references my Doctoral thesis titled ‘The personalisation of experience in the public interior and its contribution to emotional attachment to place: towards a sensory-emotional framework for experiential design.’ In this research, I asked the following questions:
- How can the design and management of an inviting and sensorially engaging public interior contribute to visitors’ emotional attachment to place through modes of personalisation?
- How can this research contribute to the development of a design framework for the personalisation of experience in public interiors to cultivate sensory and emotional connections?
The thesis investigates the personalisation of experience in the public interior to uncover principles that can contribute to a design understanding of the visitor emotional attachment to place. It posits that catering for a diversity of sensory and emotional needs can foster a greater sense of belonging and wellbeing in the public realm. Insights are brought together into a framework for designers interested in enhancing the relationship between people and environment.
The research is rooted in the paradigm of embodiment, placing the sensing body as the primary means of perception, and explores the visitor situated experience of personalisation. This is analysed in two dimensions: personalisation for visitors, the way the interior is designed and managed, and personalisation by visitors, the way they engage with the environment to enact their preferred activities. Personalisation for and personalisation by are treated as complementary and interdependent. Their relationship is examined through three pairs of associated terms connecting environmental qualities with human behaviour and feelings: looseness and appropriation; enticement and exploration; and porosity and privateness.
The Royal Festival Hall, London, is used as a case study in exploring the relation between the personalisation of experience, sensory phenomena and the way visitors perceived its interior environment emotionally. The methodology is grounded in a phenomenologically inspired conception of experience that foregrounds the primacy of enacted situations in the collective environment of the public interior. In addition to an observational study, interviews with staff and visitors provide first-person perspectives on personalisation for visitors and personalisation by visitors. The usability, transferability and value of insights is then tested through design experiments with students before being articulated as a framework for design to contribute to the creation of multisensory public environments that can cultivate positive emotional connections.
The design of the framework draws on data visualisation methods to bring the complexity of this research into a structured, coherent and usable format. The framework is composed of five sections, elements are organised into categories and colours are used to group them. The first section introduces the experiential process developed through this research: the personalisation of experience can generate rewarding sensory phenomena conducive to visitors’ ability to develop positive emotional connections with the public environment. In time, this can also contribute to emotional attachment to place.
Models from the framework
PhD thesis
Mace, Valérie (2024) The personalisation of the visitor experience in the public interior and its contribution to emotional attachment to place: Towards a sensory-emotional framework for experiential design - University of the Arts London.
Related articles
Mace, Valérie (2025) Towards a sensory-emotional framework for design and management practices to cultivate a greater sense of connectedness in public environments. In: Uncommon Senses V, 7-10 May 2025, Centre for Sensory Studies, Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada.
Mace, Valérie (2023) A phenomenological ecology of personalisation as a dimension of intimacy in the public interior. Sociétés: Revue des Sciences Humaines et Sociales.
Mace, Valérie (2022) Sensory Ecology. Designing synergies between micro and macro-scales of experience in public environments. Back to Human Scale International Meeting. Re-thinking Living Spaces for Tomorrow, Universidade Lusófona, Lisbon, Portugal.
Mace, Valérie (2020) Inhabiting the Public Interior. An Exploration into the Critical Role of Personalisation in Imparting Quality to Public Life. AMPS conference Proceedings Series 18.2. Experiential Design – Rethinking relations between people, objects and environments, Florida State University, USA.