Thursday 12 June 2025, 10.30 – 11.15, Department of Humanities, Auditorium P. Prodi
Charles Spence
Professor Charles Spence is a world-famous experimental psychologist with a specialization in neuroscience-inspired multisensory design. He has worked with many of the world’s largest companies across the globe since establishing the Crossmodal Research Laboratory (CRL) at the Department of Experimental Psychology, Oxford University in 1997. Prof. Spence has published over 1,200 academic articles and edited or authored, 16 books including, in 2014, the Prose prize-winning “The perfect meal”, and the international bestseller “Gastrophysics: The new science of eating” (2017; Penguin Viking) – winner of the 2019 Le Grand Prix de la Culture Gastronomique from Académie Internationale de la Gastronomie. His new book Sensehacking was published in 2021. Much of Prof. Spence’s work focuses on the design of enhanced multisensory experiences, and he has recently published on the theme of multisensory architecture, and the impact of the multisensory environment on people’s social, cognitive, and emotional well-being.
Sensehacking wellness
Traditionally, architectural practice has been dominated by the eye/sight. In recent decades, though, architects and designers have increasingly started to consider the other senses, namely sound, touch (including proprioception, kinesthesis, and the vestibular sense), smell, and on rare occasions, even taste in their work. As yet, there has been little recognition of the growing understanding of the multisensory nature of the human mind that has emerged from the field of cognitive neuroscience research. In this talk I will summarize the role of the human senses, both when considered individually and, more importantly, when studied collectively, in architectural design practice. It is only by recognizing the fundamentally multisensory nature of perception that one can really hope to explain a number of surprising crossmodal environmental, or atmospheric, interactions, such as between lighting colour and thermal comfort and between sound and the perceived safety of public space. At the same time, I will argue that the contemporary focus on synaesthetic design needs to be reframed in terms of the crossmodal correspondences and multisensory integration, at least if the most is to be made of multisensory interactions and synergies that have been uncovered in recent years. Looking to the future, the hope is that architectural design practice will increasingly incorporate our growing understanding of the human senses, and how they influence one another. Such a multisensory approach will hopefully lead to the development of living spaces that do a better job of promoting our health, and emotional well-being, rather than hindering it, as has too often been the case previously.