In the constantly evolving landscape of design, understanding the target audience is an essential yet complex step. Traditional tools like mood boards are often used in the early phases to translate design opportunities into visually stimulating collages. Mood boards typically consist of visual collages with stimulating images, colours, material swatches, textures, drawings, and physical objects.¹ Building on this method and inspired by the philosophy of phenomenology, I have integrated sensorial mappings into my design courses at both bachelor and master’s levels since 2021. This method invites designers to move beyond purely visual observation and engage deeply with their lived, sensory experiences to build empathy with the target audience in their everyday life settings. By focusing on the rich, embodied interaction between the designer and the environment, sensorial mappings open up new ways of understanding the target audience – through the senses and beyond the surface of observation.

Phenomenology, which focuses on the lived experience, is nicely captured by Maurice Merleau-Ponty's words: ‘The body is the vehicle of being in the world.’² In this view, our bodies are how we exist in and interact with the world. We sense, engage with, and ultimately make meaning of the material world through our physical experiences. When designers enter the environments of their target audience, their observations are shaped by the interconnectedness of lived bodies and the material world. However, over the years, I’ve noticed that design students often associate observation with sight. Yet, human experience is embodied and extends far beyond what can be seen. It is not always processed cognitively or emotionally but is felt through the sensing, moving body. Therefore, I propose sensorial mapping as a method where the human body is understood as a sensory being, moving beyond the classic five senses.³ In phenomenology, this is known as the lived body, the medium through which we experience and make meaning from the world.

To engage with the method of sensorial mapping, designers work in teams, beginning with individual reflections on the lived, sensory aspects of their observations. These reflections, captured through notes and sketches, are next shared in a team setting. Together, the team then creates a mood board using tangible materials – branches, surplus textiles, or other found objects – to articulate their sensory experiences. This tangibility provides a way to bridge the gap between experiential and linguistic understanding, translating felt experiences into something physically graspable. To describe and illustrate this method, I turn to a recent workshop I led for third-year undergraduate design students in 2023. This two-day workshop was part of a week-long collaborative international course delivered at the Estonian Academy of Arts. The course focused on social design and a sensorial approach in the designing process and the students were from countries such as Belgium, Estonia and Hungary. The course asked how a visit to the participants’ living environment could inform the co-design process of an expressive artefact created between design students and the participants. It began with the workshop I led, including a visit to a centre run by a welfare organisation in Estonia, where children without parental care or those struggling with behavioural or substance abuse issues receive professional assistance. During this visit, students were asked to observe the environment not just with their eyes, but with all their senses. Subsequently, they were asked to translate their observations into a sensorial map. This map was later used as a starting point to brainstorm and ideate on the artefacts to be co-created with the residents of the centre. In the next section, I will use my first-person experience to illustrate the process of sensorial mapping: