Sensory Design
1. Designing for sensory interest
Through careful and imaginative design it is possible to create landscapes that offer a wide range of sensory experiences to people with disabilities. Multi-sensory design is becoming increasingly popular in special schools, hospitals, residential homes and training centres. All landscapes induce sensory responses but it is the concentration of different experiences that gives sensory designs their identity. Most are passive places, designed to be inviting and comfortable. Some are designed to stimulate while others are used within educational programmes to teach a wide range of skills.
When planning for sensory interest it is important to decide exactly what you want. There are three basic options:
- A sensory garden: A self-contained area that concentrates a wide range of sensory experiences. Such an area, if designed well, provides a valuable resource for a wide range of uses, from education to recreation.
- A sensory trail: The trail has similar objectives to the sensory garden in providing a range of experiences but it has more association with movement. It can therefore have a direct application to teaching orientation skills, for example through people learning to recognise different sounds, textures and smells along the trail and gaining confidence in their own abilities to interpret the environment and find their own way.
- Enriching the overall landscape: Sites that are relatively diverse and easily accessible may lend themselves to developing an overall theme of sensory interest rather than concentrating on specific areas. It can also be argued that even sites that develop sensory gardens or trails should have an overall aim of high interest throughout their grounds, even if this takes many years to achieve.
Sensory designs will normally be places where the whole ethos is to encourage users to explore, touch, pick and crush plants or interact with objects. This places certain challenges on the design, particularly a need to make things fairly robust and to choose plants that can tolerate the inevitable damage from inquisitive hands.
In order to maximise the value of certain experiences unusual design approaches may be required. For example, trees may be deliberately planted near to a path so that the bark can be felt rather than setting it back as it would be an ordinary design. People must be able to get around the area but it may be interesting to include path surfaces whose textures give different and more challenging experiences of a type that would not be encountered on main access paths. An extension of this idea would be the provision of slopes or other features to test or stretch mobility skills.
The areas also call for different management techniques. For example there may be a deliberate policy to retain lower tree branches to enable children to balance and climb on them and to prune shrubs and trees into interesting shapes.
Historically many sensory gardens were focused on people with visual impairments. Sadly, many designers made the mistake of assuming that, because a person has a reduced sensory range, they need an over-emphasis of the remaining senses. Thus many early sensory gardens focused on too few sensory experiences (failing to appreciate that people with visual impairments often have some residual sight) and were simply collections of scented plants. In practice of course many visually impaired people have heightened awareness of other senses and can easily be overpowered by crude stimuli en masse. The principle holds true for many other forms of sensory impairment.
Successful design is largely based on imaginative approaches and finding ways of concentrating or 'stage managing' events (such as dovecotes so that birds can be seen) and experiences (such as access to water or autumn leaves) that would normally require venturing further afield. It is an ideal project in which to involve an artist or sculptor who can provide stimulating settings for all-season sensory experiences.
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