was developed as a PhD research project titled: The Personalisation of Experience in the Public Interior and Its Contribution to Emotional Attachment to Place. Towards a Sensory-Emotional Framework for Experiential Design. The first part of the title asserts that public interiors can be designed and managed in ways that help visitors feel more connected to physical and social environments. The second part establishes that the research uncovered practical principles for fostering sensory rewards and strengthening emotional attachment to place.
Prior to this study, I worked on a research project called Sensing the Urban Interior in which I explored sensory-emotional disconnection between body and space, but I found that focusing on negative experiences did not provide me with transferable insights. I therefore framed this project as a study of the conditions for successful relations between the sensing body and its environment, while also exploring barriers and tensions to minimise bias. The emphasis on positive experiences is not an attempt to propose an unrealistic ideal. It is instead concerned with the need to identify the conditions that can help visitors reach a state of sustained connectedness.
The study draws on the work of Iryna Kuksa and Tom Fisher (2017) to define the personalisation of the visitor experience across two complementary and interdependent dimensions: personalisation for visitors and personalisation by visitors. Here, the emphasis is on a visitor-centred approach to designing public environments and managing the visitor experience. This approach caters to a diversity of people and activities. Visitors are able to exercise a degree of agency as they personalise their experiences, interacting with and adapting their environment to suit their own preferences and rhythms.
The study investigates two key questions:
• How can we design and manage public environments to enable visitors to develop personal connections?
• How can these insights shape an approach that supports positive sensory-emotional engagements and interactions?
The concept of embodiment is therefore central to the research. It positions the sensing body as the primary means of perception and demonstrates that, when designers and managers of public environments cultivate rewarding sensory phenomena, visitors can develop emotional responses that contribute to a greater sense of belonging, perceived ownership, and wellbeing.
I first drew on relevant literature to define the boundaries of this study and identified three pairs of principles that link the design and management of public environments to visitors’ behaviour and emotional responses: looseness and appropriation, enticement and exploration, and porosity and privateness. Looseness, enticement, and porosity represent qualities that can be designed and managed, while appropriation, exploration, and privateness are enacted by visitors as they engage with and personalise their experience.
Looseness and Appropriation
Design and management practices characterised by openness, generosity, and flexibility can bring life to a public environment by encouraging a diversity of people and activities. Such loose practices enable visitors to develop a degree of mental ownership and freedom of choice, encouraging them to exercise a relative autonomy and self-expression.
Enticement and Exploration
Partially concealing or revealing sensory phenomena, together with the use of forms and materials that invite touch, can arouse curiosity. This encourages visitors to explore and to enact modes of approach behaviour characterised by movement towards, flânerie, and interactions between the body and its environment.
Porosity and Privateness
The composition of solid boundaries, partially open borders, and sensory thresholds within the physical environment regulates sensory flows. This allows visitors to enact positive territoriality by defining personal or group territories at the micro-scale of the body, often with a preference for vantage points.
I used the public interior of London’s Royal Festival Hall as a case study where, applying non-participant observations and reflexive research methods, I was able to expand on insights from the literature. I also applied principles of purposeful sampling to triangulate the case study with interviews, to gather first-person perspectives from staff and visitors. Then, insights were tested and developed further through design workshops. Together, these methods helped shape a framework, a practical resource that can be used to create more sensorially and emotionally engaging public spaces. It is intended to be open and adaptable, encouraging interpretation and re-interpretation to suit different contexts. Top-level elements are briefly outlined below and the complete reource is available in the PhD thesis (pp. 151-177). The thesis also includes detailed information on the literature review, theoretical context, research methods and design workshops.
Overview of the framework
The first layer, the experiential process (Figure 1), is structured across four interrelated concepts: Experience, Reward, Connection, Attachment. It expresses the idea that the personalisation of experience within the public interior can generate rewarding sensory phenomena that enable visitors to develop positive emotional connections with their environment. The cumulative effect of these deeply personal and meaningful experiences can, in turn, contribute to emotional attachment to place.
The framework then reframes this experiential process as a sensory-emotional design process (Figure 2) structured by three interrelated components: Cultivate (visitor-centred experiences), Modulate (desired emotional qualities), Generate (rewarding sensory phenomena).
Cultivate
This model defines the personalisation of experience, its principles and characteristics (Figure 3). A Venn diagram is used to illustrate that they are distinctive yet complementary and interdependent. The framework also foregrounds the way historical, political, geographical and economic contexts can impact design and management practices. They may bring benefits but also create tensions.
Modulate
An emotionality model (Figure 4), points to grounding and stimulating emotional qualities deemed pertinent to positive individual and collective experiences. This is an invitation to reflect on the emotional tone of the public environment across space and across time.
An emotionality model (Figure 4), points to grounding and stimulating emotional qualities deemed pertinent to positive individual and collective experiences. This is an invitation to reflect on the emotional tone of the public environment across space and across time.
