A hat full of honey and other keys to design

By BARBARA SWIFT
Swift & Company

As humans we use all our senses to understand, use and remember our environments. Of all the senses, sight is the most evolved. While sound, smell, touch, time, memory and movement play important roles in the development of meaningful environments, have we lost access to them as important tools? We need a design method that integrates them as tools into the center of our work.

In an informal experiment, a group of design professionals, visual artists and museum curators were each asked to describe a particularly arresting experience of place. Uniformly, smell and sound introduced the individual to the experience, typically described in a nonlinear manner, allowing the subconscious to lead the conscious into engagement with the experience.

The stories tended to use language that reflected the involvement of all the senses without a domination of the eye or a potentially linear rational assessment. The stories focused on the whole, not on the parts, with a suspended sense of time and a feeling of separation from daily life.

One story told was of Ann Hamilton's installation Privation and Excesses at the Capp Street Project: AVT in San Francisco. The installation included a rectangle of honey poured on the floor and covered by pennies in a dark garage. Beyond the sea of pennies were three sheep, two mechanized mortars and pestles, and a seated person bathing her hands in a hat full of honey.

In this story, there was first the sweet smell of honey on the street. Next, walking from the street into the dark garage toward the mechanized sound and the luminous shine and glow of the pennies. From here, the story moved to a sense of slowed time and complexity with the passage into the room. The arrested sense of time and place lingered after leaving the installation.

This story and others suggest that truly rich experiences and memories of place are those which the other senses - often in advance of the visual allow the human animal to integrate and process the information using the full capacity of the mind and body. This provides access to more and varied information.

What does this mean for professionals involved in environmental design? We must understand the ways the body and mind work to be better able to create truly arresting environments, environments which ground us in a deep experience of place and time. We need to understand how various sensory stimuli are engaged and processed by the body and mind to be able to use them to the greatest advantage in our design work.

The brain is structured to move information at varying speeds using different mechanisms. It is important to understand how the brain works to design for experiences which use the slower moving, more complex mechanisms to allow access to the richness of memory.

Research on neuropeptides by scientists such as Candace Pert suggests that the view which sees the limbic system as the center of memory and emotion must be expanded to include the body with its nervous system. Current thinking suggests brain cells work like members of a committee which are active in characteristic patterns. While the analogies of a computer or linear pipeline are helpful when thinking about the mind, they are inaccurate. The integration of memory and processing with the continuously shifting of patterns suggest the more appropriate analogy of a complex ecosystem.

We need to learn how to design to engage the brain stem, the limbic system, the medulla, middle brain, and body as well as the frontal lobe and the frontal cortex. If as environmental designers we have further evolved via an education/professional system to focus on the visual and to work within theoretical cerebral constructs, are we in fact creating environments which are increasingly reduced in the richness of experience offered? If this is the case, there is the opportunity to counter this methodology by understanding the way the body and mind experience place and remember it.

We need a simple primer which will help designers pursue richly textured designs, a tool kit which connects common sense and round-truthed experience with our intellectual constructs.

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