In this episode Mariana interviewed Sanjit Samaddar a lecturer and researcher of interactive media with expertise linking user experience, design, and accessibility.
Transcription of the podcast episode:
Mariana: Welcome to this new episode of the DARCI podcast, the podcast on Disability, Accessibility and Representation in the Creative Industries. My name is Mariana López, and I’m a professor in sound production and post-production at the University of York. Today I have the pleasure of welcoming Sanjit Samaddar. Sanjit is currently a lecturer in interactive media at the School of Arts and Creative Technologies, having been a student at the University of York since 2012 and a member of staff since 2021. He teaches a variety of programming and design modules on the Interactive Media BSC, mostly concerning user experience, design, and accessibility. His research is dedicated to the intersection of gerontology and rehabilitation engineering, with a particular focus on investigating the use of personal robots for older people. A core aspect of his work involves engagement with older populations to understand their needs, preferences, and the barriers they face in utilising rehabilitation technologies. His interest in this area started with a thought of using a drone inside people’s homes in working with potential. They found that the drones provided a unique and quite helpful solution to a lot of problems that users faced. This has now led Sanjit and collaborators to investigate other personal robot solutions for helping age at home and involve older people in the research as much as possible.
Mariana: Hi, Sanjit, thank you so much for coming to the studio today. How are you this morning?
Sanjit: Um, yeah, I’m good, thank you for having me. It’s a pleasure. Yeah.
Mariana: Today we’re going to be uh learning more about your research, and one of the things that really fascinates me is that you’ve been focused on the design of technology, such as robots for older populations, and this is a topic. That we have never covered in this podcast before, and I’m sure I know very little about it, and I’m sure listeners are going to be really excited to learn more about your work. So, a really, really general question. Can you tell us a little bit about how this technology operates? So, what is it used for? How does it connect to accessibility and the creative industries? And how advanced is it? And I do realise that’s not just questions. One question, it’s just 3 questions.
Sanjit: That’s good. Yeah, it’s a it’s a very interesting topic. Um, it’s, it’s fun to talk about, right? Uh, so robots, um, the way we classify robots, or as I have done, is we look specifically at personal robots, so anything that is helping you out at home. And this ranges, and the best way to do it as examples, so it ranges from a very interesting fun idea, which is a tablet, but on a device that moves around or follows you, and that becomes a robotic implementation of Zoom or Skype, or Anything like that, and it can be that simple. And now there is just tablets on like a mic stand, essentially with wheels that walks around, and then it gets more complex from there, and you’ve seen things, you know, the media, um, coming out with robots that can do flips and things like that, and yeah, there’s a little bit sci-fi on there, that’s the extreme range, but there’s a lot of different… Uh, ways that a robot can assist. Uh, you’ve got robots you would even consider uh a robot to be something where just at your kitchen, a cooking station where it has, um, sort of various sort of robotic arms or robotic things that can grab stuff for you. Simply put, you put a can somewhere and it opens it, that could be considered a robot as well. Ideally, we have some intelligence behind it where it’s not just a machine. Um, where you have to put in manual input, there is a little bit of automatic feedback, back and forth, where the robot is making certain movements or decisions, a little bit of intelligence there, then you’d consider it a robot. In that, we also take drones, which is part of a huge part of my research. Uh, so we considered drones as part of the robotic family. Um, and we then have, uh, we call them embodied conversational agents, which are not, uh, which are not robots really because they’re virtual, they’re avatars, essentially, that talk at you, so talking heads, and you now have them just on consumer websites, on shopping websites as well now. Uh, so all of that, we push into this robotic and in intelligent agents umbrella. Um, so hopefully that gives a little bit about what robots is.
Mariana: Yeah, absolutely, yeah.
Sanjit: Um, in terms of how that connects, um, specifically to accessibility, creative industries. The bit that I focus on is not the making of the robot, because they’re very intelligent developers, amazing people who make the robots, especially in um I was, let’s say, trained in the computer science department here at York, uh, doing my bachelor’s and master’s there, and most of my PhD. Uh, there, so lots of people who make these amazing robots, and the HCI or the human-computer Interaction department, we focus on the people on how you use technology. So that now has become the HRI sphere, the human-robot interaction, um, bit, which is me and my mentor, Helen Petrie. Um, who do most of that. So we look at how can you use these robots in a much more personable way, how can they be designed and developed, so they actually work for people. Um, and then the specific area I work with is older people, and a lot of the time when you think robotics, you think, how can they help us in reducing care for older people or helping them age at home, those are the two big reasons for for robotics, healthcare being a big one, how can we take care of older people who may have health issues. Um, and these robots that are developed just haven’t taken that into mind. that’s where the accessibility issue screams at you, and yeah, there has been development. And obviously there is HRI research that looks at all of this, but talking to older people, figuring out what they actually need, doesn’t work Because generally speaking, the developers are not living that life, they’re not talking to those older people. There are accessibility concerns across it, and the big thing we always push is older people are not a homogeneous group.
