Design Beyond Vision

by David Howes

This text is excerpted from The Sensory Studies Manifesto: Tracking the Sensorial Revolution in the Arts and Human Sciences - Chapter 7: Sensory Museology, pp. 173-76 (University of Toronto Press, 2022).

The Senses: Design Beyond Vision brought together some 40 objects and over 65 design projects and ran at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum in New York City from April to October 2018. With this show, billed as an “inclusive celebration of the sensory richness of design,” and the accompanying catalogue, with its “call to action for a multisensory design practice,” the former curated and the latter edited by the team of Ellen Lupton and Andrea Lipps, sensory design came of age. In place of futurity, the focus of The Senses show was firmly on accessibility, and it testified to the great strides that have been made in inclusive design during the intervening decade. The Senses was also noteworthy for its emphasis on the multiplicity and interactivity of the senses both in the objects and projects on display and in the design of the exhibition experience as a whole.

Cooper Hewitt Director Caroline Baumann aptly enucleated the groundbreaking sensibility that informed the exhibition in a statement to the press:

Across all industries and disciplines, designers are avidly seeking ways to stimulate our sensory responses to solve problems of access and enrich our interactions with the world. The Senses shares their discoveries and invites personal revelation of the extraordinary capacity of the senses to inform and delight. Within the inclusive environment created for the exhibition … [multiple measures have been taken] to ensure the exhibition will be welcoming to visitors of all abilities, an important step forward in our ongoing commitment to making Cooper Hewitt accessible to everyone. [1]

Thus, the show included many objects and experiences that were specifically designed for a “diverse and differently-abled audience” on the principle that two (or more) senses are always better than one. Out of consideration for visually-impaired visitors, there were maps that could be seen, felt and heard; out of consideration for hearing-impaired visitors, there was audio that could be felt through the skin and a themed section on architecture informed by DeafSpace principles; and, taking into account dome of the needs of dementia-sufferers, there was a display of coloured tableware to facilitate discrimination (e.g. food/dish) and a scent player that released smells (e.g. grapefruit, curry or chocolate) to stimulate the appetite at mealtimes. These accommodations were augmented by Braille labelling, twice-weekly descriptive tours led by Lupton, and an Accessible Exhibition App.

Novel sensory conjugations abounded, such as “Tactile Orchestra,” an interactive installation consisting of an undulating wall covered in black synthetic fur embedded with sensors: when one person stroked it a recording of a single string instrument would play, and when multiple persons touched it one could hear the full composition. Other installations included: scratch-and-sniff wallpaper, the “Ostrichpillow” (a portable sensory isolation contraption), and a film animation that translated bird songs into bursts of colour and motion entitled “Visual Sounds of the Amazon.” The catalogue is especially rich in pointers that highlight the distinctive features of each sense and how they interact, such as “Sound is material,” “Flavor is smell,” “Color amplifies the sensation of taste and flavor”: each slogan is accompanied by a paragraph that bristles with factual observations and reflections on how mingling the senses can inform and delight us at once.

Not all of the sensations on offer were pleasing. A few were quite jarring. Some installations purposely provoked cognitive dissonance in the viewer, such as a video called “For Approval”: this video included a scene in which what looked like eggs drop on a ceramic plate but bounce instead of smash (their shells being made of soft rubber). Another installation, called “A Seated Catalogue of Feelings,” involved sitting on a chair (or one could clutch a pillow to one’s chest), putting on headphones, and listening as a voice intoned a message (with the same message projected on the floor), such as “an avalanche of frozen peas,” “falling backwards into a tub of Jello,” or “the last nail in your coffin.” The seat would then begin to rumble with a pre-recorded pattern of corresponding tactile sensations. The translation - or rather, transduction - of sentences into vibrations was highly evocative.

With 11 main themes, ranging from “The Sensory Table” to “Shaping Sound,” and from “Tactile Library” to “Sensory Materials,” staging a coherent experience or “narrative” for the exhibition posed a real challenge. To this end, Lupton and Lipps commissioned the New York-based design agency Studio Joseph. As Monica Coghlan of Studio Joseph observed: “One of the things that was very clear from the beginning was that the premise was how the senses influence each other, not as separate experiences”; and as Wendy Evans Joseph stated: “We were determined to create a complementary embrace that gave each piece its ‘day in the sun’ and demonstrated its relationship to other objects.”  The problem of allowing for sound and sensory isolation of one display from another so as to avoid cacophony while at the same time creating the conditions for a symphony of sensations and encouraging fluidity of movement was solved by the careful positioning of objects and installing a screen system consisting of vinyl strips of varying hues and transparency (rather like a bead curtain) that shimmered and could easily be parted by visitors to allow them freedom of movement in their “journey of discovery.” In this manner, the “what” of saying or message (i.e. the narrative of multi- and intersensoriality) was seamlessly integrated with the “way” of saying or medium.

Ellen Lupton created a graphic for the poster announcing her plenary address at “Uncommon Senses III: Back to the Future of the Senses” [2] which provides the perfect finishing touch to this exposition.

The Senses exhibition stimulated my senses in numerous creative ways. Nevertheless, I did have reservations about it. One had to do with the relative lack of cultural diversity. It is true that The Senses boasted a star-studded roster of designers of international renown. However, with all due respect, it must be said that many designers tend to rely on their own intuitions even when they engage in co-design with a give target population. As an anthropologist, I am an advocate for the practice of ethnography as an essential first step or prelude to imagining “design solutions.” Doing ethnography involves getting out of the studio and out of one’s own head and immersing oneself in the analysis of the practices of everyday life among diverse populations. I was also somewhat perturbed by the technological dependency of the vast majority of the “design solutions” on display. For, apart from all the cutting-edge technologies of perception that can be used to dazzle us, there are the techniques of perception or ways of sensing, rooted in particular traditions the world over, that also deserve our attention. Studying these practices, which continue to flourish on the outskirts of the technological dynamo of modernity (and even within it) can provide insights into alternative orchestrations of the senses which lie beyond the ken of the professional designer. [3]

[1] The press release can be found here. For an account of the considerations that informed Studio Joseph’s approach to designing the exhibition

[2] The abstract for Lupton’s talk at Uncommon Senses III reads as follows: This crunchy, slurpy, brainy talk explores how designers can engage the human body. “Ocularcentrism” is the dominance of vision over all other senses in modern society. The empire of the eye excludes people who touch, hear, or smell but do not see. Inclusive design practices range from eyes-free interaction design and audio description to typographies and topographies of touch. Opening up to all our other senses not only includes more people but reveals new possibilities for visual design as well.

[3] We think here of what Jennifer Biddle (2016) calls the “remote avant-garde” – that is, the work of the Aboriginal artists of the community art centres of the Australian Outback whose aesthetic experiments often outflank these of the cosmopolitan avant-garde through their ingenious combinations of local materials and technology, such as clay-mation films that employ substances that “belong country” (e.g. clay, ochre, etc.) and “mark” or “enliven” the local in the process. Likewise, as regards technological breakthroughs like, for example, the cochlear implant, it has been shown that the effectiveness of such devices depends heavily on the home language environment and diverse other social, economic, political and intimate factors (Lloyd and Tremblay 2021). Finally, there are the many inspiring examples of everyday pursuits and practices, such as knitting and making your own cyanometer presented by Anna Harris in A Sensory Education (2021), which do not require a studio or museum setting to be valorized.