Composed By-Ketan Goriwale
Sensory Design.
A space is much more than just what we see or perceive through only our eye. Textures, smell and sound also can strongly affect the experience of a user. It helps to transform the interaction between people and the built environment into something deeper.
A space is a medium which use to trigger feelings such as cosiness, warmness, cleanness, comfort and surprise. The accurate temperature as well as interrelation of warm colours and cool colours with light add extra glitter to space designing.
We find ourselves in a position where our interaction with surrounding is multisensory experience the world with all of our senses, these senses interact with each other at levels in many different ways.
Instead of focusing on a single individual sense in an unrealistic isolation philosophers and psychologists have started examining that the individual senses are deeply intertwined with each other. The embrace of a multisensory perspective of experience is a good thing. Our experience of the world involves several senses which are not isolated from one another. The senses work together to provide us with awareness about our environment.
Senses-
The five natural powers (touch, taste, smell, sight, and hearing) or abilities through which we receive information about the world around us.
The ability to understand or to recognize the things around us which we use in surrounding neighbourhood environment.
It is also known as a sensory reception or sense perception through which human beings detect and respond to the environment. The environment will vary according to user needs, location and type of work they are working in.
The senses are in terms of physical energy or modality (mode in which experiencing or expressing) is involved.
The modalities in humans are –
The light Senses-
Photoreception
i.e., Vision
The Mechanical Senses-
Mechanoreception
i.e., Touch, Hearing
The Chemical Senses-
Chemoreception
i.e., Taste and Smell
The Light Sense-
Vision is the ability to see and capture things with the eye. Vision is used by human beings to determine and identify the surrounding neighbourhood and it is important for locomotion (the ability to move around). The eyes with good resolution can have good vision of geometry and form of surroundings.
Photoreception is the mechanism of detecting light which produces vision and depends on photoreceptors (light-sensitive cells) present in the eye. The calibre of a vision will differ accordingly provided by photoreceptors
Mechanical Sense-
Touch and hearing are examples of mechanical sense in human beings. Hearing a process of perceiving sound and converting sound waves into impulses. Touch a system of analysing temperature by feeling the other surface.
Chemical Sense-
Taste the ability to recognize different flavours. It is associated with the mouth region, especially the tongue. Smell a quality that is responsive to activity by nose.
Role of Senses-
The senses are a medium which connects us to our surroundings whereas in human body plays the role of a system. The disturbance or loss of any of the senses will lead to an intense impact on us. Accidents like thumb cuts or common colds where we are not able to smell or taste for a short duration can give us an idea about and strong dose of realisation. Examples like this give importance to these senses and how they play an important role in day-to-day life without any realization. Each of the senses uses its own system to get and perceive the surroundings and information.
Apart from the five senses, we sense a lot more than this from the environment. Examples of these are realising the temperature difference, pain etc. Even though we are not aware that these main five play significant roles.
They are connected to the world and also help with everyday tasks and performing activities. It is an essential part of the enjoyment of experiences and memory-making. More importantly, they are connected to emotions and memories and have a very dramatic impact on how we feel. Any interference with the function of the senses will limit interactions or make it harder to perform activities.
Vision plays an important role among all. It is crucial in situations of daily life and one of the senses which we are always using for human activities. A large part of the human brain is dedicated to processing visual information. It is easy to analyse that we feel losing the sense of vision would be more difficult than any other because of the importance that we give to vision in our daily lives.
Architecture and sense–
Experiencing a built environment, we always attempt to relate or understand the surroundings by imageability or relating it with an incident, object or sign. We identify the objects according to their adjacency from any other objects. Since we are living beings we have an ability to locate ourselves towards non-living things. Every time we move it is with respect to our body and as a response to reach the object by determining their position. The eyes play an important role in this activity in terms of gaining the visual sensation.
We perceive the objects within our reachable area and are aware of our limbs and the anthropometry of body. When we experience space and use the building the things which stimulates are not only our vision but sense of touch as we walk, touch the ground and things which are related to a particular activity. It is a combination of vision and haptic sense.
A major role of architecture and a challenge for a designer is to provide the function with respect to stimulating perceptual experience (representation of what is being perceived) for the user in response to its surrounding environment or premises. A structure must approach, confront and experience its function with the actions and reactions of our body.
The architecture itself offers the sensation of texture, the experience of light and shadow pattern and movement, and the smell and sound of space achieved through the volume. The structure speaks for itself through its perceptual perspective, because it has an ability to possess all possible senses. As the building is not only built to see but should stimulate the senses with respect to its function.
The criteria are now to consider the sensory sense as the most important factor in design because of the fact that it’s been very rarely used in buildings. If it should be considered then what sort of architecture should be produced from the awareness of this important interaction of vision and touch and other sense?
The key question here is how and in what way sensory perception can enhance the quality of space. Hence the purpose is to suggest a framework of thinking to help construct ideas and meaning in the design process.
The human body is deeply affected by a circadian rhythm which is physical mental and behavioural changes that follow a 24-hour cycle. The role of light in an environment is crucial for the comfort of a user also a key to improving people’s mood and energy levels which affect human emotion.
Architecture can be experienced in a multisensory way. The capacity to perceive architecture in human beings is very diverse and will vary according to person. More importantly, designing and creating architecture rely upon the visual representation because of the strong fact like the first impression which also leads to quick response of good and bad. Which does not relate to architecture but almost to everything that we use.
Multisensory activities are very important for a person with visual impairment in a built environment. Since the user group has a lack of vision their spatial experience relies mostly on the haptic sense (activities associated with sensation) where touch plays an important role.
