In the traditional definitions, sensation, perception, and cognition are viewed as distinct phases in acquiring and processing information: the sensory organs gather stimuli in the sensation phase; in perception—the first phase in the thought process—the brain interprets sensations and organizes the information into patterns; the second phase of the thought process is cognition, “the way the information and knowledge come to be known, through the actions of perception, reasoning, or intuition” (Kopec, 2012, p. 51). Research has shown various perspectives on environmental perception. One of them is that visual perception is dominant when people acquire and process information from their surroundings: people derive as much of their perception of distance and movement from visual cues within a space despite sometimes conflicting non-visual cues (Axelrod, 1973; Harris et al., 2000; Kopec, 2012); consequently, they become less aware of movement within a space or senses responding to other corporeal aspects if there is an abundance of visual information (O’Regan and Noë, 2001; Hurley and Noë, 2003; Sun et al., 2004). More recent studies have stressed that action and perception attribute, in tandem, to making sense of the context and content of space: action and perception are embedded in each other and bound to one’s physical body and body awareness (Garner, 2018). One’s bodily states provide judgments and perceptions, and sensorimotor stimulations influence those judgments made (Brouillet et al., 2010; Ionta et al., 2011). Research on perception and cognition has adopted sensorimotor approaches (Hurley, 1998; Torrents et al., 2013), embracing the phenomenological concept of embodiment (Albertazzi, 2013, p. 5).

In the 18th century, the relationship between action and perception became an interest of philosophers and psychologists, including Berkeley. He initially proposed that vision was to be determined by visual depth cues, the movement of one’s eyes, with the adaptation of lens and when paired with touch would allow for people to move and interact with space and objects and therefore develop a “perception of the sensation” (Berkeley, 2008). In 20th century, action-based perception evolved from initially focusing on the movement of one’s eye to inform their spatial experience and perception and moved to be thought of as enactive: sight depends on one’s “sensory effects of movement” through a two-step process: users must experience the sensory stimuli and then use the sensory stimuli to retrieve sensorimotor contingencies associated with that object based on past experiences (O’Regan and Noë, 2001; Noë, 2010, p. 249). The concepts of embodiment and embodied cognition stress the mind (brain)–body connection in perception and cognition and gives attention to the impact of the interaction between the sensorimotor aspects of body and physical environments (Brouillet et al., 2010). Theories such as the motor component theory (Shebilske, 1984, 1987; Ebenholtz, 2002; Helmholtz, 2005) and the efferent readiness theories, modest readiness theory, and bold readiness theory (Coren, 1986) emerged stating that one’s ability to process stimulus information is optimized by the input of additional information to aid the visual information, specifically looking at proprioceptive feedback and actions such as turning around or turning upside down affect one’s understanding of the surrounding environment and objects within it. The embodied aspects of sensorimotor activities in human learning, knowing, and reasoning have been studied in education, including child learning and STEM education (Abrahamson and Bakker, 2016; Tversky, 2019). Linguistics brings to light the relationship between action and perception and linguistic responses that abstract concepts are grounded metaphorically in embodied and situated knowledge (Brouillet et al., 2010, p. 312). Studies in robotics and interactive product design also focus on somatosensory phenomena (Van Rompay and Ludden, 2015; Shima and Sato, 2017), as the action and perception of objects or space take a significant role in one’s experience (Noë and Noë, 2004; Brouillet et al., 2010).

Perception and cognition can be influenced by various factors such as type and intensity of stimuli, personal past experiences, current emotional state, or individuals’ physiological sensitivity. One’s perception of its environment, including objects, is in direct relation with its kinesthetic dimensions; the perception and the kinesthetic dimensions together create the meaning for the said environment or objects for the individual (Husserl, 1970; Gallagher and Zahavi, 2012). British neurologist Henry Charlton Bastian is credited with creating the term, kinesthesia. Kinesthesia is defined in various studies concerning bodily experiences: humans’ ability to sense one’s muscular movement from the lived body, the self-conscious subject perceiving its own body as the object experiencing and relating it to the environment or objects outside of the lived body encountered; the movements of the body and the kinetic sensations allow one to perceive and understand the space and objects within the environment it is inhabiting (Garner, 2018); a direct sensitivity to movement through internally mediated neuro-muscular systems (Sheets-Johnstone, 2019, p. 145). Humans possess a kinesthetic sense, affording them the ability to gain awareness of their body’s location and position in relation to their surroundings. Kinesthesia belongs to the lived body, as it represents the dynamism of embodied self-experience inside of the kinetic body (Garner, 2018, p. 146). The kinesthetic sense is beyond what they see, hear, and touch; it is a form of physical holistic (i.e., neurological transmission, motion, vision, and touch/tactile), aiding in an intuitive and instinctual recognition of the characteristic of a physical location. Kinesthetic intelligence is created through the lived body sensing movement expressed and experienced. Kinesthetic intelligence and awareness enable humans to better perceive the world and cope with it; by moving in the context, one can gain access to the meaning it has to the lived body (Melcón et al., 2017; Meglin et al., 2018; Korik et al., 2019). While Sheets-Johnstone (2019) defines kinesthesia as “the evolutionary descendant of proprioception” and Garner (2018) argues that, although similar in meaning, the term proprioception is often misused when conceptually describing kinesthesia: although kinesthesia may be explained with an emphasis on its proprioceptive aspects, it is not a favored term among the literature and certain disciplines concerning movement in spatial embodiment and perception.