Mariana: Ok. People are not the same.
Sanjit: Yeah, all different. Exactly with anything inaccessibility, that’s the big thing that we push for. Um, so, that’s what we really focus in and try to work on, is amazing, we have all this tech. Lots of different robots, lots of different things they can do. What are your needs, how exactly do they work? And how can we help and you have to be really creative, you know, that’s where I think the creative bit comes in. You shouldn’t just sit there and go, this is what the robot does at the end. We’re not in an age of computers where it’s, oh, yeah, one input, one output. This is what we’ve programmed it to do, it can’t move around. Now, you can be creative with it. Um, what does the robot look like? How does it feel? There are older people, um, participants of mine who have older parents, who they’re looking after, um, who are either suffering from dementia, early onset or not. Um, similarly with our participants, like, we can’t have a robot to show up, they’ll forget it exists, right? It’s very day to day things like this, and you need to think about these and have creative solutions to them on how … and HCI has come to that point now. Computers traditionally we’re thinking a lot about how can we be creative with how we interact with things. We need to bring that to robots as well, and that’s what we’re working on now. Yeah.
Mariana: And, and can you give us an example of something that you’ve worked on or you discussed with participants that you that you’re able to talk about that, that you feel, oh actually this is something that comes up that people would like in this format that would help in XYZ manner?
Sanjit: Yeah, so the big project which called the Gufo project, it’s about drones. So gufo is owl in Italian, and that was the original plan as we have this wise bird, because owls are considered wise in a lot of cultures, except India, where you’re considered a fool if you’re an owl,
Mariana: Oh, intersting. I did not know that.
Sanjit: But yeah, yeah, a little bit, yeah. Oh, that’s when I joined the project, that was the first thing that struck me. Um, yeah, but it’s, so the Gufo project, as I’ll refer to it, that the owl project was this idea for drones that would help, um, people if they fell down. Uh, so a little bit of background there, we have a lot of people know about the lanyards that you may give to someone who is at a risk of falling down or has had a fall before, uh, something they can press if they need, uh, emergency services. Uh, you now also have watches and uh home alarm systems with a button in every room. Accessibility concern there, you take a shower, you’re going to take it off, and then you’re never going to put it back on again. Simple thing like that. Um, very, very obvious basic concern buttons are not at a height that everyone can reach. Um, if you’ve had a fall, you may not have the force to be able to press the button. Uh, so these things kept popping up, and so we said, OK, intelligent robotic system, that could help. Um, drones, because they can fly. So they would not be bothered by stairs, um, things like that, because there are older people who live in multi-leveled, uh, housing. So that was where we decided, OK, is this possible? And this was 2017 that we started. Um, yeah, we’ve, I think we published a month ago, it finally the camera ready paper went in.
Mariana: It shows how much time these things need.
Sanjit: It was 3 years that we took to research everything, at different facets, and then, uh, we, it was on lockdown for a little bit, um, for yeah, reasons. Uh, so 2017, no one done this, drones at that point. Our listeners now, you’re probably thinking, oh yeah, drones, they’re very easy, like almost any drone can follow you and do all of that. 2017, that was not the case. Exponential increase in how what we do with drones now. So at that point, we said, OK, if the person falls down, the drone should be able to monitor every room, scan it, figure out if the person’s fallen down automatically through AI visual, um, image recognition. Figure out if the person’s fallen down, and then if so, call emergency services.
Mariana: OK.
Sanjit: No interaction from the person because the person’s fallen down, they can’t. Um, so that was the plan.
Mariana: So there’s no like arms coming out from the drone and … [Mariana laughing]
Sanjit: It did have the arms, you could drop a biscuit. That was …
Mariana: OK, so if you drop a biscuit, it can pick it up. [both laughing]
Sanjit: Yeah. That that was the demo that we showed, which is great. Um, we were really worried about, there were a lot of concerns here, and that’s where this real sort of, how do we make things accessible to people came in, drone buzzing around, none of our participants had seen one. That was a safe assumption to make, and it was proved when we talked to them. But what we found was, everybody means like, yep, that’s great, we’ll have one now, please. There were no concerns in the, in the way that we had planned them as developers, as HCI people. Not something we’d come at. What we found is a lot of people are very much wanting to have it as a safety precaution, for when they’re considered young, if I told a 60-year-old, you’re old, then a lot of them would not be very happy with that, and I would completely agree. Um. A lot of them are independent, you know, fully, everything’s all good, day to day lives are fine, but they not want a safety net, and this would be their safety net. And that’s what we found is the design does not need to be about, worst case scenario, it needs to be about every case scenario, which is what we preach in accessibility a lot is designed for all in every case scenario. It’s exactly the same here. Um, how can we make something that works for them in various different ways? So one person said, I don’t need it. My older mother really does. She will not operate any of this. So I need to be able to control it from my house. Right? So leave the automation out, I don’t care. What I want is something where if I press the button. It’ll do a quick scan of the room, right? Uh, so that was really cool. And then they got the more fun approaches because it was so odd that everyone pretty much accepted it within half an hour.
