Sensory design probes

Marshall McLuhan was the inventor of the probe. He deployed them to explore and cast into relief the “environments” created by diverse media. Our chosen environments are somewhat different. They consist of the atmospheres of six sorts of public space: the mall, the museum, the hospital, the spa, the urban park and the festival. But we are one with McLuhan when it comes to,the importance he attached to “the training of perception” in such works as The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects.

Our preferred research method is ethnography, which François Laplantine in The Life of the Senses, describes as follows: “The experience of [ethnographic] fieldwork is an experience of sharing in the sensible [le partage du sensible]. We observe, we listen, we speak with others, we partake of their cuisine, we try to feel along with them what they experience.” To highlight this emphasis on sensing (and making sense) together with others, we call our method sensory ethnography.

We have also experimented with other methods, such as mobile sensory photography (Akbari), hand-drawn film animation (Soulikias), scenting (Sriram), sculpting (Rozanski), and poetry (Lambert). You will find examples of these complementary sense-based methods for ethnographic and atmospheric research presented in the Methods section of the Sensory Design Thinking page.

In what follows, each of the six sites that have constituted the focus of our investigations to date are introduced via a brief paragraph, followed by a list of probes by different members of the ESD research team, which you are invited to sample. There is also a seventh site, called Miscellaneous, that gathers breaking research on a range of other spaces, such as the classroom, the metro, and the home altar.

Hospital

The modern hospital is typically designed with functional efficiency foremost in mind, and with little regard for the patient’s senses (other than to anesthetize them through the use of painkillers). The senses of the physician are augmented by visual (x-ray, MRI) and other technologies often to the exclusion of listening to or touching the patient. Meanwhile, the patient is bombarded with unwelcome sensations despite the ostensible hygieneity of the environment: unpleasant odours, irritating sounds, rooms without views (other than of the hospital parking lot), drab colour schemes and uniforms, notoriously tasteless (if nutritious) food. In recent years, there has been a growing movement to humanize the hospital and create a “restorative environment” (Caspari et al 2011). The attention of architects and designers has primarily focussed on the visual (sunny exposures, soothing colours, com- missioned art) but other senses besides sight have also come to assume greater prominence of late: controlled soundscapes (Iyendo 2016), high ceilinged atriums (Adams et al 2010; Koller and McLaren 2014), improved meal presentation (Navaro et al 2016; Spence 2017), and “ambient distraction techniques” for the benefit of young patients (Szumanski and Horton 2007). What are the implications for hospital redesign now that aestheticization is understood to be as important to wellbeing as anaesthetization?

Cold White of Day: White, colour, and materiality in the twentieth-century British hospital — Victoria Bates

Listening through Lines: Mark making, sound and the hospital — Victoria Bates

Hospital Senses: On Thresholds, Waiting Spaces, Operating Room, Laundry, Wards, Corridors — Hospital Senses Collective

Museum

Formerly, museums were empires of sight and the rule was “do not touch.” In recent years, however, the protocol has changed and the museum space has been transformed into a “sensory gymnasium.” This has long been true of children’s museums and science museums but now art and ethnographic museums have followed suit (Classen 2017). To take but one example, a 2018 exhibition of medieval art at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore was supplemented by concerts of medieval music; one room was devoted to the pleasures of the table, another to the art of courtly love; and there were workshops in diverse medieval scenarios of activity (Bagnoli 2017, 2018). The objective was to immerse the visitor in the period sensorium through interactive displays, and thereby make the visit into something much more than an object lesson in the visual arts. The new “sensory museology” brings the senses to visitors and visitors to their senses, and seeks to be inclusive of differently-abled publics as well as attentive to and respectful of First Nations’ understandings and aspirations.

Sensing the Redpath: A Sensory Ethnography of Montreal’s Redpath Museum and Its Collections:

Introduction — Erin E. Lynch

Redpath Museum Picture Gallery

Take 1: Sensing Silence and Loudness at the Redpath Museum — Rosalin Benedict

Take 2: Senses Come to Life — Melanie Schnidrig

Multisensory museology — David Howes (forthcoming)

Sensing Tupinambá Mantles - From Colonial to Contemporary Brazilian Featherwork — Rodrigo D’Alcântara

Sensory Design and the Aesthetics of Redress and Accountability in the Settler Museum: the Liveliness of Things and Indigenous Sensory Initiatives as a Practice of Abolition — Ika Peraic

R. Murray Schafer and The Theatre of the Senses — David Howes

Spa

In contrast to hospitals, spas take “a holistic approach to health, incorporating diet, massage, and [aroma- and] hydrotherapy, as well as the supposedly uplifting influence of scenery and the inspirational impact of music and genteel artworks” (Horrocks 2011). Wellness tourism is a growing trend. However, it is not always necessary to go elsewhere to embark on a sensuous journey, since many spas bring the sensory practices of other cultures home, as in the case of the Scandinavian themed Bota Bota spa-sur-l’eau in Montreal (Anon 2010, 2011; see also Sherwood 2010). Interesting questions of authenticity arise, both as regards spa design and as regards the existential fashioning of one’s self, since many visitors to spas are motivated by “a desire for transforming the self” through the encounter with cultural and sensory alterity (Laing et al 2013; Smith 2003). The probes in this section will take you to Finland and to Whistler, BC and also compare how the atmosphere of the Old World spa, the Ur-spa, differs from the New World version.

