Unlocking the Sixth Sense: The Hidden Dimension of Design and Behaviour.
Our surroundings profoundly influence the way we feel, think, and behave, often in ways we don’t even realise. From the colours we see to the sounds we hear, every element of a space interacts with our senses, shaping our emotions and behaviours.
The hospitality industry, in particular, has tapped into this understanding, using sensory design to create memorable experiences. But the power of sensory perception extends far beyond dining rooms or hotels. It impacts how we interact with spaces in our daily lives.
We the relationship between our senses and the environments we occupy, uncovering the science behind multi-sensory design and its transformative effects on our wellbeing and experiences.
On the 15th of November 1930, the Italian futurist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, while speaking at a multi-course banquet, presented his fellow Italians with a manifesto calling for a ban on pasta, describing it as “an absurd Italian gastronomic religion.” The favourite food of Italians, Marinetti claimed was a “passéist food” that “deluded people into thinking it was nutritious” and made them lazy, tradition-bound and pacifist. Pasta he said "weighed Italians down and prevented them from achieving any kind of greatness".
People living everywhere from France to Australia commented on the matter, but nowhere was the response more impassioned than in Italy. He was met with massive protests. Petitions were signed, housewives took to the streets and an enraged Italian journalist challenged Marinetti to a duel. A duel which Marinetti foolishly accepted and... lost. He was gravely injured.
Two years later, perhaps having learned a valuable lesson, in his futuristic
Cookbook, “A Tactile Dinner Party” he suggested a more passive concept. A restaurant where guests would engage all of their senses whilst dining. They would be dressed in pyjamas made of various materials, “such as sponge, cork, sandpaper, felt, aluminium sheeting, bristles, steel wool, cardboard, silk, velvet, etc.” They would be led into a dark room, where they would have to choose dinner partners according to their tactile preferences. There would be no cutlery. Some of it would be eaten with hands whilst yet others only with faces buried in plates of vegetables. Parts of the meal would consist of identical-looking balls containing wildly different ingredients like raw meat, banana and peppers. There would also be music, dancing, spraying of cologne, and then more unusual food. All the while, “the guests would need to let their fingertips feast uninterruptedly on their neighbour's pyjamas.”
This conceptual thinking was certainly way ahead of it its time and it would take decades for retailers and restaurateurs to catch onto some of this thinking. In fact when Blumenthal at the Fat Duck famously asked diners to don headphones and listen to the sound of the sea while eating an oyster it was more than 80 years later.
The hospitality industries have come a long way since and astute operators are now acutely aware of the positive impact of multi-sensory triggers. There are five basic human senses familiar to most people namely touch, sight, hearing, smell and taste. However, we also have a remarkable 6th sense that we will elaborate on in our final chapter in this series next week. Applying design solutions that leverage on this knowledge of our senses has led to incredible results for astute hospitality operators. That being said, we have put taste last as this category is often skewed and gravely misunderstood. Our findings here may just surprise you.
Let’s expand on the 5 human senses in Hospitality & Restaurant Design.
SIGHT:
This is often the first means by which we gather information of which colour is the most powerful tool to impact behaviour. It can be divided in 3 sections according to its effect on appetite and behaviour, namely strong, mild and suppressants. Red as a reptilian carry over from our hunter gatherer days signalling energy dense sugar packed fruit whilst yellow secretes serotonin in anticipation of the food & orange feelings of comfort & warmth. To this end yellow or warm spectrum lighting in a restaurant also has a far greater impact on our behaviour than you may think. It has a remarkable effect on our sense of satiety. Low light suppresses the feeling of being satisfied and also in addition suppresses our inhibitions around eating. This of course has the net effect that we end up eating more than we would otherwise do. Low light is also more intimate & more complimentary to skin tone & thus how we look and feel about ourselves.
SOUND:
Ian Schrager, creator of fabled nightclub Studio 54 in New York teamed up with Marriott to launch The EDITION hotels in a number of major cities, including New York and London.
“The sound of a hotel lobby is often dictated by monotonous, vapid lounge muzak – a zombie-like drone of new jazz and polite house, with the sole purpose of whiling away the waiting time between check-in and check-out.”,
Schrager says. As might have been expected, the music in the lobbies of The EDITION hotels is carefully curated to add to the total immersive experience and make for the most sociable and attractive environment for the visitor. Whilst its not excessively loud, its definitely more akin to a night club but due to the careful balance and quality of the sound equipment, conversations are still very audible and pleasant.
