About

LIVE DESIGN

Most design is caged by the image. We “look” at design, we don’t “feel,” “experience,” or “sense” it. In fact, most design is non-sense design—cold, technical, formal, and inhuman—engineered to serve business or technical functions rather than to surprise, inspire, and delight. Such examples include products that work in the computer program where they were developed, but fail in real life; environments that look good in renderings, but are soulless to live in; processes that make sense in theory, but not in practice. So much of our daily experience is an assault on our senses. Our senses are forced to serve as the interface for unrelenting friction and conflict instead of the pathway to inspiration, coherence, and beauty. We are designing the invention of a new medium the medium of LIVE - all senses design. Like the early days of photography or television, there is no road map, there are no standard formats, there is no existing methodology for the medium of LIVE. We need to explore, experiment, and invent new formats and combinations of sensory experience, new ways of telling stories. We need to design the LIVE design process to open the medium for full immersive experience.

LIVE experience has the bandwidth of reality it is fully immersive, and the visitor’s body and mind are alive and available for full engagement of all the senses. (Notice we do
not use the term “viewer,” which would only reinforce our existing cultural bias.) However, designers do not have an established creative process for the integration and synthesis of design for all the senses. Our design practice is built for the image. If we are to develop an all-senses design method, we will need to consciously focus on the senses and build a process of synthesis.