ABOUT LIZ
Liz Holland
Inventor. Industrial Designer. Founder of Sensory Product Design™.
I've spent most of my life trying to understand one deceptively simple question: Why does something work for one body—and not another?
That question has followed me through industrial design, decades of living with sensory differences, years of prototyping solutions for myself, and ultimately the creation of Sensory Product Design™.
I'm an inventor and industrial designer, but I'm also someone who has spent a lifetime paying very close attention to what helps me function—and what gets in the way. Long before I had words like Sensory Processing Disorder, ADHD or dyslexia to explain some of my experiences, I was already observing, modifying, adapting and designing around them.
That combination of professional design training and lived experience shapes the way I see problems today.
I'm interested in what happens when we stop asking people to adapt to products—and start designing products that adapt better to people.
Design has always been how I solve problems
I grew up around invention.
My father was an inventor who helped pioneer automated warehousing systems, developing machinery that moved stored pallets through enormous warehouse grids long before that kind of automation became commonplace. He seemed almost incapable of encountering an object without wondering how it could work better.
I inherited that instinct.
At fifteen, I started my first business in the tennis industry, stringing racquets and selling products from a small pro shop. Years later, I became an industrial designer and went on to design award-winning sporting goods, including tennis racquets recognized with international industrial design awards.
But the part of design that has always interested me most isn't making something look different.
It is noticing a problem other people may have stopped noticing.
What isn't working? Who isn't it working for? What compromises have we simply accepted because that's how the product has always been made?
And then the question that has driven me since I was a kid:
How could this work better?
Lived experience became design data
For decades, I lived in a body that could become overwhelmed by things other people barely seemed to notice.
Light. Sound. Temperature. Texture. Pressure. Clothing. Smell. Position. Hunger. Fatigue. Stress.
I had constant headaches and could experience what I came to call domino triggers: one sensory problem made the next harder to tolerate, and then the next, until my ability to function could collapse.
Eventually, I realized I couldn't solve the whole mess at once.
So I started untangling the mess.
I learned to identify the individual dominoes. What exactly was bothering me? Was the sun coming through the window making my headache worse? Was I cold? Was a texture irritating my skin? Was I hungry, overtired or overloaded by sound?
Then I dealt with what I could. Close the curtain. Change the fabric. Warm my feet. Remove one source of noise. Solve one problem before it became five.
Over time, I got better at recognizing what was happening earlier—and sometimes preventing the dominoes from falling at all.
By the time I was diagnosed with Sensory Processing Disorder in my fifties, the diagnosis didn't create the experience. It gave me language for an experience I had already been studying for most of my life.
Before I had a diagnosis, I had decades of data.
From self-observation to Sensory Product Design
For years, I made and modified things to help myself function more comfortably. I didn't think of them as products. They were solutions.
Cozyzzz™ began that way.
I wanted warmth without feeling trapped. I wanted my hands and feet warm while still being able to use them. I wanted to uncover one part of my body the instant I became too warm without throwing everything off. I wanted the comforting feeling of being wrapped while maintaining movement, access and control.
The product I needed didn't exist.
So I made it.
Then I changed it. And changed it again. Years of living with the problem informed years of prototyping the solution. What eventually emerged was a patented design built around warmth, gentle containment, micro-adjustability and freedom.
But Cozyzzz™ also showed me something much larger.
When we design around how bodies actually experience the world, ordinary objects can do extraordinary work.
That realization became Sensory Product Design™.
Cozyzzz™ is its first product family. It isn't the limit of the idea.
How I think about design
Not performing discomfort correctly. Not forcing ourselves to tolerate something simply because other people can. The question is: What helps this person function, participate and live their life?
I believe discomfort is information.
Instead of immediately judging a response as too sensitive, too difficult or too much, we can become curious about it. What is the body telling us? What changed? What might help?
I believe small changes can have enormous consequences.
Sometimes the intervention isn't complicated. Close a curtain. Change a texture. Warm cold feet. Reduce a sound. Reposition the body. Give someone the ability to adjust something for themselves.
I believe autonomy is part of good design.
Being comfortable matters. Being able to control your own comfort matters too. Whenever possible, people should be able to uncover, reposition, adjust, move and make choices without having to ask someone else to do it for them.
And I believe we should design for real bodies.
Bodies are not static. Temperature changes. Sensory thresholds change. Illness changes things. Aging changes things. Stress changes things. What feels right now may not feel right ten minutes from now.
Good design doesn't demand that the body remain consistent. It gives the person room to respond.
The work ahead
Cozyzzz™ is the beginning, not the destination.
I created Sensory Product Design™ to explore a much larger question:
What could everyday products, care environments and experiences become if we designed more intentionally around how people actually experience them?
I want to keep asking that question—and invite designers, clinicians, caregivers, researchers, companies and, most importantly, the people using the products to ask it with me.
I also want people to become curious about their own nervous systems. To notice what helps. To recognize what doesn't. To understand that their responses contain information worth paying attention to.
I don't live in a body that is comfortable all the time. Far from it. I still monitor, adjust, anticipate triggers and make choices throughout every day so I can function.
The goal was never perfection.
The goal is functionality—and having more tools to find our way back toward center when our systems get knocked off course.
That is the perspective I bring to design.
And that is the work of Sensory Product Design™.