was developed as a PhD research project, The Personalisation of Experience in the Public Interior and Its Contribution to Emotional Attachment to Place. Towards a Sensory-Emotional Framework for Experiential Design. It explored how the way we design and manage public interiors can help visitors feel more connected, sensorially and emotionally, to their environment. It uncovered practical principles that can foster emotional attachment to place.
The personalisation of experience
A visitor-centred approach to designing public interiors and managing the visitor experience that caters for a diversity of people and activities.
I asked two key questions:
- How can we design and manage public interiors to enable visitors to develop personal connections?
- How can these insights shape a design approach that supports positive sensory-emotional engagements in public environments?
The underlying idea: when designers and managers of public environments cultivate a range of rewarding sensory phenomena, visitors can perceive emotional qualities conducive to a greater sense of belonging, perceived ownership and wellbeing. To identify these phenomena and corresponding qualities, the investigation centred on successful relations between body and environment. Central to the research is the idea of embodiment, placing the sensing body as the primary means of perception.
The project explored personalisation in two ways:
- Personalisation for visitors – how the public interior is designed and managed to cater for a diversity of needs and activities.
- Personalisation by visitors – how people interact with and adapt their environment to suit their own preferences and rhythms.
These two modes are seen as complementary and interdependent. To explore their relationship and define the boudaries of this study, I identified three pairs of principles that link environmental design to how people behave and feel in a space. These are looseness and appropriation, enticement and exploration, porosity and privateness. Looseness, enticement and porosity can be designed and managed while visitors enact appropriation, exploration and privateness.
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Looseness
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Appropriation
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Enticement
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Exploration
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Porosity
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Privateness
To ground the research, I used the public interior of London’s Royal Festival Hall as a case study. Through on-site observations and interviews with both visitors and staff, I gathered real stories and experiences that helped reveal how people personalise their use of the space, and how design and management practices support or limit that process. Insights were tested and developed further through design workshops with students. These experiments helped shape a framework, a practical and adaptable resource that can be used to create richer, more emotionally engaging public spaces.
The final framework brings together insights from the research in a clear, usable format, organised into five sections with colour-coded elements for clarity. It is intended to be open and adaptable, encouraging interpretation and re-interpretation to suit different contexts, and to remain useful over time. Top-level elements of the framework are briefly outlined below; the complete framework is available here.
The first layer, the experiential process (Figure 1), is structured across four interrelated concepts: Experience, Reward, Connection, Attachment. It stems from the understanding that the personalisation of experience in the public realm can generate rewarding sensory phenomena conducive to visitors’ ability to develop positive emotional connections with their environment. The cumulative effect of deeply and personally felt experiences can also 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 section defines the personalisation of experience, its principles and characteristics (Figure 3). A Venn diagram is used to illustrate that these principles are distinctive yet complementary and interdependent. It also foregrounds the notion that historical, political, geographical and economic contexts impact design and management practices; they may bring benefits but also create tensions.
Modulate - This secion articulates an emotionality model (Figure 4), pointing 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.
Furthermore, the model 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 rewarding potential of sensory phenomena. The list is not exhaustive, but it is as comprehensive as it was possible to achieve through this research. It provides a detailed reference to explore the correspondence between spatio and socio-sensory phenomena and desired grounding to stimulating qualities in the physical and social environments.
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.
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 framework was created to bridge a gap in and contribute to existing sensory-emotional practices discussed in the design literature. It foregrounds the value of what Mallgrave (p. 92) calls the “nonquantifiable elements of a design that endow the human habitat with life, vitality, decorum, and pleasing atmospheric qualities”.
Looking ahead, this research could also be useful to other researchers exploring sensory-emotional dimensions in existing environments, communities and cultures, expanding its outreach beyond the original boundaries of this study. For instance, a research-oriented version of this framework could contribute to an ethno-graphic-style methodology. As an open framework, it also presents a starting point for adjustments to be made to remove barriers and support the sensory-emotional inclusion of diverse populations, including neurodivergent individuals and those with physical impairments. In the current framework, sight dominates the sensory model but additional research with specific groups could generate alternative models. This is an open invitation to others interested in cultivating or exploring the sensory-emotional dimension of experience.
Notes on the limitation of the research
This research focused on positive experiences to be able to limit the investigation to the contribution of sensory rewards to visitors’ ability to connect emotionally with the environment of the public interior. I realised from previous research projects that investigating emotional disconnection did not allow me to contribute to design knoweldge. I understood that to develop a framework that can help designers connect people and environment sensorially and emotionally, I needed to frame this research as a study of the conditions for success. Nonetheless, barriers and tensions were explored, and bias were minimised by considering how these could also impact the visitor experience in the specific context of the principles examined in this study. Therefore, the focus on positive experiences is not an attempt to propose an unrealistic ideal state where all negative experiences have been banished. It is instead concerned with the need to identify the conditions that enable visitors to reach a state of sustained connectedness with the environment of the public interior.
A small sample of participants contributed to the interviews. This included one key staff member at the RFH and nine visitors. This was deemed sufficient because this is not a study about the public interior of the RFH but about the contribution of the personalisation of experience to emotional attachment to place. Accordingly, this research was not built from the ground up. Instead, my approach was to develop a definition of the personalisation of experience and corresponding principles specific to the public interior through the literature review to define the boundaries of this research. Insights from the literature provided a structure for the case study, which then substantiated and added new insights through non-participant observations and reflexive documentation. Then, the role of the interviews was to triangulate these with first-person perspectives. The staff member selected for the interview was identified as the most knowledgeable and thus most suitable, and the outcome of the interview corroborated this understanding. The visitors interviewed represented a segment of population and I was careful to include participants with a range of personal characteristics within the requirements of purposeful sampling. However, even though visitors could articulate their experience of situations and emotional responses with relative ease, some struggled to describe specific sensory phenomena. These could be interpreted in the analysis of the interviews, but with additional time and resources, other methods such as conducting sensory journeys with visitors on the site of the public interior could yield more precise information into their perception of rewarding sensory phenomena.
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.
Reference
Mallgrave H. F. (2018) From Object to Experience. The New Culture of Architectural Design. London: Bloomsbury Visual Arts.