About
Project Description
This research program asks: How can we best analyze, and gain a critical purchase on, the florescence of the senses in contemporary design? This new trend was consolidated by The Senses: Design Beyond Vision exhibition, curated by Ellen Lupton and Andrea Lipps, at the Cooper-Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum in 2018. In addition to showcasing recent advances in the multisensory design of a wide array of consumer goods and playful artworks, The Senses exhibition foregrounded the key role played by the notion of ambiance in the design of spaces. The ambiance of a space is constituted by its architecture and the objects and “scenarios of activity” that go on within it. The materiality of the space, and the properties of the objects, are treated as a dynamic whole, mediated by the senses. Our research team, which is comprised of scholars in history (Classen), anthropology (Howes), design (Cucuzzella), communication and performance studies (Dokumaci), marketing (Grohmann, LeBel), and psychology (Johnson), aims to explore and enhance the practice of Sensory Design by interrogating it from the robust, socially and ecologically attuned, multi- and interdisciplinary perspective of the emergent field of scholarship known as sensory studies.
The primary methodological innovations of this research program involve: 1) theorizing and demonstrating the method of sensory ethnography in action and drawing out its import for the practice of design; 2) developing a hybrid approach which crosses sensory ethnography (a qualitative method grounded in fieldwork) with sensory psychology (a quantitative method for use in a laboratory) for the study of ambiances; and 3) to spark a metamethodological discussion around the question: What is good sensory design? Is it personally gratifying? Profit maximizing? Culturally meaningful? Socially responsible? Inclusive or also expansive?
With its continuous feedback loop (alternating between ethnography and psychology) for purposes of modeling different environments and their impact on the sensorium, this research program will generate many novel insights into the sociality of sensation and ecologies of the senses. Our hope is that this will, in turn, stimulate designers to think more critically about how to engage the senses in the design of spaces that are not only inclusive but culturally and personally transformative. Such a change would have incalculable health, recreational, educational and ethical benefits for, as argued in The Sensory Studies Manifesto, sensory critique is the beginning of social critique – and transformation.
This research program is situated at the intersection of design, marketing, anthropology (including design anthropology and sensory ethnography) and psychology (including consumer psychology and sensory evaluation). It interrogates the nascent field of Sensory Design from the standpoint of these other disciplines, and through incorporating the theories and methods of the latter into sensory design thinking seeks to socialize, responsibilize and thereby better ground the prevailing conceptions of what counts as good design.
We submit that grounding Sensory Design entails elaborating a methodology that crosses sensory ethnography with sensory psychology and applying it to the analysis of the design and experience of a select array of public sites. The sites in question are distinguished by their cultural or educational, commercial or entertainment, and therapeutic or recreational value in addition to their sensory ambiance. This multisectoral approach is essential to delimiting the commonalties and differences to the social life of the senses in contemporary culture. It also has the potential to responsibilize the practice of design by, first: shifting the focus from the creative genius and intuitions of the designer to the study of user experience, and second: bringing a supraindividal, cross-cultural perspective, based on the practice of multi-sited ethnography to bear on the evaluation of the sensory affordances offered by the spaces in question.
Crossing the conventional divide in the human sciences between the experiential and experimental, the qualitative and the quantitative, ethnography and psychology, is no easy task, and even the members of our team have pursued independent though complementary lines of inquiry (Classen and Howes in history and anthropology/Grohmann and Johnson in psychology) in the past. This research program with its continuous feedback loop for the purposes of modelling different environments and their impact on the sensorium will change this for the better, and the betterment of design practice.
The success of this research program also depends on developing a radically inclusive and sustainable approach to design. Drawing on the expertise in Critical Disability Studies of Dokumaci, it incorporates her program of “disability as method” into the practice of ethnography and builds on her theory of “micro-activist affordances” in its critique of most designers’ uncritical reliance on conventional affordance theory (Gibson 1966, 1979). Drawing on the expertise in designing for sustainability of Cucuzzella, it envisions the incorporation of an ecology of the senses into the design of the built environment and foregrounds the promotion of “green pleasures” (Classen) as its telos. How to market such a telos will be one of the primary challenges taken up by our team’s specialists in marketing (Grohmann, Lebel).
One of the outcomes of our sensorial investigations of the six types of public space to be addressed here – namely, the museum, the mall, the festival site, the urban park, the hospital, and the spa as encountered in Montreal and abroad – will be a catalogue of “uncommon practices” (i.e. best practices that make uncommon sense) in socially and ecologically aware Sensory Design. There will also be many lessons for the hospitality and entertainment industry in Quebec with respect to how to enhance the sensescape of their operations. The project will conclude with the staging of an international, interdisciplinary and resolutely multisensory conference in the Uncommon Senses series at Concordia University.
“Explorations in Sensory Design” is generously funded by an Insight grant from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada, 2020-2025 (no. 435-2020-1279).