In simplest terms, phenomenology is the description and interpretation of human experience (Finlay 2009; Seamon 2000; van Manen 1990). Its central aim is “always to question the way we experience the world, to want to know the world in which we live as human beings” (van Manen 1990). Phenomenology has potential value for interior design research because it provides one conceptual and methodological means for examining the spatial, environmental, and architectural dimensions of human life. For example, why are places important to people and how does interior design contribute to architectural place-making? What is the experience of at-homeness and dwelling and how do designable qualities play a role in making home life satisfying or awkward? How do aspects of interior space – for instance, corridor layout, spatial dimensions, color, sound, or lived aspects of furnishings – support or stymie particular architectural and place experiences? How do personal, social, and cultural qualities contribute to the lived meanings of interior spaces and places?
In this essay, I review the origins and nature of phenomenology and delineate some of its key philosophical assumptions. I then indicate the relevance of phenomenological research for interior design by focusing on the three themes of “place,” “environmental embodiment,” and “architectural sustenance.” I emphasize that a major value of phenomenological research for interior design is revealing aspects of environmental and place experience that are typically unnoticed so that they might be pondered and made better use of in the design process.
The principal founder of phenomenology was Edmund Husserl (1859–1938), a German philosopher and mathematician who focused his professional life largely on questions of epistemology. In other words, what is the nature of knowledge and how can one be certain that what he or she knows is trustworthy and real? Husserl worked to establish a discipline and method that would describe how the world is constituted and encountered through conscious acts. Husserl argued that, behind the ever-shifting dynamic of everyday human experience and awareness, there are certain unchanging structures of intellectual consciousness that he claimed a phenomenological method could clarify by setting aside all taken-for-granted notions and preconceptions, whether arising from conventional philosophy, science, or common sense. Husserl viewed consciousness as a pure “region” coming before and grounding the lived realm of human experience; his approach, therefore, came to be known as “transcendental” or “constitutive” phenomenology.
Other phenomenological philosophers argued, however, that Husserl's transcendental structures of consciousness were incomplete conceptually and provided no interpretive place for the wide range of ways in which human beings actually live in, experience, and understand the world in which they find themselves. In his 1927 Being and Time, German philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) suggested that consciousness is not separate from but is interwoven experientially with the world in which human beings find themselves – an existential situation that he termed “being-in-the-world” (Heidegger [1927] 1962).In his 1945 Phenomenology of Perception, French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961) argued that an integral part of this intimate entwining between people and their worlds is what he called “body-subject”; i.e., the pre-reflective but learned intentionality of the body expressed through action and typically enmeshed in and in sync with the world in which the action unfolds (Merleau-Ponty [1945] 1962; see also Finlay 2006).
This so-called “existential turn” by Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty marked a significant conceptual shift from Husserl's realm of pure intellectual consciousness to the realm of lived situations, experiences, and meanings (Moran 2000). Because Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty emphasized the nature and qualities of human existence in its everyday typicality, their approach came to be known as “existential phenomenology.” Generally, this style of phenomenology is more useful for interior design researchers, since a central interest is the human experience of real-world environments, buildings, and interior spaces and their contents (Graumann 2002; Seamon 2000).
From the vantage point of this existential perspective, phenomenology can be defined as the exploration, description, and interpretation of phenomena, which refers to any experiences, situations, or things that human experiencers can experience. Any event, process, living thing, or object that a person can see, hear, touch, taste, smell, sense, know, feel, intuit, think about, undergo, or encounter is a potential focus for phenomenological study. There can be a phenomenology of light, of color, of fabrics, of architecture, of sitting and sitting devices, of home, of journey, of learning, of privacy, of community, of sexuality, of less-abledness, and so forth (Seamon 2000; van Manen 2002). The aim is to describe the phenomenon in its own terms as it is encountered and known through real-world experiences. The aim, however, is not idiosyncratic explication of unique experiences, but the identification and interpretation of underlying, lived patterns and relationships shared by many lived instances of the phenomenon (Finlay 2009).
A first important assumption of phenomenological research is that, to better know ourselves as human beings, we must anchor that knowledge in a conception and terminology that arise from and return to human experience and meaning (van Manen 1990). There is no world “behind” or “beneath” the world of lived experience, and the phenomenologist must be skeptical of any conceptual, ideological, or methodological system that transcribes human life and meaning into some second-hand, reason-based account – for example, scientific studies that reduce the lived complexity of human experience to tangible, measurable units and relationships that are then quantitatively correlated and explained (Moran 2000). Rather, the phenomenological aim is to generate a thorough interpretive description of some aspect of human experience, while never forgetting that lived experience is always more complex and robust than any second-hand description can ever reveal. In short, phenomenological explication is always under way in the sense that human experience is inexhaustible in its lived richness, and any vicarious portrait, phenomenological or otherwise, can never exactly or completely grasp or reproduce the actual experience.
