Design With All Your Senses

Each of us has a dominant sense. That dominant sense significantly affects how the world around us influences our thoughts and behavior.

For a lot of us, our dominant sense is vision.

That means, as we start to put the design for a space together, many of us get caught up in what it will look like—which is not surprising since we often seek design inspiration by reviewing options online and in design magazines.

However, vision is not the only sensory route from outside our heads to inside them. Many people experience the world through other sensory channels—they hear things and feel textures, for instance.

Regardless of the specific set of operational sensory apparatus we have, we combine the inputs we gather about our physical environment into one holistic impression. Then, we consciously come up with a plan for how to think and behave wherever we are.

Consider the full range of experiences in your space

When developing a space, keeping in mind the full range of experiences people will have in it will determine if you generate an alternative that simply excels on one parameter (for example, it “photographs well”) or an area that supports the life you planned.

A marble floor that’s lovely to look at can lead to annoying sounds as people walk across it. (For example, consider the clip of high-heeled shoes or the screech of sneakers.) A natural fiber that seems like the perfect fabric for the sofa, because it blends so well with the wallpaper, may be incredibly itchy under the elbows resting on the arms of that sofa. Or, perhaps even worse, it may not have a “positive” smell—for example, it may inherently smell like a wet dog or capture and retain the smell of any wet dog that happens to travel by it.

Spend time with your design materials first

It's best not to mentally commit to designing with something until you’ve spent at least a little bit of time in its presence—that’ll likely be enough to alert you to squeaky, itchy, and stinky stuff, for instance. Spending time with something before “working it in” can be difficult now that online shopping is such a big part of our lives, so be alert to return policies. Having to keep using something that’s unpleasant to spend time around can destroy your well-being.

Not all sensory consequences will be obvious

Bear in mind that not all of the bad sensations that tag along with the good ones will necessarily broadcast their undesirable presence.

An example: A chair that looks wonderful, positioned in the middle of a space with people walking in front of and behind it, won’t be an A+ place to be when the person sitting in it can hear movement behind them as they sit. Sensing movement behind us is stressful; when we were a young species, things behind us might have been getting ready to eat us, and our brains have not forgotten that. The visuals of that chair position and the sounds of someone actually sitting in it don’t align. (The more subtle lesson here: Layouts/floorplans have sensory consequences.)

Design for all of your senses so you can spend time in places where you and others live the lives that you’ve planned.