Cognitive Mental Space as the Product of Active Sensing

We tend to think of buildings as permanent structures to which we assign static properties. A two-dimensional floor plan may imply that space is a void encased in more or less solid or porous boundaries but this approach would be superficial and far removed from the reality of lived experiences. We make sense of our environment through our senses as we move through it and the primacy of sensing and movement means that our experience of space is participatory. Hence the term lived. As we move through a building, our senses actively seek information. This information filters into consciousness and, gradually, we understand space as a series of arrivals into and departures from nested sensory territories, an experience mediated by perceptual thresholds. This knowledge, the product of embodied perceptions, enables us to develop a cognitive mental map of a space, an image of its sensory and dynamic qualities. To illustrate this theory, the study takes a phenomenological journey through the interior of the Royal Festival Hall where promenades, multiple viewpoints and open-plan overlapping spaces provide unique opportunities for subtle but distinct notions of arrivals and departures, feelings of otherness and insideness, to permeate consciousness. James J. Gibson’s (1966) Perceptual Systems and Marina Panos’s (2004) Sensory Experience Chart help structure the documentation while the interpretation draws on map design principles advocated by Stephen and Rachel Kaplan (1981) as well as a system of cognitive mapping developed by Kevin Lynch (1960). The research is interpreted into a cognitive mental map, an image of the experience of active sensing and accordingly, an image relative to the subject of perception. The research is also an early iteration, a prototype, towards the development of a phenomenological practice-based methodology, to document and interpret how embodied experiences determine the way we feel about a space.