Methods

Looking across these rather different activities, I can see a few habits that recur.

I challenge assumptions

I am often drawn to an assumption that seems too simple. That everybody hears in roughly the same way. That an accessible building is accessible to everybody. That a standard designed around an average person will work for everyone. Or that professional expertise should automatically take precedence over lived experience.

Aural Diversity grew from one such problem: the idea of the "normal listener". Once that assumption is questioned, the implications spread into acoustics, audiology, music, architecture, environmental design, hearing technology and public policy. The same habit lies behind my work on sensory accessibility: I tend to ask who has disappeared from the assumptions on which a space, service or standard has been designed.

I make connections other people may not see

This is probably the most consistent thing I do. Sometimes I put together things that appear unrelated and see what the creative friction produces. Sometimes I notice an overlap between fields that are already close but are using different languages. Sometimes the useful intervention is simply to introduce two people, translate an idea from one professional world into another or recognise that a problem in one field has already been thought about somewhere else.

A small example came out of a discussion about sensory accessibility during the Leicester Railway Station consultation. Acoustician Peter Rogers had developed the idea of a Recombobulation Room as a place where overwhelmed travellers could recover. I saw that the same thinking might be useful in a rather different setting and connected him with LCB Depot. The point is not interdisciplinarity for its own sake. It is making a connection that somebody can use.

I listen across different kinds of expertise

My own experience may alert me to something, but it cannot tell me what everybody else experiences. I am interested in situations where professional, creative and lived knowledge can inform one another without one automatically outranking the others.

My work as an Expert by Experience on the Leicestershire and Rutland Autism Partnership Board is one example. I contribute as an autistic person, but alongside people bringing professional, organisational and other forms of lived expertise. My own experience may identify a problem or suggest a possibility, but it is one contribution to a larger conversation rather than a substitute for everybody else's.

I turn conversations into things

I usually want discussion to lead somewhere usable. The result might be a network, a toolkit, an infographic, a website, a piece of writing, an accessibility recommendation, a policy response, a quiet-space proposal, a workshop or a creative work. Often one idea becomes several of these.

The Aural Diversity infographic is a good example. Network members asked for something that could explain the scope of the idea. I developed it with them and released it under a Creative Commons licence. It subsequently travelled into clinical and professional settings, including audiology clinics.

I work at different scales

I am as interested in the practical detail as in the large idea. Sensory accessibility can mean contributing to national policy discussions, but it can also mean the acoustics of a café, the location of a quiet room, the noise of a hand dryer, signage in a venue or what happens to an autistic passenger in a crowded railway station.

The small details are often where an abstract commitment to inclusion either becomes real or fails. My piece "Hearing the Café", for example, starts with the ordinary experience of trying to have a conversation in a café and asks what acoustic design means when the people using the space do not all hear in the same way.

I follow what happens next

I do not assume that I know in advance where an intervention will lead. Writing about autistic experience for my Autistic Professor blog led to pieces being republished by the NHS. A BBC World Service discussion of vertigo produced another unexpected consequence when listeners in other countries found their way to the balance-disorder community Life on the Level.

That unpredictability matters. It is often the point at which an idea stops being mine and becomes useful to somebody else. The process is collaborative, iterative and usually rather less tidy than its eventual outcome suggests.