Principal Investigator
David Howes, Sociology & Anthropology

Co-Investigators
Constance Classen, Centre for Sensory Studies
Carmela Cucuzzela, Design and Computation Arts
Arseli Dokumaci, Communication Studies
Bianca Grohmann, Marketing
Aaron Johnson, Psychology
Jordan LeBel, Marketing

Collaborators
Victoria Bates, History, University of Bristol, Bristol, UK
Charles Spence, Director, Cross-Modal Research Lab, Oxford, UK
Martine Lizotte, Director, ExperiSens, Institut de tourisme et d’hôtelerie du Québec (ITHQ), Montreal, Canada
Ellen Lupton, Contemporary Design, Cooper-Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, New York, USA
Hening Schmidgen, Chair, Communication, Bauhaus University, Weimar, Germany
Suzanne Sauvage, Director, McCord Museum, Montreal, Canada
Steph Singer, Creative Director, BitterSuite; Founder, Open Senses Festival, London, UK

Project Description

This research program asks: How can we best analyze, and gain a critical purchase on, the flowering 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 ambience in the design of spaces. The ambience 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. 

Our objectives are fourfold: 

1)   To develop a hybrid methodology 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 ambiences;

2)   To try out this hybrid methodology by applying it to the analysis of the ambience (sensory affordances) of six sorts of public spaces: the museum, the mall, the festival site, the urban park, the hospital, and the spa as encountered in Montreal and abroad;

3)   To gauge the effectiveness of the models generated by this approach for the assessment of the spaces in question, and consumer experience; and

4)   To inaugurate  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?

This research program, with its continuous feedback loop (alternating between ethnography and psychology) for purposes of modeling different environments and their impact on the sensorium, will generate many novel insights into the sociality of sensation and ecologies of the senses. 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 the utopianist Charles Fourier (and latter day disability scholars and activists like Kleege and Boys) has taught us, 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 (Lupton and Lipps 2018) 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 ambience. 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 shifting the focus from the creative genius and intuitions of the designer to the study of user experience, and by 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” 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 mentioned above, both in Montreal and abroad, will be a catalogue of best practices 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, 2020-2024.