12/06 One day exhibition on ‘haptic installations’

by alzheimerarchitecture

The spatial designer translates his ideas into shape, space, materials, light. All these aspects have a direct link to the senses: sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch, balance. Some material can light or shine, but how does it feel, what sound does it makes, what are the properties of that material and what effects has it on people?

Materials and surfaces have a rich and complex language that evolves and changes over time. Stone speaks of her distant geological origins, its durability and inherent symbolism of durability, brick is reminiscent of earth and fire, gravity, and the timeless traditions of the building, bronze calls the extreme heat of manufacturing, the old processes of casting and passage of time as measured in the patina. Wood speaks of her two existences and time scales, his first life as a growing tree and the second as a human artifact by the caring hand of a carpenter or cabinetmaker.

But which is the most strongly developed sense of the spatial designer? The prevailing wisdom holds that it is the sense of sight, in order to create “a feast for the eyes”, that one moment that evokes an experience of transience, while haptic perception is more about the experience of a temporary succession of senses. And that is precisely the focus of this research: How can we help people to experience ‘space’ differently to our present fleeting perception?

We worked on the haptic perception by blocking the sight as the most dominant senses. We did many different experiments with ‘blind folded’ sessions to get a better insight in how the ‘other’ senses appear within the haptic experience. The aesthetics was in this study absolutely not an issue! This study is realized in cooperation with the students of the Rietveld Academie, department of ArchitecturalDesign.