Creating Sensory Spaces

Creating Sensory Spaces celebrates spaces enlivened with sensual richness and provides you with the knowledge and tools necessary to create them. Drawing on numerous built case studies in ten countries and illustrated with over 85 full color images, the book presents a new framework for the design of sensory spaces including light, color, temperature, smell, sound, and touch. Bridging across disciplines of architecture, engineering, phenomenology and perceptual psychology, this book informs the design of buildings and neighborhoods that reclaim the role of the body and all the senses in creating memorable experiences of place and belonging.

Creating Sensory Spaces celebrates spaces enlivened with sensual richness and provides you with the knowledge and tools necessary to create them. Drawing on numerous built case studies in ten countries and illustrated with over 85 full color images, the book presents a new framework for the design of sensory spaces including light, color, temperature, smell, sound, and touch. Bridging across disciplines of architecture, engineering, phenomenology and perceptual psychology, this book informs the design of buildings and neighborhoods that reclaim the role of the body and all the senses in creating memorable experiences of place and belonging.

Multisensory rooms are widely used across the country in schools, care settings, hospitals and homes. Even settings such as football stadiums and airports are installing multisensory environments. Nevertheless, a significant lack of effective research has led to a sense of unease around sensory rooms. This crucial book explores the use of multisensory rooms in order to ease that anxiety; taking the mystery out of multisensory rooms, and supporting the reader to reflect and make the most out of their space. Key features include: Guidance on creating sensory spaces on any budget, to suit any level of need. An overview of the history of multisensory rooms, and a detailed exploration of the actual way in which the rooms are used today. A framework for evaluating existing practices and equipment, in order to maximise the potential of the room. A focus on the practitioner as the most important piece of ‘equipment’ in any sensory room. Written by a leading sensory specialist in a fully accessible way, this book is an invaluable tool for anybody who uses, or is considering using, a multisensory room.

The revised edition of this highly practical guide to creating and using multi-sensory environments is packed full of ideas for low-cost, easy-to-assemble multi-sensory environments suitable for children of varying ages and abilities. Each creative learning environment is designed to be constructed in a classroom or school hall, encouraging creative thinking and learning, and the development of social and emotional skills. Each environment idea is accompanied by suggestions for use for children with special educational needs. Key features of the revised edition include: Ideas for creating sensory experiences that stimulate all the sensory channels – auditory, visual, kinaesthetic, olfactory and gustatory Suggestions for extension or differentiation depending on student capability or time available A summary of the theory and background to multi-sensory learning, to allow you to adapt the suggested scenarios according to the needs of individual learners Although these activities will be of particular value for children with special educational needs or sensory impairments, they are more broadly designed to provide stimulating learning environments, as promoted in the themes and principles of the Early Years Foundation Stage guidance. This is an invaluable resource for teachers and other professionals in education.

What if we designed for all of our senses? Suppose for a moment that sound, touch, and odor were treated as the equals of sight, and emotion considered as important as cognition. What would our built environment be like if sensory response, sentiment, and memory were critical design factors, the equals of structure and program? In Sensory Design, Joy Monice Malnar and Frank Vodvarka explore the nature of our responses to spatial constructs--from various sorts of buildings to gardens and outdoor spaces, to constructions of fantasy. To the degree that this response can be calculated, it can serve as a typology for the design of significant spaces, one that would sharply contrast with the Cartesian model that dominates architecture today. In developing this typology, the authors consult the environmental sciences, anthropology, psychology, and architectural theory, as well as the spatial analysis found in literary depiction. Finally, they examine the opportunities that CAVE and other immersive virtual reality technologies present in furthering a new, sensory-oriented design paradigm. The result is a new philosophy of design that both celebrates our sensuous occupation of the built environment and creates more humane design. A revolutionary approach to the built environment that embraces all of our senses and modes of understanding.

