“What makes a supermarket challenging I think is… just the noise… you can just hear everything, so you hear people, you hear like beeping, you hear like people pushing stuff, like you just hear everything. It’s very overwhelming.”
Sensory Street Participant
Our research and work with stakeholder suggested that autistic people find supermarkets to be one of the most disabling sensory environments, identifying a range of factors that may make them challenging spaces to be in.
On the 19-20th of August 2022, we brought our Sensory Supermarket to PEARL in Dagenham in partnership with Sensory Spectacle. This event aimed to showcase our findings and help businesses and the public understand why supermarkets can be disabling sensory environments for autistic people, and how we can make them more enabling.
As part of this event we shared perspectives from autistic people as well as our research findings.
Below, you can watch the videos from the Sensory Supermarket immersive experience to find out what we did and what visitors thought about the experience.
Reimagining supermarkets
As part of our Sensory Supermarket immersive experience, we worked with Architectural Designer Fulton McLaughlin of Fortis Design to co-design a digital 3D model of an enabling supermarket, based on the results of our research. You can watch the video walkthrough of this below.
Materials from the event
PEARL
PEARL (Person-Environment-Activity Research Laboratory) is UCL’s first net zero carbon building and is a unique facility that explores the way people engage with their environment. It is a massive space in which they can create life-sized environments under controlled conditions to explore how people interact with their environments. PEARL can manipulate the ground, simulate different lighting conditions, create soundscapes and concoct smells to create a truly immersive space.
Sensory Street 