Kinesthetic experience is contextual and relational. In kinesthetic experience (Figure 1), the spatiotemporality of the lived body actualizes the articulation of sensory phenomena (Merleau-Ponty, 2014). For example, a tactile phenomenon disappears if any of the two, spatiality or temporality, is removed: “smoothness [or roughness] is the manner in which a surface makes use of the time of our tactile exploration or modulates the movement of our hand” (p. 329). As such, body movement involves tactile qualities that help individuals comprehend their surroundings. Insight into the senses in aesthetic experience of Franzini (2011) helps explain the invisible dimension of spatial experience:

Body movement (not a mere shift of locations or positions) in space is the foundation of one’s senses, and the kinematics of its movement is modified upon the relational context of the experience. The kinesthetic sense gives humans the ability to identify specific environmental characteristics and qualities and thus enhances the spatial experience (e.g., Cutts et al., 2019; Giroux et al., 2019). It is a high level of perception that involves the complex constitution of body schema, the representation of the body’s spatial properties, including exteroception, interoception, and proprioception (Valenzuela-Moguillansky et al., 2017).

In the subjective human–environment dialogue, somatosensory factors such as orientation, position, temperature, texture, and pressure also play a significant role, impacting the felt body, conscious movement, bodily boundaries, and the peripersonal space (Pasqualini et al., 2013). The pavilion Incidental Space, designed by Christian Kerez, provides a distinctive kinesthetic experience that involves spatial awareness, positioning of one’s body, and/or perception of its movement acquired through physical sensations (Figure 2). The kinematics of individuals’ body movements responds to the spatial context: for example, as one attempts to reach higher than its height, passes through a narrow space, or passes by another person in close proximity. Such movements are also owing to the tactile and visual texture of the material as well as the sound and echo enhanced by the cave-like form of the inner space. These auditory, tactile, and visual factors together form the total experience of the space, contributing to the spatial identity and meaning visitors establish.

Spatiotemporality and kinesthetic perception are integral to each other. While Ando’s definition of space as “a place for many senses: sight, sound, touch, and the unaccountable things that happen in-between” points to the synesthetic dimension of sensory experience (Auping and Ando, 2002, p. 31), his work, including the Garden of Fine Arts (Figure 3) in Kyoto, Japan, often engages visitors in a kinesthetic journey throughout their experience in the settings. The spatial experience is enriched with the sensorial communication between the body and the environment: as one navigates the outdoor gallery, the sequence and gradual changes of the sound and the moist air from the cascades and the water features built around the elongated ramps comes into the total experience; the natural light and shadows change every moment while the navigating body communicates with the space in its motion and movement. No single moment is like another in the lived experience, and no single sense responds to the environment by itself; the spatiotemporality of the phenomena is the key to the total experience.

Synesthesia is a physio-psychological and cross-modal sensory phenomenon that is autonomous, involuntary, and irrepressible; it occurs when a stimulus in one sense modality immediately evokes sensations in one or more different sense modalities (Hubbard and Ramachandran, 2005; Van Campen, 2008; Merter, 2017). Synesthetes may see sounds, smell words, touch tastes, or taste letters, for example (van Leeuwen et al., 2016). When grapheme–color synesthetes see a number or a letter, they see a color at the same time (Figure 4), which is different from just imagining the color or making an association based upon memory (Ramachandran and Hubbard, 2003).