Mariana: OK.
Sanjit: The idea was there. Um, I think we did something clever, if I do say so myself, the first time we did a puppet, we didn’t do a real drone, we, we made a little puppet drone. Um, so I’d been gifted a drone, and I completely ripped it apart, but it made it a marionette with a little um dowels, which you could fly around to show what a drone looked like. So they got to see before it actually flew. And so there’s a little bit of that’s where previous accessibility literature did work is let’s try and make it as um clean and open and not just be, oh, it’s a new thing, we’ll love it. No. Um, we got some interesting responses there on that, on the functionality side of things, this is how I need it. But also on the look of things, they didn’t care what it looked like. And so, again, this is something that’s being pushed is we need to make things look more user-friendly, in quotes, user friendly is a big word. We’re not allowed to use it as HCI because I user-friendly doesn’t really mean much.
Mariana: Yeah, it doesn’t really mean anything.
Sanjit: Exactly, yeah. Um, but yeah, they make it so that it’s friendly and it’s um inviting as a robot, and not scary or sci-fi scary. Um, they didn’t care, right? They just wanted something that worked, and that was, it was all about functionality. Well, they did care about it, will my cat be OK with it?
Mariana: OK, yes. [Mariana laughing]
Sanjit: Uh, so this is where you’re meeting the fun part, which comes with every, um, thinking about very, very individual needs, which will apply then, across the board. 25 people, 5 of them said, no, I can’t have this, I have a cat. Like, OK, yeah, that could be a problem, um. And then the other was like, oh, when it gets cold, I close the doors, what’s going to happen? This is where an interesting thing came about, and they were like, OK, we can design our houses now, where there’s a little drone flap at the top. We’ve already drilled a cat flap because we have a cat, and we closed the doors and we want the cat to be ing the house, so we have a cat flap on about 6 out of the 10 doors in our house. Why not the same with the drone? Uh, so yeah, there’s, there’s this, a lot of interesting things came from that project where people said we want it, it’d be amazing. Here’s all the problems. And that’s where now my research progressed, like, OK, that was one robot. There’s others out there, similar issues.
Mariana: Yeah. It’s really interesting because I’ve heard um that especially kind of how um how positive people were about drones, because I’ve heard people that operates kind of small drones for for creative purposes, that they encounter a lot of hostility towards drones when they’re outdoors in open spaces. Even some people have told me casually that people throw thinks of them. So, did you encounter kind of any of this, or is it just that, that this just when there was kind of a specific purpose and this dissipated? What what what are your thoughts?
Sanjit: Uh yeah, it’s exactly what you said at the at the end there. It was because it was this one focus, there was no negative attitudes. And we did do a little back and forth on questionnaire and interview as you do in research, to see what these attitudes were. And there were preconceptions, and they’d seen, the big one was a lot of our participants had seen how drones were used to deliver drugs. Very negative, um, connotations, perceptions there of what drones can be used for. Um, and then seeing the drone used in sort of almost like a life-saving function. It was all positive. I think a lot of them may have seen certain things in the media about it, and people still do. Um, the case also was drone wouldn’t leave your house, it would be indoors. And only ever really come up when there was an emergency. So that’s why, yeah, we just didn’t have any sort of negative response when in that case. We have seen negative responses. If you start thinking about drone use outside. Absolutely, and we’ve seen that a lot, is as soon as that functionality becomes something more, there’s a lot more concern there, because unfortunately external factors start playing, it’s drones’s an expensive pieces of tech. If it’s outside, there’s other parties that would interfere with it. Uh, a lot of its functionality then because about protecting itself more than protecting anything else. Well, when it was in the house, it would protect you and your furniture, or that’s how we designed it more than itself in that sense, and there was a very easy turn off, you put your hand in front of the camera and it would just land, um, but yeah, that changes when you go outside completely.
Mariana: Wow, that’s really, really exciting. I, I didn’t, I didn’t… I’ve known you for quite a few years and I did not know this, so that’s good, it’s good that we have this podcast so that I can learn something.
