Inhabiting the Public Interior. An Exploration into the Critical Role of Personalisation in Imparting Quality to Public Life

The ability to connect emotionally to our environment is fundamental to human experience. Architects, designers, urbanists and environmental psychologists have explored spaces from the perspective of experience, to understand why certain places make people feel alive and human, and how to design environments that resonate with human sensibilities. A significant body of research focuses on urban public spaces and shows that the quality of the public realm can impact on place experience, social cohesion and the quality of life in cities. Cities need public spaces that people can connect to emotionally to build liveable communities. As a shared destination, the public interior is fundamental to our experience of the city. Yet, qualitative research on public interiors is fragmented, with few insights on how they can contribute to the quality of human experience. In this context, this paper asks how the public interior can colour public life by providing opportunities for people to personalise spatio-sensory experiences, nurturing emotional relations between people and their environment. The concept of personalisation is characterised by the way in which people can shape their experience of the public interior around their needs and desires to enable them to define personal and group territories. Thus, the research explores the critical role of personalisation in imparting qualities to public life by investigating how the design and management of the public interior can contribute to people’s ability to personalise their experience of the interior. It focuses on the public interior of the Royal Festival Hall, a cultural institution in London UK, because its ownership, design and managerial culture present distinctive characteristics that can nurture opportunities for personalisation and enable individuals to comfortably inhabit the public interior.