Lived Reality helps organisations understand how systems, products, and decisions are actually experienced in real life.

We work with a diverse range of lived experience. Our niche expertise centers lived experience away from the “average user”, including neurodivergent and disabled people, to generate insight that supports safer, more human societies.

Much of what is designed today is built around an imagined “average user”. In reality, many people live outside those assumptions. Neurodivergent and disabled people, people with health struggles, and others with atypical journeys are often the first to encounter exclusion or harm. These experiences reveal where systems break down, and where opportunities lie.

Lived Reality works with people who hold this lived expertise. We translate this experience into practical insight organisations can act on. This is not therapy or market research, but facilitated listening, qualitative synthesis, and experience mapping, conducted with care and consent.

The practice is grounded in trauma-informed and neurodiversity-aware approaches, with a focus on edge-case users and complex experiences that are often overlooked.

Lived experience perspectives are well placed to illuminate areas overlooked by traditional research approaches, uncovering knowledge that is difficult to capture through mainstream approaches.

who we are

Lived Reality is led by Eleanor, a lived-experience insight consultant with a creative and entrepreneurial background in youth insight, digital strategy, and peer support work.

As a teenager, Eleanor worked with organisations including Red Bull and Channel 4, sharing her unique qualitative lived experience youth insight research.

More recently, her work has focused on trauma-informed practice, neurodiversity, and understanding how systems are experienced by people outside the “average user” model. She currently works with the Samaritans as a freelance Lived Experience Coach.

Eleanor often sees the joy in approaching things creatively. She runs a project ‘Ted Camp’, where people are invited to hang out with hundreds of soft toys and adopt the one they connect with, alongside ‘Kindling Space’, a peer support community that meets around a campfire over winter just outside Brighton, UK.

She brings both professional experience and lived expertise. Widely respected by her colleagues, she has access to a large network of peers with lived experience and understands how to reach demographics organisations could benefit from engaging with better.