In recent years, many architectural theorists, practitioners and teachers have challenged older, functionalist and modernist notions of the ‘user’ of the built environment. They have looked instead to much more partial, subjective, lateral and embodied ways of imagining space. Current concerns are therefore very much about how we occupy space through our body and senses, poetically through feeling, rather than via vision and measurement.

Many disabled and Deaf artists are already exploring this area; offering their own personal and poetic interpretations of their various experiences of space. Engaging with this work can offer an interesting ‘way in’ to exploring architecture and the senses.

Architecture-InsideOut is a group led by disabled and Deaf artists, with the aim of developing creative dialogues with architects, related professionals and students, so as to shift attitudes to disability and architecture. They have held a series of charrettes (intensive design workshops) at Tate Modern and at other galleries.

Maybe what architects, design students and disabled people share is an acute awareness of the material world. Whilst for many people buildings and spaces can be occupied in a “state of distraction” - hardly noticed - both designers and disabled people tend to be much more constantly conscious of their surroundings, its smells, sights, sounds, colours, arrangements, levels, movement and ambience. We share an interest in getting in close and attending to the details.

But whilst architect/writers such as Juhani Pallasmaa (in "The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses") and Peter Zumthor (in books such as "Atmosphere") have been central to opening up approaches in architecture and design to sensory experiences, we need to be careful of not just assuming that focusing on the senses is either obvious or ‘natural’:

…the ‘deployment of senses and sensibility, and not only their content, is emphatically cultural’ – that is, the way that individuals use their senses and their particular responses to phenomena is highly determined by their specific cultural context and conditions, and not simply the result of universal human attributes.

Claire Melhuish "Concrete as the conduit of experience" in Katie Lloyd Thomas (ed) Material Matters Routledge 2005. P 207

In fact, many writers in disability studies argue that the contemporary ‘turn’ to an interest in embodiment and the senses all to often remains at simply at an abstract or imaginary level and fails to engage with the experiences of our actual diverse and different bodies.

For disabled and deaf people, many of the barriers in the built environment are at a depressingly practical level; restrictions on ease of access and movement, lack of clarity in way-finding, inappropriate attitudes and non-existent or non-functioning facilities. Why, we have to ask, does this goes on happening?

At the final review, it was interesting to see how a lot of students were still not really considering the practical considerations around the use of space and particular to this particular project, allowing for how artists / users would actually use the space; the potential impact on the user or the wider narrative of how multiple users use space. Perhaps more extensive user/client research as well as conceptual ideas would have been good?

Damian Toal, disabled artist tutor on Making Discursive Spaces project, University of Brighton, Spring 08

Despite the 'turn' to an architecture of the senses and embodiment, the tendency in architectural education, and practice more generally, is to assume that design starts from the conceptual and abstract and then develops into the detail. The RIBA Plan of Work is based on exactly this principle. For disabled and deaf people this can be a problem; for it is precisely in the details that barriers to accessibility most often happen. And it is here that the unintended design consequences of earlier 'conceptual' choices by architects must then be 'fixed' with add-on details, to the dissatisfaction of everyone.

If sensory design concentrates on the haptic relationships between an individual, objects and space, then we need also to explore the sensory and spatial qualities of our relationships with each other.

The language of accessibility is a language of ‘overcoming’ - of making movements through, and relationships with, objects and spaces smooth, invisible and as negligible as possible by attempting to turn the disabled or deaf person into yet another ‘neutral’ user and 'normal' person.

What about if, instead, we start from disability and diversity to develop creative concepts out of detailed attention to the immediate, close-up, practical, poetic and varied interactions of different bodies with objects, spaces and each other? What kind of concepts might such an approach produce?

…language recommends that we conceive of the able-body as something that just comes along ‘naturally’ as people go about their daily existence. People just jump into the shower, run to the store, see what others mean while keeping an eye on the kids, or skipping from office to office and, having run through the day whilst managing to keep their noses clean, hop into bed. All of this glosses the body that comes along while, at the same time, brings it along metaphorically. Speaking of ‘normal bodies’ as movement and metaphor maps them as if they are a natural possession, as if they are not mapped at all.

Tanya Titchkosky - ref to be added

Most of the time we go about our daily life without noticing the tiny repetitive actions through which our encounters with others, things and spaces are enacted. These are the underlying social and spatial conventions – from body language, to tone of voice to ‘reading’ appearances – through which we engage with the world. Mainly these unspoken routines do not seem like work. It is only in situations were the rules are not followed, (for example, where we don’t know what is going on, do not fit, or deliberately refuse to comply with such “concerted accomplishments”) that we are aware of any difficulty or effort. Then, we can feel uncomfortable, exposed, embarrassed or frustrated.

What I have noticed often is that in groups of disabled and non-disabled participants, disabled and deaf people become a ‘problem’ because they are perceived as slowing things down; activities can take longer and have often to be explicitly negotiated, for example through a BSL interpreter, or by making room for someone in the wheelchair. The ‘normal’ rules of encounters are seen to demand additional, problematic work. Non-disabled people like myself get embarrassed or impatient – we show in our body language that the usually unnoticed social conventions have become somehow awkward and ‘troublesome’.

Jos Boys; diary notes towards exploring socio-spatial processes December 2007

Everyday social and spatial practices, then, are not just obvious and transparent – they are continual acts of translation and negotiation about what feels strange of familiar. Unravelling these practices offers not just a critique of existing social and spatial relationships, but also potential ideas for desiging differently.