MA Interior Design

This project asks you to understand how the senses connect to people consciously or subconsciously. How do our senses work and inform us and promote or engender a reaction? How are our senses linked to spaces, materials and the environment?

Looking more broadly at the idea of senses, some have identified 12, others have listed 21, is this about awareness, a 360 understanding of all we encounter in a space? The evidence of how people react to materials and colours is limited in terms of scientific fact but the research is now emerging. The world currently realises that wellbeing, a term loosely used to describe our overall fitness and happiness, can be measured. Both stress and a poor environment can contribute to our health and as such our illnesses, some chronic and fatal. Therefore Wellbeing is on the agenda and its values are being incorporated into Interior Design.

As an Interior Designer how do you use scientifically found evidence to be the founding inspiration of new types of spaces? What factors do you need to gather to interpret and through a process of development work towards concepts that could support,

calm, inspire happiness, smiling and contentment? How does this further develop the research of the investigated sense and how the environment and surrounding elements work with or participate with the space/artefact?

Is this not spatial alchemy?

You are asked to design a space which illustrates and describes one of the senses and how we engage with it and how it can affect a better state.

Through a series of models, think about scale and how you read the space/object; think about the interaction of the public or its user and the articulation or series of movements. These movements could be explored through extending, stretching, opening/closing as well as travelling, revolving and rotating.

Explore the idea of occupation or secondary experience; are there several points of interaction? i.e reverberation, echo, refraction etc.