Essay

Micro-Lecture Introduction

How can you improve your architectural design for occupants? In this Lecture, you will learn why sensory design is so critical for your architectural designs – while also discovering how to use it to optimize the positive impact of your environments for occupants.

Lecture Transcript

00:01 Maria Lorena Lehman: I am Maria Lorena Lehman, Founder of Sensing Architecture. And in this micro-lecture, we’re going to uncover a question I get asked about frequently. The question is, “How can I improve my architectural designs to bring greater benefit to occupants?” A critical and pivotal answer to this question is sensory design. You see, at the core of sensory design is neuroscience. And with neuroscience, you can learn through your design to feed occupant senses, so you can better tune your architecture to the changing needs and goals of your occupants.

00:44 MLL: You can do this as an architect by seeing more deeply into your architectural design and by better understanding your occupants’ needs, not just their one-time needs, but also their longer-term goals. You can not only position materials within space, within your architecture, but with sensory design you can begin to orchestrate materials in time, to synchronize the stimuli that your materials emit to feed occupants through their senses, so that you can tap into the five levels of occupant experience. These are the physiological, the intellectual, the emotional, the behavioral, and the spiritual.

01:33 MLL: Using sensory design, you can really fine-tune your architecture to be more personalized, to improve the way you design so that you can see more deeply, to really solve for occupant need, and support, foster, and nurture their longer-term goals. This is how you can design to expand the human horizon.