DESIGNING FOR MULTIPLE SENSES WHILE USING VISUAL REPRESENTATION TECHNIQUES? CROSSMODAL CORRESPONDENCES AS A COUNTERFORCE TO THE DOMINANCE OF THE VISUAL SENSE

Abstract

In design practice designers often use visual representation techniques to communicate to their clients. The use of visual representation techniques has been critiqued to add to a dominance of the visual sense, which is seen as a potential weakness since the other senses might by subordinated. In this paper the authors therefore introduce the concept of crossmodal correspondences. Crossmodal correspondences refer to the tendency for a feature or attribute in one sensory modality to be matched or associated with a feature or attribute in another sensory modality. In the authors’ viewpoint, designers have been using this practice intuitively, for example the use of colours (i.e., visual sense) which are labelled as warm or cold (i.e., tactile sense). In this paper the notion of crossmodal correspondences is labelled and positioned as a research field that could be of added value for designers.