Name what’s working and why. “I like how _____ because _____.”
Name what could go further. “I wish _____ because _____.”
Open a door. “I wonder what would happen if _____.”
Not This
See data in everything
Design the invisible
See a world as data — document, analyze, find insights
Design things worth keeping
Translate a place into something someone else can feel
Articulate your design principles
Design the collaboration, not just the product
Honest iteration — early work is material, not precious
Edit ruthlessly — what you remove matters as much as what you keep
Know who you are as a designer — and show it
Spence & Gallace (2011) — cross-modal congruency: when senses reinforce each other, experience is more powerful. Vision dominates, so non-visual senses are chronically underdesigned.
Desmet & Hekkert — three levels of product experience: aesthetic (sensory delight), meaning (significance through association), emotional (interpretation in context of your concerns).
Norman, Emotional Design three levels (reminder): visceral (immediate hit), behavioral (does it work), reflective (provokes meaning after).
Jiro Dreams of Sushi — 20 pieces, each designed: rice at body temperature, fish cut moments before serving. 70 years of obsessive attention to each sensory moment.
Noma — foraged ingredients from the Nordic landscape. Every dish communicates a place through taste, texture, temperature, and aroma.
Eliasson, The Weather Project — artificial sun, mist and mirrors, 2 million visitors. Making invisible energy systems perceptible.
"Invisible Senses"
Spence & Gallace (2011)
Multisensory design
Desmet & Hekkert (2007)
Three levels of experience
Norman
Emotional Design, Ch. 1–3
Our senses do not operate independently — they interact constantly. When senses reinforce each other (cross-modal congruency), the experience becomes more powerful, more memorable, and more pleasurable. A warm cup makes the person holding it rate a stranger as warmer. A heavy book feels more important. The problem is that vision dominates design: most designed experiences are overwhelmingly visual, leaving sound, touch, smell, and taste chronically underdesigned. Spence and Gallace review decades of experimental evidence showing that multisensory consistency amplifies perceived quality, while mismatch creates confusion or unease. For this week: which senses are you designing for, and which are you ignoring?
Desmet and Hekkert propose three levels at which a product produces an experience. Aesthetic is the sensory pleasure — does it feel, sound, smell, or look delightful? Most designers start here. Meaning is the significance the user assigns through interpretation, memory, and association — a coffee maker that reads as masculine, a worn jacket that reads as a life lived. Meaning is constructed, not inherent. Emotional sits on top: it is not the product that causes feeling, but the user’s interpretation of the product in the context of their goals, motives, and well-being. The same object can delight, bore, or insult depending on what the user is trying to do. For this week: at which level is your prototype operating, and is it operating at all three?
Reflection assignment: Find a designed thing in the world that represents one of these concepts. Bring it to Wednesday's discussion.
Jiro Dreams of Sushi
Multi-sensory design at the scale of a single bite
Noma
Food as multi-sensory experience
Olafur Eliasson
The Weather Project — making invisible systems perceptible
Sensory Compositions
Taste, smell, and sound as design media (Altringer Eagle)
Beneath the Surface
Whale communication as sensory experience (Altringer Eagle)
Jiro Ono serves 20 pieces of sushi. Each is designed: rice at body temperature, fish cut moments before serving, placed when the customer is ready. 70 years of obsessive attention to each sensory moment. Takeaway: You don’t need elaborate materials. You need obsessive attention to each sensory moment.
René Redzepi closed the world’s best restaurant to reinvent it. Noma’s menu comes from what the Nordic landscape offers each season — foraged ants, beach roses, reindeer moss. Each plate communicates a landscape, a climate, a moment in time through taste, texture, temperature, and aroma. Takeaway: The menu isn’t invented — it’s discovered.
The Weather Project (2003): a giant artificial sun in the Turbine Hall, mist and mirrors, 2 million visitors lying on the floor. Takeaway: The best sensory design makes invisible systems perceptible through direct experience.
Climate data translated into flavor (ICA Boston). Whale communication translated into visual + sonic experience (N+A Lab / Project CETI). Takeaway: Data becomes experience when you design the right sensory channel for it.
Overcoming the visual crutch.
Jiro Ono serves 20 pieces of sushi. Each is designed: rice at body temperature, fish cut moments before serving, placed when the customer is ready. He's been doing this for 70 years. Multi-sensory design at the scale of a single bite.
René Redzepi closed the world's best restaurant to reinvent it. Noma's menu comes from what the Nordic landscape offers each season — foraged ants, beach roses, reindeer moss.
The menu isn't invented — it's discovered. Every ingredient is sourced from a specific place and season.
Each plate communicates a landscape, a climate, a moment in time — through taste, texture, temperature, and aroma.
The Weather Project (2003) — a giant artificial sun in the Turbine Hall, mist and mirrors, 2 million visitors lying on the floor looking up. He didn't explain energy or climate — he made you feel a system you normally ignore. Turning data into spatial, sensory experience.
Energy + Sensory Systems. The best sensory design doesn't illustrate information — it makes invisible systems perceptible through direct experience.
Taste the Changing Forest — a data visualization you can taste. Climate data translated into flavor. Smell the Changing Forest — same project, scent dimension. Perfumes composed from ecological data.
Feelings for Dinner — culinary art exhibit designing emotional experiences through food.
Sensory Composition Project — "A Day in the Life, Unbundled," deconstructing daily sensory experience.
‘Beneath.’ 2026.
An entire social world — whale identities, relationships, conversations, cultural transmission across generations — made perceptible not through charts or captions, but through direct sensory experience.
