Personalising the unexpected: Preliminary suggestions for synaesthetic-oriented design

Synaesthetic-oriented  design,  inspired  by  the  phenomenon  Synaesthesia,focuses on  introducing unexpectedor atypicalsensory combinations into designs.Whilst this design approach has been used  to  design software,  there  is  limited  research  into  how  it  can  affect  User  Experience  (UX), especially  in  Mixed Reality  technologies.This  paper  providessuggestions  on how  to create synaesthetic-oriented Virtual Environments (VEs) based on an exploratory study.The study had 30 participants  split  into  three  groups  with  different  sensory  combinations:  synaesthetic-oriented (atypical sensory combinations), multimodal (typical sensory combinations) and visual-only(controlgroup).Participants  completed  four  mazes  with  puzzles  which,  for  the  non-control  groups,  had visual, auditory, tactile, olfactory and gustatory elements.The results suggest that positive aspects of  synaesthetic-oriented  design  include  surprise,  participants  creating  their  own  links  to  the  VEbased  on  their  past  experiences  and  potentiallypresence.  Challenges  for  synaesthetic-oriented design  includebalancing  the  simultaneous  senses,not  matching  user  expectations(negative surprise)and  designing  for  participants  with  higher  goal  focus  and/or  need  to  rationalise.As  the study was run remotely due to COVID-19, suggestions are also provided for incorporating smell and taste into a VE remotely.