How Does a Bat Feel?

“You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view … until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.” – Atticus Finch; To Kill a Mockingbird.

How does it feel to be a bat? My first thoughts, well, they sleep upside down? Echo location? Blind? I already wear glasses and can’t see shit so, I’m halfway there. But how do I know how they really feel? I can immerse myself in their habitat, if I so wish. I can hang myself upside down until I get a headache, or I can screech at some cave walls or take my glasses off and walk around in the dark; but will I ever really know what they’re feeling? The short answer; no. I could live with them for the next thirty years of my life studying how they move and interact with things, like Dian Fossey and her Rwandan Gorillas. But no matter how long I could spend trying to understand them I’ll never be able to know how it feels to be one. I often wonder if bats know one of their own was the catalyst for what is arguably the largest global pandemic in the history of time.

As designers, we thrive on user centered design. We need to know how our products or the existing products we want to replace aid or hinder a user. We want to know the users likes and dislikes, we want to know what bothers them, we want primary research, we want to hear it straight from the horses’ mouth but we can never truly understand how the horse feels because we are our own horse. Maybe all experiencing the same race but feeling differently, experiencing it differently.

This is what our workshop with Kellie Morrisey was about; more or less. How a user interacts with a product and the psychology behind design. We were shown a short clip from the documentary “Alive”, where we could see and elderly man in a care home, head hanging down. He was suffering from dementia. He was being interviewed and his ability to answer any of the questions was very poor. Initially he had almost no ability to verbally communicate whatsoever. But then the nurse put his headphones on and played his favourite music and his eyes lit up. He began to sing along with the music and his speech grew clearer. He was able to interact with the interviewer and you could see the joy in his eyes. It was a remarkable thing to behold. Music is something that can connect us all. It made me think of the Ariana Grandé One Love concert following the terrorist attack at one of her shows. Where a video was posted of a group of police officers and children dancing in a circle holding hands. A moment of humanity and love, captured after such an atrocious act of mans inhumanity to man.

A designer looks for elements like this when designing products, as does an artist, an author or a documentary director. We all seek to find something that everyone can connect to in some way or another. We could all watch the same movie, read the same book go to the same gallery and all feel and experience something different. Maybe evoking a memory, an emotion, happy or sad, anger or jealousy. But all of us participated in the same thing, we just experience everything as an individual, with individual thoughts, opinions, responses and emotions.