Designerly ways of not knowing

Abstract

This paper sets out to demonstrate that architects’ designerly ways of knowing and thinking are seriously limited. The quality of space, matter and scale is assessed by a combination of multiple senses. Yet, because architects know, think and work primarily in a visual way, buildings are often produced under consideration of mainly one sense: sight. This bias towards vision in the way space is conceived, taught and critiqued, results in a disappearance of sensory qualities. Architects’ designerly ways of knowing thus may as well be viewed as designerly ways of not knowing—of ignoring the non-visual qualities of the built environment. This ignorance becomes especially clear when considering the spatial experience of persons who are blind. Because they are more attentive to sound and touch, they are able to appreciate spatial qualities that architects are not always aware of. From their perspective, architects are actually designing in the dark in the sense that they increasingly emphasize the visual, and are insufficiently familiar with the multi-sensory richness of the built environment.status: publishe