Sanjit: Yeah, it’s cool, it’s nice to talk about this.
Mariana: And something else I was reading that I thought was really exciting, uh, when I was reading about your work is that you worked on developing a chatbot to help young people with social anxiety. And could you tell us a bit more about this work?
Sanjit: Uh, yeah, so, fortunately with the same company that we did the drone stuff, so we had a really good working relation there. Um, yeah, and the company amazing, uh, well, they do lots of very cool ideas. And so one idea came was developing a chatbot for younger, younger teens, um, I think is how we were phrasing it, uh, somewhere between sort of 12-years-old to about, we’re just, we were stopping 16, I think is what we were saying, is that there’s a very target audience. Uh, the reasons behind this or for context is… Waiting list for uh mental health support, not amazing. Uh, this was 2019, 2020 when we started doing it. Uh, still isn’t, but it wasn’t then either. Uh, but that’s not the only problem. There there’s social stigma around mental health, no matter how much, uh, we’d, you know, we’d like to say there’s, it’s better now, it still exists. With teenagers. We’ve all been there. It’s not always easy to talk about things, uh, with, with, you know, your teacher, your parent, uh, things like that.
Mariana: Yeah.
Sanjit: You have the unfortunate thing of someone very quickly said, oh, it’s a phase. You’re just sad. It’s a phase, right? So a lot of this, they weren’t getting the support in a way that worked. Once they did get the support, it was targeted, maybe uh for a specific thing, or too general. There was nothing that was working, um, so we looked at um CBT was cognitive behavioural therapy. Um, the reason we did this was because there’s a there’s somewhat of a more scripted approach to this than other therapies. So, yes, still general in that sense, but, uh, one specific therapy for anxiety to help them. Uh, CBC, I am no expert. All I know about it is from this project, um, is about the way you think about certain things and certain actions that you do to prevent uh… So in that sense, we could work with something that could be made into tech and make into something that could have a robotic, or intelligent robotic thing, so we call it Phobot, P H O B O T, but obviously going with the aux FAUX uh fake… therapy robot
Mariana: Oh, I see.
Sanjit: … or also phone bot. Yeah, we have fun with names that when you’re working on a project for this long, I think.
Mariana: It’s all about the name
Sanjit: Yeah, it’s all about the name and how you can how it comes up on that research paper at the top, the one the one liner, uh, have to have that. Uh, so what we did with that one was we talked to someone, um. in the NHS are very adjacent to the NHS in terms of providing, who did provide mental health was a mental health practitioner for young adults and children, so amazing to have um Tony on board. Uh, I refer to him a lot and I, or I will, so let’s come up with the name.
Mariana: Oh, I see.
Sanjit: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, call him Tony.
Sanjit: Let’s call him Tony. Yeah, so Tony was amazing. Um, I sat down with Tony over multiple therapy sessions, and we started this very fun process in HCI we used something called Personas where we look at user data and come up with uh sort of this archetype that we’re developing for. I created a persona. As these different users that we’d had, we have to be ethical, can’t be having um children do fake therapy as part of our project. That’s not, not happening. I also came up with these fake personas on data that we knew and went through these therapy sessions. And then we inputted all of this into this sort of Um, half intelligent, I don’t want to say fully artificial intelligence, half intelligent script-based system where this robot would talk to you through your phone, and it would all be through text message, because that’s one of the biggest things we saw is they prefer text message. Teenagers are afraid of their voice, voices are breaking, things like that, they don’t want to talk. Um, and they don’t want to hear that other people can hear them talk. They want to do this on the bus, they want to do this on the go. Um, so we came up with a text-based chatbot delivering CBT over 12 sessions, which is sort of what was recommended, but those talks. Sessions instead of being an hour or 20 minutes, because it’s all through text. It gives you a specific action to try out for the day. You can always come back to Phobot and talk about it if you want. Uh, we try to get it to speak the user’s language, which is a big push, um, in accessible design. Um, so we had a penguin that was dabbing. I, I don’t know if that’s cool, but it was a nice laugh. Um, so we tried a lot of those different things just to make Phobot feel… Um, realistic enough, and then you get this very interesting, you can’t make it too real, because it’s not, it’s not a professional. Yes, a professional has been involved. Tony was there. Uh, Tony’s advice is funnelled into this completely and everything, every little trick, and I grilled Tony for hours on this, and that was, that was the part I think that I played in the project was really embody these personas, really take all the design in and think, OK, how can we make this so that Tony comes across in phobot without actually being Tony himself.
Mariana: But it’s an interesting ethical question as well, because if it feels too real, then people might imagine that borderline of getting confused that it might be real and then you forget that, yeah, it’s interesting, yeah.