Due to the lack of information in the past, synesthesia was sometimes misunderstood as a neurological disorder, a brain impairment, or even a mental illness. However, there has been general appreciation for the synesthetic representation of artistic ideas found in many artists’ works, including that of Vincent van Gogh, Wassily Kandinsky, and Piet Mondrian (Ione and Tyler, 2003; Schneck et al., 2006; Van Campen, 2011; Melcher and Zampini, 2011). Kandinsky (1982) described his experience of listening to Wagner: “I saw all my colors in my mind; they stood out before my eyes. Wild, almost crazy lines were sketched in front of me” (p. 364). He also gave many of his painting’s musical titles, for example, Compositions VII, as if they were visible music. Nabokov (1989), in his Speak, Memory, described his grapheme–color synesthesia (e.g., Figure 4): “the long a of English alphabet […] has for me the tint of weathered wood, but a French a evokes polished ebony” (chapter 2, para. 2). The literature has also shown synesthetic metaphors such as “architecture as frozen music” by Goethe and “poetry of light” by Louis Kahn. The Renaissance architect Alberti described his synesthetic interpretation of architecture: “music and geometry are fundamentally one and the same; […] music is geometry translated into sound. […] In music, the very same harmonies are audible which inform the geometry of the building” (in Wittkower, 1971, p. 9). Synesthetic metaphors have also appeared in design research on human experience even though the studies do not explicitly address synesthesia, the sensory phenomenon. For example, whether intended or inadvertent, the semantic differential of connotative terms used in qualitative studies in the field often has synesthetic implications: tactile terms (e.g., hot–cold, rough–soft, and heavy–light) are used as semantic differential scale anchors to measure participants’ responses to visual stimuli; ambivalent terms (e.g., light, soft, high, dull, and sharp) are used for representing various sensory ideas such as visual, tactile, and aural (Madden et al., 2000; Yoon, 2008; Kwon and Kim, 2021).

The phenomenological perspective on subjective sensory experiences is explained often with reference to quale (plural qualia): a consciousness like an introspectively accessible “region” where variable modalities of sensing take place and, together, come into perception (Van Campen, 2008). However, Merleau-Ponty (2014) pointed out the traditional concept of quale (plural “qualia”) does not properly explain certain sensory phenomena such as synesthesia:

Merleau-Ponty’s stance on synesthetic perception is that human perception unites all sensory experiences into a single lifeworld, and thus the “total experience” of things is through our embodied senses:

Interpretation of Chumley (2017) of quale may support Merleau-Ponty’s stance by referring to sensing of intangible existence such as “energy” normally perceived by its relation to actualized objects across multiple sensory modalities—audible, smellable, tangible, tasteable, and visible; thus, quale needs to be viewed as what makes sense of our understanding of language or signs, which is constantly reconstructed and evolving, not as a stable system. In the same vein, Franzini (2011) suggests that “the specificity of the [senses] involved in the act of perception is always within a communicative context in which synesthetic perception is the rule” (p. 125). As the cross-modality of synesthesia has increasingly been discovered, studies have re-conceptualized and redefined synesthesia and proposed alternatives severing the exclusively sensory interpretation of synesthesia: synesthesia is a semantically induced phenomenon that involves high-level cognitive representation (Ward et al., 2007; Mroczko-Wąsowicz and Nikolić, 2014). Such propositions may encourage reconsideration of the traditional distinction between perception and cognition assumed for a long time in philosophy, psychology, and cognitive science (Mroczko-Wąsowicz and Nikolić, 2014).

Synesthesia is certainly not a skill or knowledge (to be figured out, so to speak) nor what everybody experiences. There have been attempts to conceptualize synesthesia in an easier way by determining the construct of the unique phenomenon: for example, synesthesia consists of a perceptive phenomenon, metaphor, and representation; features such as color or sound (qualitative) relate to subjective values; features such as image size or sound intensity (quantitative) relate to intersubjective values (Riccò et al., 2003). Such categorization may need careful interpretation, as some readers might misunderstand it as if synesthesia is some type of sensory association or imagination. From a designer’s perspective, the interpretations of synesthesia in the literature—for example, a secret sense, the sixth sense (Sherrington, 1906), a hidden sense, or “everyday fantasia” (Van Campen, 2008)—have an important implication: understanding the cross-modality of the senses may help designers establish a new mode of creative thinking and diverse perspectives on sensory phenomena and spatial experiences.

