ABSTRACT
Besides only experiencing the world locally, we do so solely through our senses. Although sensory perceptions can diverge from objective fact, they fundamentally impact how we feel, so shape our attitudes, which affect what we do and how we do it. This chapter therefore explores sensory experience: how our senses inform and sometimes misinform us, their interrelationship with conception, how they transfer information to each other and how multi-sensory experience both increases conceptualizing accuracy and deepens our connection to things and situations. Individually, however, our senses only describe physical phenomena, hence the surfaces of and emanations from things. But together, they convey the deeper reality. As it’s primarily multi-sensory ambience that produces place-mood, this, enhanced by sensory-experience sequences, significantly influences how design affects us, nourishing or harming our inner (soul and spirit) selves. Although intensely local, this affects human behaviour, hence has global environmental implications.
