Book Design & Photography
Sensory Architecture:
A blind sense of place
Sensory Architecture:
A blind sense of place
Final Major Project
Research and Visual Resolution
Research and Visual Resolution
In the absence of vision
When vision is impaired these concepts are much more difficult to understand and need to be taught. How do you visualise the concept of “corner” without vision? Do you touch corners or draw corners? If you can touch a corner or draw a corner, where do I find the corner to touch when I am walking along the street?
For the visually impaired people the term ‘visual’ loses its sense and it is important to consider they orient themselves by the means of optical aids. With the loss of sight, there becomes a greater reliance on the other senses of hearing, smelling, and touch. Although their visual acuity is limited, these travellers depend on what they can see and what they can detect through their feet or with their other senses.
The combination of texture, colour, light and pattern creates ‘ambience’ and thereby resources such as walls, ceilings, floors make a space feel ‘bound’ or ‘unbound’, influencing the nature and degree of security or insecurity people may feel within it. By recording and describing our observations between people’s perception and sensation of textures we could better explore the visual and aural communication.
While architecture is experienced with all senses, the visual tends to receive most attention from designers. Each of the five senses uses different clues for exploring the environment and features a different perception range.
This book focuses on the role of haptics, i.e. the sense of touch, in the built environment and reports on the development of haptic design parameters to support architects in paying more attention to the haptic implications of their design decisions. Haptic qualities and constraints in the built environment could be identified with the help of people who are congenitally blind, as they are more attentive to non-visual senses.
If architects design with more attention to non-visual senses, they are able to contribute to more inclusive environments. The intention is to make buildings and spaces accessible and enjoyable for more people, in line with the objective of Universal Design.