Prendre un bain de feu et de neige ou comment ma peau est devenue rivière — Roseline Lambert

Constellations of (sensual) relations: Space, atmosphere, and sensory design — Erin E. Lynch

Festival

Festival sites are a prime example of ephemeral or performative architecture (Kiib 2007). The festival is a temporally and spatially bounded site, but it has no walls. Festivals are staged by event companies but depend on the co-creation of the event by the participants if they are to succeed. There are “prescribed ways in which to experience intense sensations in order to reap the greatest benefit from the experience” (Johansson and Toraldo 2017: 232) but spontaneity and improvised action are equally essential (Frost 2016; McHugh et al 2012). “Festivalization,” whether in the form of light festivals (Lovell and Griffin 2018), music festivals (Szmigin et al 2017), wine festivals (Vannini et al 2010), food festivals (Bentia 2014) or the Edible Film festival with its “ineffable synaesthesia of sight and taste” (Wocke 2017), all create the conditions for “novel sensory and affective transformations” (Edensor and Sumartojo 2018). Festivals contribute in a major way to the “place branding” of cities such as Montreal, which is in fact one of the foremost festival cities in the world. The probes in this section will also take you to Chicago and Mexico to experience fireworks displays up-close, and to the city of Eleusis, Greece for the Eleusinian Mysteries.

Chilling Out in Montreal on a Cold Winter Night in the Month of February: A Sensory Ethnography of Nuit Blanche:

Introduction: (Slow) dancing with the carnival city / Co-producing the festive atmospheres of Nuit Blanche — Erin Lynch

Itinerary 1 — Amrita Gurung

Itinerary 2 — Aurélie Roy Bourbeau

Itinerary 3 — Melanie Schnidrig

Itinerary 4 — Rosalin Benedict

Delirious Pyrotechnics: Decolonial AestheSis of a Total Sensory Phenomenon — Adela Goldbard with Amauri Sanabria and Jorge Pirogranados

Patriotic Pyrotechnics: Self-control, Sensorial Propaganda, and Public Space as Ideological State Apparatus —

Adela Goldbard

From Sound to Senses: How New Generation Music Festivals Have Become the Sites of Multisensorial Experiences —

Burcu Yasin

Sensing the Ecosystems in Electronic Music Festivals — Burcu Yasin

Banshee: Transcendent Aesthetics & Sensing Community in Montreal’s Rave Scence (Part I & Part II) — Leona Nikolic

Urban Park

Urban parks are human-made or conserved natural environments with multiple uses and users, both human and animal. Uses may sometimes conflict, as when recreation competes with conservation or contemplation (Gobster 2001, 2007; Szanto 2019). How can multiple visions and multiple uses of the urban park be reconciled? What is its role as the city’s “green lungs”? What should nature sound like (Schwarz 2013)? And how may we best respect the wild animals and birds who make the park their home and contribute to its value as a site of sensory wellbeing? To take one of the prime sites of our team’s attention – namely, Mount Royal Park: How does the sensescape of Mount Royal contribute to the montréalité of Montreal (Klopfer 2009; Moser et al 2019)? Mount Royal Park was designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, who also designed New York’s Central Park. It is one of the sites we investigated for this project. Other sites include the park in winter, the park as refuge during the COVID pandemic, and a nature park atop a defunct quarry and landfill site.

Sense Walks and Map at Parc Angrignon — Ehsan Akbari

Staging winter atmospheres across Montreal: the case of winter seasons — Ariana Seferiades

Capturing the Moving and Sensual Architecture of the Urban Park — Aristofanis Soulikias

Waste as Energy in the Park: Sensorial Explorations through Disability as Method — Rachel Rozanski

Mall

The shopping mall is a space of sensory inundation and distraction (Crawford 1992; Andrieu et al 2003; Lemoine 2003; Healy 2014; Pikó 2017). Stores compete for shoppers’ attention through diffusing scents (e.g. Lush) or playing loud music (e.g. Abercrombie and Fitch). The Eaton Centre in the heart of downtown Montreal has recently been “reinvented,” with exceptional lighting. Such sensory appeals, and the navigational challenges posed by the maze-like layout of many malls, can be stimulating; but, they can also be distressing, particularly for those who are sensitive to sensory overload or have mobility limitations. Alexis Nihon Plaza in Montreal has also recently undergone a massive renovation with such concerns in mind, drawing on the work of the CRIR Rehabilitation Living Lab with its expertise in identifying physical and social obstacles and facilitators and developing technology and interventions to optimize function and participation of persons across the abled-disabled spectrum.

Explorations in Mall (Re)Design: A Roundtable

The sensorium of the city lays siege to the Shopping Mall: A story told in handmade film animation — Aristofanis Soulikias

A Sensory Exploration of Place Versailles: Reflections on a Commercial Capitalist Space — Lisa Conway