A sensory model (Figure 5) supports the introduction of rewarding spatio and socio sensory phenomena. It integrates three important features of sensory perception. First, perception is always multisensory, and a circular design draws attention to the collaboration of the senses. Second, perception is intermodal. The model highlights how the senses can interact by focusing on the specific context of touch and muscle sensation. Third, perception is cross-modal. This is expressed by placing a decisive emphasis on the way phenomena associated with one sensory modality can be perceived through another. For example, qualities associated with touch, described in the model as tactual, can be perceived through sight.
The sensory model also includes an extensive library of phenomena with corresponding characteristics, and introduces qualitative value scales (such as the degree of roughness or smoothness of a surface) to support the evaluation of the hedonic tone and rewarding potential of sensory phenomena. The list may not be exhaustive, but it is as comprehensive as it was possible to achieve. This resource can be used to explore the correspondence between spatio and socio-sensory phenomena and desired grounding to stimulating qualities in the environment.
Each section of the sensory wheel (Figure 5) is labelled with a symbol. The S in Si01, Si02, Si03, through to Si07 stands for sight, the T in T01 and T02 stands for touch, the K in K01 and K02 stands for kinaesthesia, and so forth. These codes provide an easy way to connect the wheel with corresponding libraries of phenomena and their attributes. Examples of libraries relating to sight and hearing are included below. The complete library is organised across fifteen categories and available in the PhD thesis.
Sensory phenomena perceived through sight (Si04 and Si05: Materiality)
Si04 - Visual qualities generated by materials and surfaces.
• Colour: its identity (red, blue, yellow, etc).
• Intensity: the degree of brightness to dullness.
• Value: the degree of lightness to darkness.
• Opaqueness: the degree of opacity to transparency.
• Pattern: the ratio of surface simplicity to complexity.
• Rhythm and repetition: regular or irregular variations in patterns.
• Scale: the size of the patterns.
Si05 - Tactual qualities generated by materials and surfaces.
Qualities associated with touch, but the body is not actually touching or being touched.
• Texture: the degree of roughness to smoothness.
• Contour identity: the degree of sharpness to smoothness.
• Firmness: the degree of hardness to softness.
• Weight: the degree of heaviness to lightness.
• Solidity: the degree of density to diffusion.
• Temperature: the degree of warmth to coolness.
• Moisture: the degree of wetness to dryness.
Sensory phenomena perceived through hearing (H01, H02 and H03: sounds, materiality and movement)
H01 – Auditory qualities generated by the sound of space, objects and people.
• Intensity: the degree of loudness to quietness.
• Pitch: the degree of sharpness to softness
• Localisation: the origin and distance from the body.
• Duration: ambient or episodic.
• Identity: the signature sound that characterises a location.
H02 – Tactual qualities generated by elements and objects.
Qualities associated with touch but the body is not actually touching or being touched.
• Weight: the degree of heaviness to lightness.
• Materiality: the degree of hardness to softness.
• Fluidity: the degree of liquefaction.
H03 – Kinaesthetic qualities generated by the movement of people and objects.
• Speed: the degree of fastness to slowness.
• Rhythm: the regularity or irregularity of movement.
This research was developed to contribute to existing sensory-emotional practices discussed in the design literature and to develop a practical process. It foregrounds the value of what Harry-Francis Mallgrave (p. 92) calls the “nonquantifiable elements of a design that endow the human habitat with life, vitality, decorum, and pleasing atmospheric qualities”. As an open framework, it also presents a starting point for further enquiry and adjustments to, for instance, support the sensory-emotional inclusion of diverse populations. In the current framework, sight dominates the sensory model but additional research with specific groups could generate alternative models. It could also support sensory-ethnographic research methods to better understand how people connect (or not) with a broader range of public environments.
As an independent researcher with limited resources, I cannot explore every possible variation or application, the topic is simply too vast. Hence, this study extends an open invitation to others, researchers, design academics, students, and managers, who share an interest in connectedness, belonging, and wellbeing within public environments. It is a foundation for further exploration, testing, and development.
PhD thesis
Mace, Valérie (2024) The personalisation of the visitor experience in the public interior and its contribution to emotional attachment to place: Towards a sensory-emotional framework for experiential design - University of the Arts London.
Related articles
Mace, Valérie (2025) Towards a sensory-emotional framework for design and management practices to cultivate a greater sense of connectedness in public environments. In: Uncommon Senses V, 7-10 May 2025, Centre for Sensory Studies, Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada.
Mace, Valérie (2023) A phenomenological ecology of personalisation as a dimension of intimacy in the public interior. Sociétés: Revue des Sciences Humaines et Sociales.
Mace, Valérie (2022) Sensory Ecology. Designing synergies between micro and macro-scales of experience in public environments. Back to Human Scale International Meeting. Re-thinking Living Spaces for Tomorrow, Universidade Lusófona, Lisbon, Portugal.
Mace, Valérie (2020) Inhabiting the Public Interior. An Exploration into the Critical Role of Personalisation in Imparting Quality to Public Life. AMPS conference Proceedings Series 18.2. Experiential Design – Rethinking relations between people, objects and environments, Florida State University, USA.
References
Kuksa I., Fisher T. (2017) Eds. Design for personalisation. New York: Routledge.
Mallgrave H. F. (2018) From Object to Experience. The New Culture of Architectural Design. London: Bloomsbury Visual Arts.