Sanjit: So that was, that was the project in terms of the design, um, and coming up with it. The results were, amazing, and I wish it had gone further. We did test it, but obviously, above 18, we had a few 16 year olds with parental consent and a lot of ethics, but nothing below 16 at all. We had two very anxious teenagers. Who could not come to the induction session, which poses an issue because they do still need to consent, regardless of your with your parent is consenting, uh, right? So, really difficult there, uh, on how we do that. Uh, eventually we managed where we could talk to them. It was essentially just me having a quick chat with them as much as possible, but then all the material, all of that, the questionnaires were all done by their parents with them, which in the end was OK. The amount that helped them uh was just insane is the best way to use it. It was amazing, uh, to for them to have this thing, just to be able to talk to, just to give them a little bit of an idea of the type of support that they are waiting for, or the type of support they could get. And the, the best feedback we got there was, it was repetitive, and it almost, they could predict what happened, which started helping. It is like, OK, I know what I need to do. I still can’t fully process the idea of CBT, but I know what the robot would say, or I know I can just talk to the robot and it’ll be the same thing because there’s a limited amount, but it really helped them in developing certain mechanisms to help with anxiety. Uh, so yeah, a really positive project that unfortunately, at some point stopped. Uh, but yeah, that’s a little bit of detail.
Mariana: Are there any plans to take this further so it can be implemented in the kind of, don’t say, I don’t want to say real world, but you know what I mean, to wider numbers of people.
Sanjit: I wish, I don’t think so. I think the drones are the things that have been worked on, um, in terms of the two projects I’ve done with the… But yeah, I, I really hope or wish it could be. We dealt with a lot of ethical concerns, some of which I’ve alluded to. I think the next step was almost clinical trials, was to to actually send this out as something that a public could access. Um, and that’s where it just halted because there were so many guidelines and issues there around it, I think, from a how do we get this out beyond what we’ve done. That’s where it stopped. Which is fine, um, but I think there’s ways… given the recent rise in Large Language Models, ChatGPT infamously or not. Um, there is enough out there now, cause I, I think that there is a way for it to be done. However, at the same time, there’s probably more risk now, cause anything can be faked in a way where there we had Tony’s knowledge. It was, it was essentially a knowledge base is how I see it. Tony’s brain and skill, somehow, a very tiny part of it into this um app, which now is not the case, because you could ask ChatGPT to do this, and it would give you wrong advice or it wouldn’t have that trained specialist knowledge. Uh, yeah, so that’s what I’m thinking there’s unfortunately, uh, issues.
Mariana: But in the, in the uh topic of kind of uh kind of products reaching uh people, um, one of the things I read you do is work with SMEs to make their products accessible. And I was wondering uh what sort of things do do SMEs find themselves struggling with and why do you think that is?
Sanjit: Oh, that’s tough, yeah, that’s a tough one because I definitely have certain frustrations with how SME’s work, um. With small businesses te intention is always good. Um, I think even with, you know, medium or large businesses, the intention is always good. I think the issue being with your big corporations, there is a legal precedence that gets pushed on, which sometimes are not, uh, the priority. Um, so, having worked with both university systems and non-university systems when it comes to sort of helping these SMEs, uh, the big thing they struggle with is just developers understanding that they need to factor in for their users, specifically disabled users, uh, partially sighted or um uh visually impaired users into this. That’s the big thing. It’s websites, apps, those are the big things that we’d work on when it comes to these. Um, so you’re taking away from the robots back to a little bit more traditional, um, interaction. The big thing, the struggle there is still, because we could developers have had this, you know, HCI has had this problem is getting developers to fully understand that. There’s some amazing developers, one person who was actually a graduate of Interactive Media from here. I ended up, I worked with him before I worked in interactive media, I was just very accessibility-minded. And so you do have specialists who are coming that, but specialists usually go to the big corporations, SMEs don’t get, don’t get the specialists, right? Um, you only have a certain amount of budget, and you’re going to go with the with the amazing developers who are doing the thing and doing it really well. Uh, so there’s a struggle there, uh, just on a realistic basis. Um, I think the problem also there is users end up falling into a specific group, and then developers almost by default, start focusing in on, OK, that’s the group, and that’s about it.
