Garden Design for the Blind :: Architecture Design Essays

Garden Design for the Blind It is a commonly known fact that the removal of one sense sharpens and enhances the perception of the others. We as humans are very centered on sight, and we tend to give less weight to our other senses when it comes to perceiving the world around us. For the most part, our environment tends to consist of designs made for us to experience visually. We do recognize sound as important, but when we are not actively listening to music or speech, sound tends to fade into the background. While we don’t really notice it’s there, sound serves to give us many clues about our surroundings. Our sense of touch is also important in many ways. We can use it actively, feeling many aspects of the world around us; a simple touch can read the temperature, surface texture, and hardness, among other things, of an object in our surroundings. We also possess a sense of kinesthesia, which involves cues from our muscles that give us information about the way our bodies are moving through space. An important component of this system is our balance system in our middle ear. This lets us know when we are or are not in a vertical position. Our leg muscles can tell us the conditions of the surface upon which we are walking and how far we have traveled. Easily the most overlooked sense is the sense of smell. Most of us rarely think about it, but studies have shown that of all the external stimuli that affect the way we do things, odor might be the biggest influence on our behavior. Scent is a major component of memory, especially of pleasant memories. A whiff of a particular smell, perhaps lavender, might bring back memories of weekends at Grandma’s house, where the linen closet was scented with lavender sachets. Studies have linked changes in emotion and even basic instincts to our sense of smell. The French have a restaurant called â€Å"dans le noir?† (or â€Å"in the dark?†) in which seeing people get an experience that is almost like being blind. They are guided to a table by waiters, some blind and some sighted; they eat their entire meal in the complete darkness. The principle behind this is that in the absence of sight, all the other senses are heightened.