An interesting fact is that loud noise detracts diners from smelling and tasting their food. Think about the term “aeroplane food.” American researchers have found that it’s the constant high frequency noise that significantly alters our perception of taste preventing us from enjoying food the way we would normally. That being said noise is also the second most common complaint, after poor service in restaurants. Acoustic control is thus vital. If diners can’t hear each other over dinner, they resort to raising their voices, which in turn raises noise levels even further. This is called the Lombard Effect. As people dine out to socialise, the ability to converse easily cannot be overvalued.
SMELL:
This is the most primal of our 5 senses developed thru thousands of years to collect data from our surroundings. Humans have 400 smelling receptors. Scientists (and astute restauranteurs) know that when we are hungry, our bodies boost the performance of our sense of smell in order to improve our chances of finding food. As soon as a smell is detected it triggers our olfactory neurons which in turn triggers a part of the brain called the Olfactory bulb which in turn triggers our limbic system that regulates mood, memory, emotion and behaviour. Apart from the theatre and sense of trust an open kitchen brings, it is also open to allow the smell of food to travel through the space where you sit and if this is not enough scents are often pumped into the dining area to boost these triggers.
Incidentally, the correct smells can increase restaurant turnovers by 300% and average stay by 16%?
TOUCH:
Touch is thought to be the first sense that humans develop, according to the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy. Touch can greatly impact the way we make decisions.
"Those tactile sensations are not just changing general orientation or putting people in a good mood,"
said Joshua Ackerman, an assistant professor of marketing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. They have a specific tie to certain abstract meanings. Touch consists of several distinct sensations communicated to the brain through specialized neurons in the skin. Pressure, temperature, light touch, vibration, pain and other sensations are all part of the touch sense and are all attributed to different receptors in the skin. Whilst Filippo Marinetti created detailed manifestos about tactility as far back as 1930, tactility in restaurants are still mostly overlooked. Tactile stimulation is an extremely important consideration from the front door to the menu, the table/table cloth, seat, crockery & cutlery in order to enhance total experience.
Subconsciously we allocate certain levels of quality to the weight and texture of items that we interact with at the table for instance. The weight of the chair and menu for instance should be in line with the category of products served. Think about a take-away or fast service venue where menus and chairs weigh very little compared to a fine dining establishment. If it were the other way around you would feel that something was off without necessarily being able to put your finger on it (no pun intended here)
TASTE:
We spoke about this in a prior article, but it worth mentioning here again. We all say that we enjoyed a certain drink or food product from a certain restaurant or local coffee shop, but how much of this perception is actually true? Could it be that we are fooling ourselves and that other factors are influencing how we feel about the product we think we tasted? A 2014 study by the Sagol Department of Neurobiology at the University of Haifa has uncovered a link between the region responsible for taste memory (the taste cortex) and the area encoding the time and place of the food taste experience. (the hippocampus) This is particularly true if the taste was new or unfamiliar.
“This means that even during a simple associative taste, the brain operates the hippocampus to produce an integrated experience that includes general information about the time and place”
explained taste.
If the experience was not memorable in its totality the chances are that you will not remember the taste either. Information without emotion is hardly ever retained. It is thus more likely that people have an illusion of taste based on a myriad of other external experiences and that the combination of all of these experiences are actually the factors that make up the perception of a taste memory. Try the experiment for yourself. Ask someone to tell you about their favourite food memories. They are almost always related to an experience where the time and place or people you were with take precedent over the food.
“A Pizza with my mates when we won our 1st game,” or “A Sunday barbecue with my parents the day I arrived back from college”. None of the stories will be isolated to a food item only. They will almost always be about an experience with someone where a memory was created.
In conclusion, the spaces we inhabit profoundly influence our emotions, behaviours, and memories. By thoughtfully engaging our senses, sight, sound, touch, smell, and taste.
Designers can create environments that evoke joy, comfort, and connection. As research and innovation continue to shed light on the intricate relationship between design and human experience, the potential for creating truly transformative spaces has never been greater. Whether it’s a restaurant, a home, or a public venue, thoughtful design can turn everyday moments into lasting memories.
In our final chapter in this series next week on how spaces impact our behaviour,
We invite you to explore the next article from this exploration series.
Information Reference Index:
The Hidden Sense That Shapes Wellbeing
What if One Futurist Had Made His Ideas More Delicious?
A Sixth Sense? It’s in Your Genes
Anti-Pasta: When Italian Futurists Tried to Ban Pasta in Italy
The Impact of Touch on Decision Making
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