A second important phenomenological assumption is that human experience, action, and awareness are always intentional – in other words, they are always and necessarily directed toward and finding their significance in a world of continually shifting experience, encounter, and meaning (Moran 2000). Human beings are not only aware, but always aware of something, whether a thing, an idea, a feeling, an imagination, a person, an event, or something else. All thinking is thinking about something, just as grasping is grasping something, hearing is hearing something, or imagining is imagining something. All human actions and encounters are directed toward something, which in turn contributes to the particular manner of the directedness.
Intentionality is central to a phenomenological conception of human experience because it means that people are inescapably bonded to and enmeshed in their world, which always appears as ready-made and already there – Heidegger's being-in-the-world. The everyday lived structure through which being-in-the-world expresses itself is termed the “lifeworld” – the day-to-day world of taken-for-grantedness to which, typically, people give no attention because they are caught up in their ordinary, daily pursuits (Moran 2000). In turn, the unquestioned acceptance of the lifeworld is called the “natural attitude” (Moran 2000), and one phenomenological aim for interior design research is to identify and depict the lived dimensions and dynamics of the lifeworld and the natural attitude, which always include environmental, architectural, and spatial aspects.
To illustrate more specifically how phenomenology can have value for interior design research, I highlight three relevant topics that have received phenomenological attention: “place,” “environmental embodiment,” and “architectural sustenance.” Research on place, including phenomenological work, has proliferated in the last two decades (Janz 2004; Patterson and Williams 2005), partly because of its gathering, synthesizing quality to hold people and their worlds intimately together (Casey [1993] 2009; Malpas 1999). One of the most revealing starting points for understanding a phenomenological approach to place is to identify a favorite place in one's own experience and to describe it as fully as possible.
For example, Sidebar 24.1 reproduces a place description written by a second-year undergraduate design student in a course I teach at Kansas State University entitled “The Designed Environment and Society.” From a phenomenological perspective, this account of a popular St. Louis music club named “Off Broadway” can be understood as one experiential description to be probed for generalizable themes and qualities that mark the underlying, lived structure of the “phenomenon of place.” Notice, for example, that the account indicates an intimate relationship between physical and experienced qualities: the spatial density of the club contributes to a sense of camaraderie and vibrancy, just as the lighting, difference in floor levels, closeness of functions, and unique sensuous and performative qualities evoke a singular ambience that “lets you know this place is special.” A next step would be to study other favorite-place accounts and locate common themes and patterns that point toward the lived crux of place experience (Manzo 2005).
To provide readers with one picture of what a more comprehensive phenomenology of place might be, I highlight phenomenological geographer Edward Relph's Place and Placelessness, still perhaps the most accessible phenomenology of place so far written (Relph [1976] 2009). Relph defined place phenomenologically as a fusion of natural and human-made order and a significant center of a person or group's life. He argued that the lived crux of place is the experience of “insideness” – in other words, the more deeply a person or group feels themselves inside an environment, the more so does that environment become, existentially, a place. The deepest experience of place attachment and identity is what Relph termed “existential insideness” – a situation where the person or group feels so much at home and at ease in place that they have no self-conscious recognition of its importance in their lives, unless it changes in some way, for example one's home and neighborhood is destroyed by natural disaster. Relph identified several other modes of place insideness and its lived opposite, “outsideness” – a situation where the person or group feels separate or alienated from place in some way (see Sidebar 24.2).
Phenomenologically, Relph's conceptual structure of place is useful because the various modes of insideness and outsideness provide a flexible, conceptual means for distinguishing the lived experience of place from its material, environmental qualities (Seamon 2008). These modes provide a way to keep sight of the existential facts that: (1) the same physical place can involve a wide range of differing experiences for different individuals and groups involved with that place; and (2) the same physical place can, over time, involve vastly different place experiences for the same individual or group – for example, a well-loved home that suddenly feels alienating because one's significant other has just died.