Visualizing abstract ideas and transferring them into spatial configuration is a conceptually translational process. The Synesthetic Translation Model (Figure 5) involves a participant’s (other) narrative of an auditory (e.g., musical) experience, designers’ (self) synesthetic interpretation of the non-visual and intangible sensory properties and qualities the participant describes, and the designers’ self-experience and reflection of the interactive context and event with the individual. The self and other can be single persons or groups depending on the project. This model shares some aspects of narrative design methods. While narrative methods have often been used to promote designers’ imagination in design thinking, the research raised a concern that using narrative methods may interfere with the visual representation of their imaginations and ideas (Danko et al., 2006). It is important to note that synesthetic phenomena are fundamentally lived, so they differ from imaginations or memory-based sensory associations. The design approach must concern the lived nature of occupant experiences. The synesthetic translation model emphasizes designers’ empathetic approach as reflection—not imagination—of participants’ lived experience.

An example of synesthetic translation design thinking uses music as a non-visual inspiration (sensory stimuli) and involves a participant representing the body (other) as a subject of sensory experience as well as an object the designers perceive in the interactive event and the spatiotemporal context. This approach focuses on the audiovisual and temporal realms of the participant’s musical experience and designers’ synesthetic interpretation of the participant’s narrative in the lived context and “translation” of the verbal description into a spatial setting. The synesthetic translation approach consists of five phases: (1) music plays as a sensory stimulus, (2) music replays during the participant’s concurrent think-aloud (narrative), (3) designers’ interpretation of the participant narrative, (4) visualization of the essences of participant experience, and (5) spatial configuration and prototyping. The participant’s concurrent narrative in this process can provide “vivid” descriptions of the lived experience, possibly implying the concept of multisensory and cross-sensory phenomena. Although music is typically described as an auditory phenomenon, it is, in fact, multimodal. For example, music engages the body with its vibrations, volumes, and cadences that rise and fall, increase and decrease, and quicken and slow (Garner, 2018, p. 172). The properties of sound (music), for example, intensity, volume, pitch, and rhythm, are closely linked to the concepts of spatial attributes such as compression/expansion, volume, scale, and pattern. Indeed, they are described in similar words, for example, heavy–light, strong–soft, rough–smooth, and dark–bright. Musical experience needs to be explained in spatial terms because music is the sounds ordered in time, which moves through the imaginary space of music (Scruton, 2004). The concept of movement is metaphorically applied to creating the sequence of space, in which designers’ interpretation of sensory experience and “synesthetic intelligence” play the key role. Due to the attention to the temporality of musical experience that is fundamentally sequential, the designs produced applying the synesthetic translation model tend to show linear (or spiral) progress or “journey” in the spatial configurations (Kwon, 2017, p. 390). Thus, this model may be adopted in design processes where storytelling is the key.

Humans recognize and respond to their surroundings and other entities in the context, including others’ bodies and their kinematic parameters (Torrents et al., 2013; Garner, 2018). Individuals use their knowledge of their bodies and current and previous situations to understand abstract concepts (Lakoff and Johnson, 1999). The Kinesthetic Resonance Model (Figure 6) integrates the kinematic parameters of others (e.g., inspirational art performers, prospective occupants/users, and passers-by) observed by an audience (i.e., designers) into design thinking. Kinesthetic resonance refers to “the perceiving subject’s vicarious engagement with the movements of others”; the responses are situational, multi-directional, and variable (Garner, 2018, p. 145). In the perception of another’s intentional action, what we know about movement has an impact on the sense of engagement we experience and the vicarious engagement we feel in our muscles (Garner, 2018, p. 158). Empirical studies in performing arts have shown the relationship between kinesthetic and expressive qualities that reveal the emotion represented in the work of arts (Montero, 2012; Garner, 2018). Certain kinematic parameters in dance influence a non-expert audience’s aesthetic perception of the artistic expressions of movement (Torrents et al., 2013, p. 457). In one’s aesthetic experience in a constructed environment, empathy plays a role in its resonance with the space and as activation of embodied mechanisms (Freedberg and Gallese, 2007; Jelić et al., 2016).

Attfield (2000) found dance and music as useful tools for explaining a sense of movement in relation to space and time: innately, dance, music, and space are present in time, which is a channel through which human existence represents a sense of temporality and continuity. Seamon (1980) has used the metaphor of dance and “time–space routines” to characterize the sequences of actions that make up everyday practices (Cresswell, 2004). Thus, dance can be used as an inspirational tool in design exploration based on designers’ observation of movements (e.g., amplitude, turning velocity, balance duration, jump height, and range of motion) and their experience of the event in relation to the spatial setting and other circumstances. Dancers’ movements not only show the postures and positions of their bodies but also convey the dynamics that affect the audience’s kinesthetic resonance: kinetic energy and human–human and human–environment interactions—for example, dancer–dancer, dancers–audience, dancers–space, dancers–music, and audience–music—in the space and time.

