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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