Today, phenomenological research on place is wide-ranging (Janz 2004).1 On one hand, phenomenological philosophers (Casey [1993] 2009; Janz 2009; Malpas 1999; Mugerauer 1994; Stefanovic 2000) have written book-length works demonstrating the foundational significance of place and emplacement for understanding human being-in-the-world. On the other hand, a related body of research focuses on phenomenologies of particular places and their associated place experiences (Janz 2009; Seamon 2000). In regard to phenomenological work on place directly relevant to interior design, one can mention studies of workplaces (Horan 2000), hospitals and healing facilities (Hammer 1999; Moore 2009; Sternberg 2009), learning environments (Foran and Olson 2008; Rothbauer 2009), commercial establishments (Oldenburg 2001; Rosenbaum 2007), performance spaces (Blesser and Salter 2007; Filmer 2006), sacred spaces (Barrie 2010), and homes, domestic interiors, and domestic furnishings (Cloutier-Fisher and Harvey 2009; Cooper Marcus 1995; Percival 2002; Rechavi 2009; Shenk, Kuwahara, and Zablotsky 2004).
For example, Moore examined how hospice day-care patients experienced the hospice as a place in the context of their illness, while Oldenburg explored the community-making value of “third places” – i.e., public establishments like taverns and cafés where people informally gather and socialize (Moore 2009; Oldenburg 2001). Foran and Olson drew on teacher descriptions to understand the places and situations in school environments where students experience more engaging and stimulating learning experiences, while Horan and Moores, in examining the impacts of cyberspace on contemporary society, considered whether physical places and environments still hold significance in human life or might be largely superseded by virtual environments and realities (Foran and Olson 2008; Horan 2000; Moores 2006).
A phenomenology of “environmental embodiment” examines the various lived ways, sensuously and motility-wise, that the body as a pre-reflective intentionality encounters, understands, and synchronizes with the world at hand (Finlay 2006). One important aspect of environmental embodiment is what can be called the “body-as-given” – i.e., the ways that bodily size, structure, and modes of sensuous encounter sustain environmental and place experiences. Casey, for example, examined how bodily qualities contribute to our taken-for-granted sense of direction and orientation, while Pallasmaa, McCann, and Malnar and Vodvarka considered the need to reintroduce a deeply sensuous dimension into environmental design (Casey [1993] 2009; Malnar and Vodvarka 2004; McCann 2005; Pallasmaa 1996, 2009).
A second important aspect of environmental embodiment relates to the “body-as-learned,” a lived situation referring to the pre-cognitive intelligence of the body manifested through action and intertwining with the world at hand – what Merleau-Ponty ([1945] 1962) termed “body-subject.” Body-subject has significance for interior design because one can point toward its wider-scaled movements, behaviors, and actions extending over time and space (Seamon 1979, 2007). Two such bodily patterns are, first, “body-routines” – sets of integrated gestures, behaviors, and actions that sustain a particular task or aim, for example preparing a meal, driving a car, doing home repairs, and so forth; and, second, “time-space routines” – sets of more or less habitual bodily actions that extend through a considerable portion of time, for example a getting-up routine or a weekday going-to-lunch routine (Seamon 1979).
Because interior designers regularly fashion the spatial and architectural environments in which body- and time-space routines transpire, an understanding of body-subject is important so that there is a smooth, comfortable “fit” between lived body and surroundings. One way, phenomenologically, that one can become better attuned to body-subject is to observe what happens experientially when one attempts simple lifeworld experiments that change everyday taken-for-grantedness in some way – for example, moving a thing that has a place to a new place; or walking to a destination by a route different from what they typically use (Seamon 1979). Another way, phenomenologically to better understand body-subject is using passages from imaginative literature as an interpretive context for recognizing dimensions of body-subject.
For example, a passage from Columbian novelist Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude describes how a woman named Ursula copes with progressive blindness. Sidebar 24.3 presents interpretations of this passage written by students in my “Designed Environment and Society” class mentioned earlier. Drawing on the phenomenological notions of body-subject and lifeworld, these two interpretations highlight the habitual dimension of Ursula's home life and recognize qualities of body-subject as its lived foundation. In emphasizing the household's quotidian regularity, the two interpretations recognize the lived intimacy of relationship between family members' environmental embodiment and their dwelling. Both students point out how, in Ursula's unusual situation, a seeming disadvantage – being blind – can make one more aware and thus better able to “see.”
In regard to environmental embodiment and interior design research, one significant body of work has focused on the environmental experiences of less able and differently abled individuals, including the blind (Allen 2004), the deaf (Finlay and Molano-Fisher 2007), paraplegics (Cole 2004), persons with multiple sclerosis (Toombs 1995), the elderly (Stafford 2009), and infants and children (Simms 2008). For example, neurophysiologist Jonathan Cole and philosopher Kay Toombs explored how less-abled individuals' loss of mobility leads to a changed interaction with the surrounding physical and human world, while phenomenological psychologist Eva Simms delineated “some of the key experiences of early childhood” (Cole 2004; Toombs 1995; Simms 2008). For interior design research, one of the most instructive introductions to the design importance of environmental embodiment is sociologist Galen Cranz's The Chair, which argues that many chairs are uncomfortable because designers are not typically attuned to the lived dimensions of sitting (Cranz 1998). The key to bodily-attuned design, Cranz demonstrated, is changing posture often and keeping the body moving: “We need to consider not just different ways to sit, but also ways to incorporate a variety of postures – including lying and standing – into our lives” (Cranz 1998).
