Abstract
Interior spaces are experienced with all the senses, including seeing, touching, hearing, smelling, and sometimes tasting. Moreover, our bodies in movement have a moment-to-moment changing interaction with spaces and products in accordance with our activities. User-centered design should consider not only the comfort of the body, through ergonomic principles, but also impressions that are obtained through all our sense doors. By bringing into attention how spaces and the designed features within them impact all our senses in everyday life, we can apply this valuable information into our design practice. However, education and practice in fields of architecture, interior design, and product design have predominantly focused on the visual sense. An embodied understanding and awareness of the human-environment interaction, directly affecting our pleasant, unpleasant ar neutral feelings is therefore necessary. This study is a preliminary insight into how different public interior spaces effect the body and senses. The interior spaces include cafes, libraries, bookstores, retail stores, and many multi-functional spaces in the city. The sense impressions are investigated upon changing activites such as reading, eating, reaching to a book, etc. Rather than a generalistic perpective, the exploration includes the natural, purposeful, or unintentional encounters situated in the lived experience of each individual. The ‘multisensory inventory of spaces’ are provided by Interior Architecture students, who carried out their case study as an assignment for Ergonomics course. Analysis of the cases provide a bodily and sensory landscape of interiors, mostly overlooked by designers, providing an embodied perspective.
Presenters
Burçak AltayAssistant Professor of Practice, Interior Architecture and Environmental Design, Bilkent University, Turkey
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
Multisensory Design, Interior Design, User-centered Design, Ergonomics, Embodiment
