Great Work Engages All Five Senses

By Tony Zagoraios, Stavros Kypraios, and Georgios Papaioannou

If you want to heighten the experience of your work, you need to appeal to more than just one of the five senses. Without realizing it, we tend to only cater to one of our senses in our work—for example, designers or web developers who focus on sight. Abstract visual artist Devon Sioui explains how incorporating even just one more sensation can change the overall experience:  

My sister-in-law Faye [Harnest] is an author, poet, and braille transcriber. She always had this idea to incorporate braille in a visual way with paintings and texture… She’ll punch her poem in a braille machine on acetate and from there we will attach it to the canvas. Then there is a lot of paint layering overtop and incorporating the edges so it doesn’t look like it’s taped on… [we want] people to come [and] explore the paintings by touch… because you don’t ever really get to do that.

By engaging the sense of touch along with sight, Sioui and Harnest are able to enhance the overall artwork experience for both themselves and the audience. Besides visually taking in the dynamic colors and composition, the artwork takes one way the audience experiences the world around them and integrates it into another, heightening the senses.

Industrial designer Jinsop Lee started evaluating his life experiences based on senses by creating a graph with a scale from one to ten along the vertical axis and the five senses along the horizontal. Every time he had a memorable experience, he recorded it like a five senses diary. He found that the best experiences engaged more senses on a higher level than others easily forgotten. Once he was aware of what made for the best experiences, he began appealing to more senses within his design work. Lee challenges us to incorporate as many senses as possible to make any experience more memorable:  

Now in the middle of all this five senses work, I suddenly remembered the solar-powered clocks projectfrom my youth. And I realized this theory also explains why Chris’ clock is so much better than mine. You see, my clock only focuses on sight, and a little bit of touch. Here’s Chris’ clock. It’s the first clock ever that uses smell to tell the time. In fact, in terms of the five senses, Chris’ clock is a revolution.

And that’s what this theory taught me about my field. You see, up till now, us designers, we’ve mainly focused on making things look very pretty, and a little bit of touch, which means we’ve ignored the other three senses. Chris’ clock shows us that even raising just one of those other senses can make for a brilliant product.

Of course, not every line of work will be able to add extra senses to a project—or at least, not without having to really sit and think outside of the box. Which in itself is the whole point: to expand your thinking about what’s involved in your work. Perfect experiences engage all the senses, so why focus on only one? See what other senses you could pull in. It could be what turns a good project into an unexpectedly great one.

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