“Architectural sustenance” refers to the ways that elements of the designable environment contribute to human well-being. A phenomenological perspective recognizes that, existentially, people and environment are not separate and two but indivisible and one. This lived fact has immense significance for interior design, since it suggests that the specific material, designable constitution of the world contributes to sustaining or undermining human life. A central question is whether, through thoughtful design and policy, we can re-create, self-consciously, places and environmental experiences that, in the pre-modern past, typically arose unselfconsciously and spontaneously, for example robust town centers, lively city neighborhoods, and life-enhancing buildings and interiors.
In regard to architectural sustenance, this means asking if qualities of the built environment, just by being what they are, contribute in various ways to a more pleasurable, sustaining way of life. One eye-opening study is Thomas Thiis-Evensen's Archetypes in Architecture, which can be described as a phenomenology of architectural experience (Thiis-Evensen 1987). This architect's aim was to understand “the universality of architectural expression” and his interpretive means was what he called architectural archetypes – “the most basic elements of architecture,” which he identified as floor, wall, and roof. Echoing Relph's interpretation of place, Thiis-Evensen argued that the lived commonality of floor, wall, and roof is their making of an inside in the midst of an outside, though in different ways: the floor, through above and beneath; the wall, through within and around; and the roof, through over and under.
Thiis-Evensen proposed that a building's relative degree of insideness and outsideness in regard to floor, wall, and roof can be clarified through what he calls the three existential expressions of architecture (Thiis-Evensen 1987): motion, weight, and substance. By motion, he meant the architectural element's expression of dynamism or inertia – i.e., whether the element seems to expand, to contract, or to rest in balance. In turn, weight refers to the element's expression of heaviness or lightness, while substance involves the element's material expression – whether it seems soft or hard, coarse or fine, warm or cold, and so forth. Using examples from architectural history as descriptive evidence, Thiis-Evensen generated an intricate language of architectural-elements-as-experienced. For example, he discussed stairs as one kind of directed floor and explored how a stair's material and spatial qualities of slope, breadth, groundedness, and form contribute to contrasting lived experiences and meanings (Thiis-Evensen 1987). His interpretation offers a powerful demonstration of the tacit ways in which architectural elements sustain or undermine specific modes of environmental and architectural experiences.
Though not explicitly phenomenological, the work of architect Christopher Alexander is a second important example of research relating to architectural sustenance. Throughout his career, Alexander has sought to understand the designable qualities of environments and places that evoke a sense of wholeness, healing, and life. His influential Pattern Language can be described as an implicit phenomenology of design elements that contribute to making place (Alexander, Ishikawa, and Silverstein 1977).
This book presents a method for envisioning and programming a design problem whereby, moving from larger to smaller scale, one identifies designable qualities – what Alexander calls “patterns” – that contribute to an environmental and architectural robustness. In his more recent four-volume The Nature of Order, Alexander integrates his pattern language with the much larger aim of understanding and making wholeness, particularly as environments and buildings can be imagined and designed as dense centers of human meaning and life (Alexander 2002–2005). Alexander's work is a masterly demonstration of the powerful ways that architectural sustenance plays a major role in making the world a better place.
I highlight the work of Thiis-Evensen and Alexander because both architects, though working at somewhat different environmental scales, strongly believe that the material and designed environments play a central role in the quality of human life. Both assume that, by exploring and understanding architectural elements and qualities that we normally take for granted, we will more suitably and effectively envision and design future environments, whether they be neighborhoods, buildings, interiors, or furnishings. One aim is re-creating self-consciously the kind of exuberant, serendipitous place ambience illustrated earlier in the colorful student account of the music venue “Off Broadway.”
In this sense, the most important value of a phenomenological approach to interior design is its power to make us more aware of our lived relationship with physical and spatial environments. Qualities of the material world make a difference in human lives, often in ways we don't see because we are caught up in the lifeworld and natural attitude. All phenomenological work calls the obvious and taken-for-granted into question so they can be seen in the light of empathetic description and interpretation. For interior design, a major phenomenological aim is to understand the lived nature of inside places and their parts and to use that understanding as one springboard for better interior design.