Mariana: OK. [laughing]
Sanjit: Um, I don’t think HCI is always very nice with how we give our, um, feedback. Um, and this is something I, I love to talk about a lot, uh, when I’m teaching, is we always teach our students, and that’s what I was taught is, find the negatives, this is the problem, this is the usability issue, this is the accessibility issue. This thing can’t be screen read, and that thing can’t be done, and this colour is bad. And you force all this on the next. Well, there you go. Here’s my accessibility audit. Um, sorry, that’s my job. Yeah, you’re terrible. Uh, which is not the case. These are creative people who’ve worked really hard, come up with this cool design that never been done before. Um, I won’t name the system. There are systems that we complain about you and I am sure that we use, uh, on the day to day, um, but they’ve done some amazing stuff. It’s just it’s not possibly implemented the way we think. And then if you take that further, it’s not implemented for let’s take visually impaired people, uh, as one example. Uh, so we shouldn’t be going in there and going, you know, problem, problem, problem, problem. Uh, that’s the big issue that I found in sort of working with it is… why are we Pointing out all of these, take, take it down to the basics. You need to be able to tap through your page. Start there. Go on step at time, simple solutions, thinking of different ways to do things, making them realise that sometimes going away from their cool idea, which for 90% of their audience, or so they say, I don’t, they say 90%, so 90% of their audience doesn’t need the the … Um, screen reader, so, whatever. It’s like, OK, great, for your 90%, you have your very cool graph, or very cool whatever, and visualisation of this, all the different hours or whatever database you want to do. But you can also do the simple tech. It’s an easy win. Highlighting those easy wins in a way that is easier to work, it almost, you don’t want it to be a battle between these accessibility specialist or audit person who’s come in for workloaded for what, 10 hours on contract to come in and tell you bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, and off I go. Doesn’t work. Um, so I think that’s where there’s some leeway on how we can do things and really open communication up quite a bit.
Mariana: And I think there’s there’s nothing to be gained if people start getting frustrated, and then they end up coming a negative attitude towards accessibility rather than seeing the advantages and what it could bring them. So it’s kind of that balance to be struck, it seems like it’s what what you’re saying, being able to point out things, but also in a way that people can actually deal with them uh in a in a way that is, is doable in their time in their time frames.
Sanjit: Uhm.
Mariana: And um we we’ve been talking a lot about your research, but you’re also a lecturer here at the University of York, and I was wondering how do you incorporate aspects of accessibility to your teaching? And you did hint a little bit at that, but could you tell us a little bit more?
Sanjit: It’s always been the bit I’m more interested in, the teaching rather than the research. So it’s great if you can combine those. Um sort of two-pronged approach, or the two-pronged approach, I’ll, I’ll talk about it, I suppose. Um, the first one is the, the topics that you talk about, um, in accessibility. So I teach user experience design as the core module that I teach on the, uh, interactive Media BSE. Um, with that, the first bit is, how do you communicate? These things, which is what I alluded to there is you need to communicate in a way that is firstly accessible to the developers before you’re even thinking about your work being accessible to a wide audience or a disabled group. Think about how it’s accessible to everyone, including uh the devs you’re essentially critiquing. Uh, so teaching that uh from the ground up really helpful. Uh, the other thing is to really focus in on the various methods that. I always find it weird to say that I have developed, uh, uh, very weird to say that, but yeah, that that is what it is. Uh, so that’s what I like doing, going through and saying this is how it works. So, uh, to give an example there for teaching. Uh, this personas thing that I talked about with Tony in making up a persona. This is not something you’re supposed to do. When we teach about personas, the big, in red, patronising text on the slide, do not make up your persona ever. Don’t do it. Use your user data, come up with a realistic mirror or a picture of a person, and it’s used in advertising and HCI in different ways, but it has to be based on user data. You should never assume the data and make up a persona. However, I thought why not try it? Tried it with Tony and it worked really well. Uh, I also tried it with older people where there is this fear of when you are an older person, and you’re coming to test out a tech product, uh, and you’re being told, oh, you’re here because you’re old, essentially, and this is what’s this is the fear. And then there’s this extra fear. This is all that’s going, we’re not telling them that, this is what’s going through their head. I’m gonna get it wrong. I don’t know tech well enough. I’m going to appear stupid. Obviously not true. Um, but there’s this fear that developed, so we came up with this idea of, OK, let’s blame this persona, and we saw this happening a lot where it’s like, oh, I don’t have this problem, but someone else does, someone older than me. Um, Helen, who worked a lot with visually impaired people, uh, because like, oh, I don’t have this problem as a blind user on screen here. Someone more blind than me does. And this is this story that we um started seeing, so we made fake personas as almost a conduit or scapegoat, I shouldn’t use scapegoat, but um, sometimes they do become a scapegoat, it’s conduit to to foster conversation in a more natural way, in a way where the person you’re sitting next to doesn’t feel, … and this rapport building, persona management, this is what I’d like to teach to make things accessible in terms of how you do user research. It’s just, in the end, you want to have a conversation. Of