The twenty senses

Design starts with sensation. The senses, both visceral and intuitive, play a major role in the process of making a designed environment. Whether the result is order or chaos, the designer must think and feel using every part of the mind and body. Graphic design is not about following templates or formats (though so much of it is), rather it’s more like sculpting a mound of clay from which emerges a familiar figure, common shape, or a never-before-seen-or-experienced hybrid. Design is about making those hybrids accessible.

When asked to interpret “senti-mentally”, the students of School of Visual Arts (MFA) “Designer as Author” program decided to literally tackle human senses by illustrating each one, more or less literally. They soon realized the mundane nature of the exercise and decided to analyze more than the basic five senses (ignore the metaphysical sixth) and find dozens more with universal appeal. There are scores of more senses that have never been codified. So each designer – coming from very distinct artistic backgrounds – decided to make concrete the senses that drive their (and our) behavior, both physical and ethereal.

Each piece must enable the designer – and by extension the viewer – to feel and think about its implications. The images are evocations of the world in which each designer lives, translated into the visual language(s) that best reflect the uniqueness of every sensation and thought.