Thesis Project

I would like to thank Tom Potter for giving me the idea of setting up a Thesis project blog. After reading his blog (http://aireabbey.blogspot.com) i decided it would help me progress my project and aid me in organising myself a little better. 

Ok, so this isn't really supposed to be read by anyone other than myself and possibly my tutor Mark if I actually manage to keep this up for more than this initial post.

In the first few months of my project I have done alot of research and gathering of information (both relevant and... well not-so-relevant) but I won't bore you with that right now. To keep things nice and brief here is my Thesis idea in 6 bite-size chunks:

Right, so i'm designing a leisure centre. Well not exactly. The idea is to get away from the general vision (excuse the pun) of a leisure facility and return to first principles. Architecture is never completely successful for every single person in the world, there are always conflicting design issues for various groups (even if it is a minority group) but I want to try and establish a set of principles for visually impaired people and the blind that considers from scratch how they can interact with the immediate environment in a much more sensual way.

I want to start by analysing the possible users of the building in turn and establish there individual needs and how exactly they would want to connect with the architecture. 

By looking at the senses available to people and the possible architectural experiences that can link to them I will begin to get an idea of the organisation and layout of spaces and what type of building this would be.

I want to build up layers of sensual stimuli that can be triggered throughout the spaces but I need to work out what is too much stimulation. I have heard that the olfactory sense (smells for those of us that prefer simple words) can handle up to 5 different smells before it begins to become over stimulated and people get headaches and things. This as based upon smelling fragrances and perfumes so it may be slightly different for more natural smells.

I have been giving people a smell test with 23 different smells ranging from Freshly Cut Grass to Lemon Meringue Pie. The primary purpose of the test was to see if people could identify different smells whilst blindfolded but I was also looking to see at what point people began to need to take a break and/or got headaches etc. It seemed that under the test conditions people could handle alot of different stimulations in a short space of time. It wasnt until around the 12th or 13th smell that people began to really notice the overstimulation.

I shall continue these tests with both sighted and unsighted people to see what else i can gather from them.