"... a curriculum geared toward helping students gain skills in consciously regulating their actions, which in turn leads to increased control and problem solving abilities. Using a cognitive behavior approach, the curriculum's learning activities are designed to help students recognize when they are in different states called "zones," with each of four zones represented by a different color. In the activities, students also learn how to use strategies or tools to stay in a zone or move from one to another. Students explore calming techniques, cognitive strategies, and sensory supports so they will have a toolbox of methods to use to move between zones. To deepen students' understanding of how to self-regulate, the lessons set out to teach students these skills: how to read others' facial expressions and recognize a broader range of emotions, perspective about how others see and react to their behavior, insight into events that trigger their less regulated states, and when and how to use tools and problem solving skills. The curriculum's learning activities are presented in 18 lessons. To reinforce the concepts being taught, each lesson includes probing questions to discuss and instructions for one or more learning activities. Many lessons offer extension activities and ways to adapt the activity for individual student needs. The curriculum also includes worksheets, other handouts, and visuals to display and share. These can be photocopied from this book or printed from the accompanying CD."--Publisher's website.

“Esther Sternberg is a rare writer—a physician who healed herself...With her scientific expertise and crystal clear prose, she illuminates how intimately the brain and the immune system talk to each other, and how we can use place and space, sunlight and music, to reboot our brains and move from illness to health.”—Gail Sheehy, author of Passages Does the world make you sick? If the distractions and distortions around you, the jarring colors and sounds, could shake up the healing chemistry of your mind, might your surroundings also have the power to heal you? This is the question Esther Sternberg explores in Healing Spaces, a look at the marvelously rich nexus of mind and body, perception and place. Sternberg immerses us in the discoveries that have revealed a complicated working relationship between the senses, the emotions, and the immune system. First among these is the story of the researcher who, in the 1980s, found that hospital patients with a view of nature healed faster than those without. How could a pleasant view speed healing? The author pursues this question through a series of places and situations that explore the neurobiology of the senses. The book shows how a Disney theme park or a Frank Gehry concert hall, a labyrinth or a garden can trigger or reduce stress, induce anxiety or instill peace. If our senses can lead us to a “place of healing,” it is no surprise that our place in nature is of critical importance in Sternberg’s account. The health of the environment is closely linked to personal health. The discoveries this book describes point to possibilities for designing hospitals, communities, and neighborhoods that promote healing and health for all.

The room is dim, the chairs are in perfectly lined rows. The city planner puts up a color-coded diagram of the street improvement project, dreading the inevitable angry responses. Jana loves her community and is glad to be able to attend the evening meeting, and she has a lot of ideas for community change. But she has a hard time hearing, and can’t see the diagrams clearly. She leaves early. It’s time to imagine a different type of community engagement – one that inspires connection, creativity, and fun. People love their communities and want them to become safer, healthier, more prosperous places. But the standard approach to public meetings somehow makes everyone miserable. Conversations that should be inspiring can become shouting matches. So what would it look like to facilitate truly meaningful discussions between citizens and planners? What if they could be fun? For twenty years, James Rojas and John Kamp have been looking to art, creative expression, and storytelling to shake up the classic community meeting. In Dream Play Build, they share their insights into building common ground and inviting active participation among diverse groups. Their approach, “Place It!,” draws on three methods: the interactive model-building workshop, the pop-up, and site exploration using our senses. Using our hands to build and create is central to what makes us human, helping spark ideas without relying on words to communicate. Deceptively playful, this method is remarkably effective at teasing out community dreams and desires from hands-on activities. Dream Play Build offers wisdom distilled from workshops held around the world, and a deep dive into the transformational approach and results from the South Colton community in southern California. While much of the process was developed through in-person meetings, the book also translates the experience to online engagement--how to make people remember their connections beyond the computer screen. Inspirational and fun, Dream Play Build celebrates the value of engaging with the dreams we have for our communities. Readers will find themselves weaving these artful, playful lessons and methods into their own efforts for making change within the landscape around them.