Spatial Scales in the Making of Future Experiences

Abstract

The fundamental principle in experience design is a fluctuation between familiarity and unfamiliarity, which invites users to make his or her own sense of a design. This is an inclusivist attitude aiming at evoking curiosity about what is actually going on. One of the ways to generate this fluctuation is by manipulating the spatial scales as part of redesigning and restorying buildings. Through examining how novice designers handle spatial scales in their construction of an experience to come, the paper identifies four approaches, arguing that they may serve as scale-oriented design principles for restorying a building as either more familiar or more unfamiliar, more homely (“a place”) or more alien (“space”). Our argument is that these principles can be used systematically to promote this fluctuation as part of the making of future experiences of buildings and to stimulate user inclusion as a collaborate manner of future making.