The interesting work rarely arrives fully formed.
These are a few examples of what happens when you move anyway — the situation, the moment that made it urgent, what we did and what changed.
Busy transport hubs are full of information with departure boards, signs, announcements, screens, and yet passengers still get confused, miss their connections, cluster in the wrong places and leave without finding the help they need. The problem is not the quantity of information, but that most passenger information systems are designed for the average passenger in the average situation, which means they work adequately for the confident and familiar, and poorly for everyone else. That might be the first-time visitor, the passenger with an accessibility need, the person arriving on a delayed train with seven minutes to make a connection.
InnovateUK’s First of a Kind programme created a specific funding window for genuinely novel solutions to real transport problems. South Western Railway, operating one of the UK’s busiest commuter networks, was willing to sponsor a live deployment at Southampton Central. The combination of funding, a willing operator and a well-defined problem that hundreds of hours of field observation had made impossible to ignore meant the moment to build and test a real product had arrived. Waiting for a better window would have meant watching someone else solve a problem we had already understood.
We built AlightHear as a context-aware passenger information system that combines dynamic visual projection, directional audio (heard only within a defined zone) and real-time data triggers to deliver the right information to the right passenger at the right moment in their journey. The system senses what is happening in the environment such as a train arriving, a passenger near an accessibility help point, post-gate hesitation causing a bottleneck, and responds with targeted information rather than broadcasting at everyone simultaneously. It was developed through iterative prototype testing and is now deployed and operational with live operations and passengers at Southampton Central, addressing three specific use cases identified through field research: accessibility support, post-gate wayfinding, and onward transport connections.
AlightHear is live. That matters more than it might sound as most transport innovation stays at the concept or pilot stage indefinitely, unable to make the transition to operational deployment in a real environment with real operational constraints. The product works because it was designed from observation of actual passenger behaviour rather than from assumptions about what passengers need. The deployment at Southampton Central is generating the real-world evidence needed to refine the system and make the case for deployment across a wider station network which is exactly how good transport innovation should work.