The kinesthetic resonance approach illustrated in Figure 6 is inspired by (not direct reflection of) the phenomenological concept of John Cage’s composition 4′ 33″ that uses an “expressive silence” as a means of engaging the audience in the abstract dialogue during the piano performance: while a pianist is sitting at the piano for 4 min and 33 s, no piano music is played. Some people might view the “performance” as plain silence beside the random sounds the audience makes (e.g., rustling and creaking noises from people shifting in their seats and coughing) because the performance does not convey a particular musical intention. Yet, the pianist still “performs,” creating the “expressive silence” that embraces the unpredictable and lived event (Cage and Gann, 2011). The audience is contributing to the performance by being part of the lived context, observing the performers (and perhaps the others in the audience), and reacting to the circumstance in which the audience’s kinesthetic resonance takes place.

When the kinesthetic resonance approach is adopted in exploratory design projects engaging professional dancers and music, it often results in outcomes that the envelope—rather than the space inside—of the designed space tends to be representational of the concept and resemble the visual of the dancers’ body postures in a captured moment or rotational movement. It may be because the approach heavily relies on the designers’ observation. This model may better suit the conceptual visualization of an observed scene or designing an object or relatively small structure (e.g., fixture, pop-up kiosk, and three-dimensional artwork) that the view from the outside is one of the primary interests in the design process.

Spatial perception is reciprocal with self-consciousness: the sense of agency, sense of body ownership, and self-location (Longo et al., 2008; Pasqualini et al., 2013; Galvan Debarba et al., 2017). In other words, spatial perception occurs through the embodiment of the material properties of the environment (Gibson, 1979; Blanke and Metzinger, 2009); the sense of embodiment emerges from the feeling of motor control over one’s own body perceived in its location. The content of spatial experience is enacted by action engaging the body and its sensory mechanism (Noë and Noë, 2004), to which kinesthetic perception is key.

Corporeal concepts originate in the context of moving (action) and thinking in movement (Sheets-Johnstone, 2019). Embodied design approach foregrounding the kinesthetic sense is an important design strategy in which how moving and knowing bodies can impact the way designers think and work (Wilde et al., 2011; Loke and Robertson, 2013; Kwon, 2018, 2020). The Kinesthetic Engagement Model (Figure 7) represents action-based design thinking and the embodied processes through human–human and human–space interactions. The interactions are enacted by the actors—the self (designers) and others—engaged in bodily movements and conceptualizing the movements in relation to the space and time in which the movements take place.

Movement-based approaches can foster the connection with emotion and bodily sensations in sensorimotor processing, establishing coherent body awareness and gaining familiarity with bodily sensations as part of embodied subjectivity (Valenzuela-Moguillansky et al., 2017). The project illustrated in Figures 8, 9 used the kinesthetic engagement model focused on occupant bodily engagement and experience in a setting. The design process included experiments (Figure 8) focused on how physical bodies—the self’s and other’s—could create the sense of space, territory, or boundary, responding to the surrounding. For the project, interior design students played dual roles, occupants (users) and designers, to learn occupant experience from the first-person point of view and incorporate it in their designs. Students “choreographed” the dialogue between their own bodies and space, conceptualizing the gestures, movements, positions, and postures: for example, balance, stability, tension, fluidity, and containment often discussed in design disciplines. This experiment was followed by ideation conveying the concepts of the body and movement in a confined space (Figure 8). Finally, students designed and built full-scale structures of experiential space (Figure 9), portraying their sensorimotor and somatosensory experiences through their bodily exploration.

One’s kinesthetic intelligence is affected by the felt scale of its own body and relationship with the spatial setting. Prototyping (except for study mock-up) in the kinesthetic engagement approach was conducted on a 1:1 scale. The outcomes through the three approaches—synesthetic translation, kinesthetic resonance, and kinesthetic engagement—with designers’ bodily engagement to varying degrees, showed interesting patterns in design outcomes (Table 1): (1) designs using the synesthetic translation model presented sequential order of space; (2) many outcomes through the kinesthetic resonance approach appeared in spiral configuration and the exterior form reflected body posture captured in a specific moment of the total movement; (3) designs through the kinesthetic engagement processes showed their emphases on the interior configuration and space, the negative form of which resembled and evoked various body movements.