course, you want to be scientific about it where you can, but it’s still a qualitative research and you still want to… Uh, so these things is where I like to really get in on the teaching. The methods and the actual content. The other problem is the other side of things is how do you make teaching accessible? How do you keep it accessible. Um, and I know you’ve had it, we have those training documents that come up and you read through them and all of these different training bits in itself, probably not that very accessible. Um. For me, it’s not just about, uh, accessibility in terms of making things accessible for specific learning disorders or anything like that. It’s about, should work for everyone, and you need to think about different languages. Um, doing this in a second language, any university degree in a second language. Impossible to me, and I have, I do speak multiple languages, and still, if I did a university degree in my second language, it’s not happening. So you need to think about how you design for that. You need to think about people who will have difficulty reading as fast as you do. Um, so in that sense, it is a passionate but very difficult challenge of mine to figure out how you can do that. Um, ethics is the big one that I tackle every year. UXD has the ethics lecture, um, the ethics lecture, that we call it, um, in week 3 of semester one, where they’ve barely done anything, they’re just in their 2nd year. Have realised now that OK, 1 year maybe didn’t matter as much, 2nd year, we need to get to it, so we do. But we’ve had these really cool workshops about UXD and so two weeks, very fun talking about interviews and focus groups and I get them to go observe the Ron Cook cafe and everyone’s having fun, and I give them this ethics lecture, by design, already fun to. And we have this problem of we have to tell them certain things. They have to know how to do these things. So there’s a legal and ethical implication to do things. But it’s not an accessible topic, at least in my opinion, especially for a second year who doesn’t care. Um, it’s that’s you have to think about that extreme as well as the person who’s like, oh, this is really cool. You can’t just focus it and just drone on, and it’s a two hour lecture. Um, so droning on about these different things, you have to tell them, look at these are forms you have to fill out. Uh, so being able to design that in a way that’s… It should be fun, why not? So start there, but then it’s accessible because you cannot have all this ethical or ethics documentation, I should say, without really remembering that some people just won’t understand it the first time around, and that’s OK. That’s OK, nothing wrong with that. Um, so how do you help with that? How do you make it more accessible to them? Different modes of learning is the big one. If you can have something on the screen, talk about it, have them practise it, but even then… It’s just not going to click for different reasons, and we can’t do that. Uh, so really coming up with those things is like the other ethics challenge alongside teaching all the cool accessible methods that I’ve developed and really being able to focus in on that and say, talk to the people, think about the people, work for the people, that sort of thing. Um, then also making my own teaching as accessible as possible. Uh, the other one being how do you present is the other big one that I keep redesigning every year. Maybe I should stop at this point, [Mariana laughing] but uh I it’s uh um. Presenting is this weird one, and we’ve had it as academics, we ask people to present, as industry professionals, you are expected at some point to present. It’s an important skill to have. Not everyone can do it. Not everybody wants to do it, nor should we force anyone to do it. Uh, but to be really able to sit there and explain to them what that means, um, actually bringing a diagram of what Tony drew for me about, uh, panic attacks, uh, with Tony’s permission, that is now part of the slide, explaining that a panic attacks normal, um, that happens, um, really tying that back to, you know, me presenting and how it’s still terrifying, and I do it for a day job, like, um, all of those things. You’re again, much like the research, just making it a little bit more accessible to everybody. Um, having them that, yeah, results have been really good, maybe that’s why I keep redesigning it cause small bits come up here and there, 4 hour conversations with students about how can I manage this, uh, during practicals, like, just opening that space up has been really interesting, and then, and the other way I did is, I didn’t force all my colleagues, but I very strongly asked most of my colleagues, what’s your advice you all present? There must be something, some of you have been doing it much longer than I have, and you do it really well. I know that I’ve seen you talk. Uh, what is it, uh, what works? Um, yeah, and you, when you say it, it sounds fairly like, yeah, OK, obviously you ask the experts how to do it and then you tell people, but the students were marked and told to present without giving them any of this info.
Mariana: Yeas.
Sanjit: Uh, so yeah, that that’s a cool accessibility when there is just opening it up in all these different ways and all these different methods, and at the end of the thing going, well, one way to present, here’s all these different colleagues who have different ways, and I, I, my slide says Don’t practise. Because I don’t like practising before a presentation too much, I freak out, um.
Mariana: OK, interesting. I’m a practise person and everything gets practised.
Sanjit: As is um our our very good colleague and friend Anna, who Anna slides says practise a lot. And so that’s where I can go, yeah, one approach is not good for everyone. Some people have to practise more and they prefer practising more and then where they feel confident that way. If I practise too much. And then I say something different while I’m talking, I will have a panic attacks.
Mariana: Oh, I see… yeah.
Sanjit: So I will never practise to that level. I can’t hold a script, I can’t really uh think that way, but why should I sit here and say that’s the right way?