Sperm whales off the coast of Dominica communicate in codas — rhythmic sequences of clicks that carry identity, family membership, and social intent. Project CETI, founded by marine biologist David Gruber, has been recording and decoding these exchanges for years. The data is extraordinary: individual whales recognized by their click timing, mother-calf synchronization patterns, cross-generational cultural transmission spanning 30+ years. An entire social world, invisible beneath the surface of the ocean.
The question was: how do you make this world perceptible to a human standing in a gallery? Not through charts or captions — through direct sensory experience. The N+A Lab at Dartmouth designed Beneath the Surface, an immersive installation that translates real whale communication data into visual and sonic experience on a large-format LED panel.
The piece presents a deep ocean field — shifting layers of blues sampled from the Caribbean waters where the whales live. It is deliberately subtle. Someone might walk past it without noticing anything but beautiful blue. But those who look closely begin to see patterns: expanding rings, organic wobbles, luminous particle drift. Those who connect audio begin to hear the clicks synchronized to the visuals.
The experience deepens through four progressive levels of perception:
Level 0 — Ambient: Just ocean. Blues shifting. Beautiful and quiet.
Level 1 — Notice: Subtle disturbances become visible.
Level 2 — Listen: Whale clicks synchronized to visuals. Depth scale appears.
Level 3 — Recognize: Whale identities. Family zones. Exchange arcs connecting caller to responder.
Every data property maps to a sensory property. Rhythm patterns become expanding rings. Tempo controls propagation speed. Spectral type determines color temperature. Rubato — the slight timing variation in each whale’s clicks — becomes elliptical distortion in the rings. The rings breathe. Ornamental clicks produce bioluminescent sparks that drift outward. Each whale family occupies a distinct zone with its own accent color.
This is the same principle as Eliasson’s Weather Project — making an invisible system perceptible through direct experience rather than explanation. But where Eliasson made you feel a single atmospheric phenomenon, this piece makes you perceive an entire social world: identities, relationships, conversations, cultural transmission across generations.
Your challenge this week asks you to do the same thing at a smaller scale: take something invisible and make it perceptible through designed sensory experience. The medium should be something that could not just be a presentation.
Take your partner to a place in 10 minutes.
Step 1: With your partner, grab materials from the table. You have 5 minutes to design a 60-second experience of a place for another pair. (5 min)
Rules: Use your storytelling skills + another sense. No screens. Make the experience something that could not be a presentation.
Step 2: Swap. (5 min)
Choose your place. Read theory slides, research your place, prep partner presentation. Begin brainstorming: what makes this place this place and not somewhere else? Research your place — memory, family, recordings, textures, tastes and smells of what grows there or happens there. Use Week 3 rabbit hole and storytelling skills. Read your assigned theory reading (Spence, Desmet, or Norman). Explore sensory materials — what’s available to you?
Bring your place to life for your partner. Honest feedback both ways: does this land? Where does the message get muddy? Then begin work together on the combined experience inspired by both your places. Source materials, test combinations.
Build combined experience inspired by your two places. Present combined experience to class.
Reflections 1:1s · Magnason workshop 5/6 · rabbit hole interviews
Your WIP Doc — Week 5 section:
Partner sensory interview notes — what they love, what they don’t, examples
Research on your place — what you found through memory, family, recordings, other sources
Brainstorm notes and sensory material exploration
Design decisions: which senses, why, how they work together
Rehearsal notes — what worked, what you changed after partner feedback
Concept tags — mark which apply to your work this week:
Week 5: Multisensory Design · Three Levels of Experience · Emotional Design · Obsessive Sensory Attention · Place as Story · Making Invisible Perceptible
Week 4: Constraints Increase Variability · Emotionally Durable Design · Craftsmanship · Constraint as Identity · Durability as Desirability · Repair as Understanding
Week 3: Disappearing Interviewer · Curiosity as Structure · Interviewing Users · Invisible Systems Made Visible · Dual Desires · Going Deep
Week 2: Structure Mapping · Far-Field Analogies · Technology Brokering · Experience Economy · Affordances · Anticipation as Design · Controlled Reveal · Sensory Arc · One Resonant Idea
Week 1: Service · Energy · Material · Interactive/Sensory · Natural · Artificial · Longevity
Weekly Gallery Slides — your name section (3 slides):
Slide 1: Your video — the filmed prototype (or a highlight reel with a link to the full version). What place is this? What should someone feel?
Slide 2: Design decisions — which senses you chose, what each adds that vision can’t carry, how they reinforce each other.
Slide 3: Principle transfer statement — what concept(s) from this week’s theory or case studies you engaged with, and how you applied it in your design.
Spence & Gallace (2011) — cross-modal congruency: when senses reinforce each other, experience is more powerful. Vision dominates, so non-visual senses are chronically underdesigned.
Desmet & Hekkert — three levels of product experience: aesthetic (sensory delight), meaning (significance through association), emotional (interpretation in context of your concerns).
Norman, Emotional Design three levels (reminder): visceral (immediate hit), behavioral (does it work), reflective (provokes meaning after).
Jiro Dreams of Sushi — 20 pieces, each designed: rice at body temperature, fish cut moments before serving. 70 years of obsessive attention to each sensory moment.
Noma — foraged ingredients from the Nordic landscape. Every dish communicates a place through taste, texture, temperature, and aroma.
Eliasson, The Weather Project — artificial sun, mist and mirrors, 2 million visitors. Making invisible energy systems perceptible.
"Invisible Senses"