like saying, wants to watch some porn.

Um, anyway, okay. And you know this porn on the internet, how? Oh, oh, actually you've watched porn, right? So you're actually imposing standards on someone that you don't do to yourself. Do as I say, [00:28:00] not as I do. Fantastic. Yeah, the Amos came through her because that's where the concept I had then created as an activity for this group, realizing to what extent autistic people might communicate feelings and emotions differently.

So an example was hers, which was, I think it was like upset but not obvious, feeling a sense of joyful wonder. And just a bunch of other emotional states, which was important. Mm-hmm. Didn't exist on the normal, like it scales. Yeah, exactly. And you get more richness, don't you? It's like, actually, yeah, you can dive into that.

Mm-hmm. As opposed to Yeah, I'm, I'm kind of in the middle. It's like, oh, great. Yeah. Fantastic. Nice. Good graphing, but uh, you don't really get much insight. What's good graphing, but not much insight. So I'm gonna do a okay from happy to sad, one to five. Where are you? Five. Oh, great. Okay. However, if [00:29:00] someone comes back and says, I've drawn this emoji and it shows wonder, but puzzlement, and it's like, oh, actually that's fantastic because that's so richness.

So can, can you tell me a bit more why there a blend? Would you say it's more one or the other? It gives you a much better starting point than, so. Why do you say slightly happy rather than really happy? That just makes design research a slightly suicidal, to be honest. Um, if I that I didn't know if I actually felt happy anyway, but I just gave you that response.

'cause it's there. Yeah, yeah, exactly. On a scale of one to 10. Oh really? No, just wanted to be over. Good fun is one. No, you can't. Yeah. What is one? It's like what about zero? Can I have a zero? Um, right As, yeah. What is it in the middle? Is that just a, is the middle always apathy? It's, it's good. And we, we, we all love scales because scales lead to graphs.

Graphs leads to something where we can share improvement and that that then leads to us getting budgets and green lights. Fantastic. Of course. Does it lead to insight? I guess it's that balance [00:30:00] between, I guess I'd say at the, I mean this is something that's philosophically in my mind, but the balance between holism looking at the person as a whole.

Getting these really in depth insights. Mm-hmm. Whereas we often approach science the west anyway, from a very reductionist structured view so that we can create our graphs and there's a balance between the two somewhere that we can get our insights, but also we can create our graphs. To get our budgets.

Yeah. Yeah. And we have the qual quant balance. Yeah. Both are great. If you've got both together, that gives you a lot more material. You can look at things through two different lenses and yeah, for, for me. Qual always gives me more aha moments and unearths the things that you didn't know you didn't know.

Whereas quants just mean you put a tick in the top right and everyone's happy. Hmm. Maybe that's reductionist. So we've heard a little about your career and uh, we had some really good stories. I love the weird badge. I'll definitely be seeking one of those out. If we want to [00:31:00] leave our audience with a, a few things that they should try, which will then make their design research activities more inclusive, what would you say the top few are?

We're very fortunate, I think, with AbilityNet that a lot of our staff are also diverse users and people, and so we have this opportunity to create research with people who are diverse and divergent. But that might not be the case for everyone, particularly with some global cuts and UK cuts happening at the moment, which will, I think, impact on people's jobs, particularly in the disabled space, which means that there'll be less people in work, which means our ability to create inclusive research might be more challenging.

Inclusive designs might be more challenging, but I think the main real top tip is where you can to co-create. Aspects, your process, particularly if it's a group that you haven't worked with before. The other thing I would say is a lot of the challenge [00:32:00] for people is really, it's their confidence that gets in the way.

They're so scared of getting stuff wrong and defending people and upsetting someone, that it prevents them from creating the research to create the processes to get good quality. Information. It's a real hindrance and it takes time and it takes practice, and there will be times that you're gonna feel really uncomfortable, and that's just part of it.

I think there's also a acceptance of knowing what your limitations are and your own self-awareness as a particular group. I think that maybe back to aspects knowing you need cocreate, so again, informed research. I know that. Apart the global majority, I'm white. And so there's a lot of difference in how I might have understood, um, or experienced or be aware of experiences of trauma.

Um, and so it's a huge gap, [00:33:00] for example, in my area with co-creating and if you can yeah, validate your research questions and also just iterate if you can. Hmm. You mentioned at the city lecture that actually you're gonna get things wrong, so just be kind to yourself. As you go through things, you'll have an opportunity to auto correct.

So e even if you do all of the, yeah, all of those steps, making sure you're, you're self aware, you understand what your gaps are, and co-creation and fostering, uh, an environment where there's confidence to contribute, it still might not be the right thing for every participant. So yeah, be kind and know you can have another go.

Once you've been wrong, it's okay because now you can get things and improve it. Be as open as possible. Open to the feedback, and open to listening, and like really listening. There we go. That's a fantastic place to bring this to a close. Ashley Pick. Thank you so much for sharing your experience of inclusive design research with us.

Some great [00:34:00] stories, and it's the first ever referenced to pornography on service design, the app. Thank you very much. Have a great weekend. Thank you everyone for listening today and for listening to some of the experiences on the inclusive user research journey. I'm sure in 30 years time I'm gonna be looking back and thinking how little I know today, and if I haven't done that, then I have done something wrong.

Fantastic. Well, no, that would be a good place because you'd have developed, the discipline will have developed, uh, and hopefully you can help us to develop as well. Ashley, thanks very much. This has been an absolute pleasure and, uh, can you tell the drummer that he needs to think about that snare drum a little bit more?

Cheers for you.

I've got an idea. Service Design app is a production from the Service Design Network, UK chapter. It's hosted by me, Stephen Wood, with production assistance from Jean Tya. Music is by Ducker Stats.[00:35:00] 

Someone is playing the drums next door. Relaxing, ain't [00:36:00] it?