A House is a House Until You Make it A Home
Understanding information context and meaning through a non-digital medium environment.
Our perception is continuously giving us information every second that shapes our experience. It is creating a narrative we can tell others from our perspective after having experienced a moment of joy. Especially when a memory sequence occurs in a physical location. Andrew Hinton explains this experience with an environment’s context, “Even though we can’t literally reach into a person’s consciousness and meticulously create an experience, we can definitely shape the environment.”¹ With this in mind, our experiences with an environment’s context shift their meaning through our perception to create an impactful impression.
According to Nob Yoshigarhara, “Perception deals with the human senses that generate signals from the environment through sight, hearing, touch, smell and taste.”² Our perceptions shape our reality, and it is a narrative in the making.
These are subdivided into the following processes:
- Visual
- Auditory
- Olfactory
- Haptic
- Gustatory
These perception processes give you the ability to interoperate information from your surroundings. From that previous experience, we then create an expectation on future interactions with designs. Visual and auditory are the most common perceptions we use with digital surfaces. We can assume that when we double click the play button a song will start playing through our smartphone’s speaker. We can also expect that if we follow the signage that says Exit to guide us out of this parking garage with ease. We start to trust that point a will lead us to point b.
This idea overlaps emotional design. Don Norman has a theory that users experience a wide range of emotions when interacting with products based on the visceral (appearance), behavioral (emotional), and reflective (memory) levels of the brain. Throughout his book, Emotional Design, he emphasizes that people form emotional attachments with products.³
In turn, our emotions change the way we think, and serve as constant guides to appropriate behavior, steering us away from the bad, guiding us toward the good.
— Donald A. Norman
This applies to services that people continue to use due to their positive memories when interacting with their sales team, customer services, and their website. This is a common goal company, organizations, and institutions strive to build brand loyalty with their target audience.
Information is presented to us in many ways. There is a building that has been repurposed over and over again. It’s important to note that this location stands true to its purpose throughout its variety of uses for many generations. It was seen as a home to past university presidents decades ago.⁵ Now it is called La Casa Cultural Latina, a cultural house at my alma mater. This house is the form of the medium in houses the information space offer to its students.
But how do perception processes, Norman’s emotional design theory, and a cultural house have in common?
Experiences.
Designed environments should meet people where they are and supplement their narrative with what they take away from the experience.¹ — Andrew Hinton
These ideas work together once you enter the front door on Nevada Street. My perception that brought up positive memories gave me the trust to know that this is a home away from home. Some rooms are painted in orange, hot pink, and neon green that resembled the façade paint of many Latina American houses. Its murals and photographs signify Latinx identity. They have an ofendra, a home alter, in their own library.
You can hear discussions from a student organization in the dining room and programming events held in the living room while students are cooking in the kitchen. It either smelled like fresh baked cookies or fajitas. I even ate a bowl of pozole prepared by a student that felt like I was at my Abuela's apartment. The scent of spices and seasonings and taste, from homemade meals, are less frequent effective approaches made in the design.
Scents are selected to represent emotional triggers.⁴
— Laurence Minsky et al.
Information is all around us and our minds create our reality to tell our narratives. We put context into systems, and we create a narrative into an existing architectural structure. Taking user perception as a critical part of their experience no matter if it’s on an app or landscape architecture. Designers tend to get inspiration from digital interfaces, but there are invaluable learning opportunities one can take away from non-digital spaces. This environment was designed to act and function like an actual home with the family-like structure it provides for students through its consistency of serving them. Latinx students can expect that they can succeed and graduate from a predominately white institution. The group photos from past Latinx Congratulatory graduations are all proof that hangs on its walls.
[1] Hinton, Andrew. Understanding Context: Environment, Language, and Information Architecture. UX Matters, March 2015. uxmatters.com/mt/archives/2015/03/understanding-context-environment-language-and-information-architecture.php. Accessed 18 February 2021.
[2] Yoshigahara, Nob. “Human Perception and Information Processing” (2010).
[3] Norman, Donald A. Emotional Design: Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things. Basic Books Press, 2004.
[4] Minsky, Laurence, et al. Inside the Invisible but Influential World of Scent Branding. Harvard Business Review, April 2018, hbr.org/2018/04/inside-the-invisible-but-influential-world-of-scent-branding. Accessed 18 February 2021.
[5] “President’s House Has Repairs Nearly Finished.” The Daily Illini, 7 Dec. 1920, p. 7. https://idnc.library.illinois.edu/?a=d&d=DIL19201207.2.67&srpos=2&e=-------en-20--1--img-txIN-presidents+house+repairs--------
