builds on my PhD research, The Personalisation of Experience in the Public Interior and Its Contribution to Emotional Attachment to Place. At its heart, the project explores how the way we design and manage public interiors can help people feel more connected—emotionally and sensorially—to the places they visit.
I asked two key questions:
- How can public spaces be designed and managed to feel welcoming and emotionally resonant, allowing visitors to experience a personal connection?
- And how can these insights shape a design approach that supports emotional and sensory engagement in shared public environments?
This research looks at how people personalise their experience in public interiors—how they make a space feel like it belongs to them, even if only temporarily. The aim was to uncover practical design principles that support emotional attachment to place. The underlying idea is simple but powerful: when public spaces support a range of sensory and emotional experiences, they can offer a greater sense of belonging and wellbeing.
Central to the research is the idea of embodiment—that we experience the world through our senses and through being physically present. It explores personalisation in two ways:
- Personalisation for visitors – how a space is designed and managed to welcome different needs and preferences.
- Personalisation by visitors – how people interact with and adapt the space to suit their own activities and rhythms.
These two modes are seen as interconnected. To explore their relationship, I developed three pairs of principles that link environmental design to how people behave and feel in a space:
- Looseness and appropriation
- Enticement and exploration
- Porosity and privateness
To ground the research, I used London’s Royal Festival Hall as a case study. Through on-site observations and interviews with both visitors and staff, I gathered real stories and experiences that helped reveal how people personalise their use of the space, and how design supports or limits that process. The findings were tested and developed further through design workshops with students. These experiments helped shape a design framework—something practical and adaptable that designers can use to create richer, more emotionally engaging public spaces.
Models from the framework
It is structured around three key design actions—cultivate, modulate, and generate—supported by two models that explore emotional and sensory dimensions. It is designed to be open and adaptable, encouraging interpretation and re-interpretation to suit different contexts, and to remain useful over time.
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.