Mariana: Yeah, absolutly.
Sanjit: Uh, so yeah, that’s where that’s, that’s another one that’s worked really well in making teaching content and how you bring your accessibility mind into these things. And then, yeah, in the 3rd year, we can really start talking about actual proper accessibility topics, uh, where they’re really focused, where I can teach them how to do an accessibility audit and do it in a way that I was talking about, which is maybe in green put the good things and then the red put the bad things. I let the developer look at the green and go, OK, I’m still doing some stuff. Uh, so those small little things when it comes.
Mariana: What a terrible person.
Sanjit: Yeah, the content I can keep the same as we’ve been taught, but yeah, why not, uh, give that a little bit more, and I think it would work, sort of, yeah.
Mariana: Yeah, absolutely. And just a reminder to listeners that Anna is Dr Anna Bramwell Dicks, and she did do an episode for this podcast a few months ago, which you can go back and listen to.
Sanjit: That was really good.
Mariana: There you go, live feedback. [laughing]
Sanjit: Oh yeah, yeah, no, it was great.
Mariana: Um, I have one final question that I actually ask everyone that comes on the podcast, and that question is, what are your hopes for the future of accessibility in the creative industries?
Sanjit: Yeah, this was the other tough one. it’s. I don’t wanna sound like it’s like a like an obvious answer, but I think that’s, it’s off what I’ve found through research, through teaching, is you need to open up the space more. I think this project, and uh, you know, a lot of other things are doing that. I think the podcast pushes that forward more, for sure, like, I had heard about Anna’s research. Obviously, we talk, we’re colleagues who works in the same degree and department, uh, similarly with your research, I can read up about it, but I’d never still get to sit down and have the opportunity to talk about it. To open that up. That’s the, like, my basic wish. Uh, at the same time, we, you know, robots, accessibility of robots, accessibility of drones, etc. Great. All well and good, I understand it is important, and obviously I work in the area, it is important. Um, but there is still a lot of basic stuff to be done before that. Um, so starting there helps. I think with the SMEs, that’s always been my focus, is not to come in as that sort of, I’m the accessibility expert and I know what’s going on. Yeah, great, that’s, that’s obviously why the job was given to me in the first place and I won the funding bid for it, um. But it’s to make it more accessible. There’s this fear sometimes that happens when you start talking about all the things that needs to be done. Um, and it terrifies me because like, yeah, you’re pushing people away at this point…
Mariana: Yes.
Sanjit: … but at the same time it’s important. Um, and as someone who’s worked in the field and has talked to the people, and worries about how things are not being made accessible and pushed out in masses, yes, you get passionate and you’re like, oh, you need to do this, and you need to do this. That may scare people away more than not to. That’s why I was saying it’s a bit difficult because it’s difficult to really find a balance there, I guess. But opening up the conversation is fantastic. Just being able to talk, just make people aware, and that’s where the students come into play is in their 2nd year or even their 1st year, they haven’t heard about these topics at all, and it clicks for them, and I’ve seen this happen on the DARCI module that uh that Mariana you teach and Anna teach… so I’ve seen that click happen and go, oh. That’s something we need to consider. Ooh, I could actually specialise in this!
Mariana: Yes.
Sanjit: I could actually be one of those people who affects that change, and to have that little bit of inspiration put in at a very basic level. Start there, I think that that’s my wish. It’s just, while I love to talk about the tech and all those things, um, yeah, in the end it’s just open the conversation up as much as possible, uh, talk to the people as much as possible, having older participants who knew me, uh, since I was… What is it? 23, so 7 years now, uh, and having seen how their needs have changed, it’s cause I’ve talked to them. It’s we’ve involved them in the research, and their needs have evolved over 7 years, because they’ve gone from 65 to now 70, 72, um, and they’re coming back and saying, yeah, OK, I see what you mean. These are the things that have changed, these are the things that are now my concerns. And being able to have that interaction with them is what’s made the tech better, that’s it. Uh, nothing else, it is there in the end.
Mariana: So yeah. Oh well, that’s a wonderful, uh, wonderful wish for the for the future. And thank you so much Sanjit for all your insight. We started with robots, then we moved to uh chatbots, then we went to a discussion on teaching and learning, and now we’ve ended with this beautiful set of of of kind of thoughts and opening up conversations on disabilty and accessibility in the creative industries. So thank you so much for joining us today.
Sanjit: Absolutely a pleasure. This was amazing, lots of fun. Um yeah, I got to monologue a little bit about research at times. Uh, lots of fun questions, so thank you. Yeah.
Mariana: Thank you very much.
Mariana: Thank you so much everyone for tuning in for today’s episode. We will be back with a new guest next month.
