What are your most dominant senses?

We tend to focus on what a space we’re developing looks like and that can be a big mistake.

For most of us, happily we have multiple sensory systems operating simultaneously and we’re pulling in information on multiple channels, which all gets integrated in our heads as discussed in this article. 

Something that is often not acknowledged as we’re designing is that different people have different dominant senses.  The information that you receive through your dominant sense has the most significant effect on how you think and behave, your emotional experience.

Lots of people are visually dominant.  That means that what they see has the most profound reactions on them.  Design is often discussed in ways that reinforces attention to visual details in a space—think about the websites where you travel to see design options—they are, at least now, entirely visual, maybe a soundtrack of some sort (if your speakers are turned on, etc.), but certainly lacking a scent and touch component.

And some people are hearing, smell, or touch dominant.

Spaces that are designed only for what they look like miss an opportunity to help people who are not visually dominant live their best lives.  For example, flooring shouldn’t be selected based only on what it looks like but also because of the sounds that people’s feet will make as they travel across it and what those feet will feel like on that journey.

When you’re working on a home it’s particularly important to know the dominant sense of the people who will share it.  And you can learn what those are by asking them.

Asking people directly what their dominant sense is will result in blank stares.  Instead ask people about some sort of memory – maybe ask them in a conversational way about a place they used to like to visit when they were a child.  The sort of sensory experience they’ll mention first is their dominant sense.  If you ask about a person’s best experiences during their grammar school summers and the first thing they talk about is the light coming though the branches of a tree they’d sit under and read, they’re visually dominant.  First mention of the smell of the new mown grass in a field? Smell dominant.

When you know the dominant senses of users, you’ll know the sort of sensory experiences that need to command your attention as you design.