This paper explores the current sensory design of open spaces surrounding educational buildings.

What is it about?

The shrinking of green spaces in an urban area is causing the prevalence of unhealthy lifestyle, especially in the tropical region where the extreme weather leads to indoor sedentary behaviour as well. Outdoor experience in green space can facilitate the enhancement of physical and mental health as well as social wellbeing. A university campus located in the city centre can preserve a certain amount of green space. It is potential to provide an outdoor environment for wellbeing promotion among students and staff. Open spaces between buildings are universally applied in hot-humid areas for achieving indoor thermal comfort and optimizing a passive design for the built environment. Open spaces between buildings are convenient to reach and easy to access. The practical use and design make these open spaces to be beneficial for students and staff to facilitate physical, mental, and social wellbeing by providing precious outdoor experiences.

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Why is it important?

Sensory stimulation is the activation of one or more of the senses including taste, smell, vision, hearing, and touch. Every sense in a space can be designed to provide the users with a more comfortable experience while they are using the place. In the landscape design of campus open space, to understand users’ perception of the physical environment, sensory stimulation is essential to be studied to encourage outdoor activities among campus users and to create more interactive campus open space. Yet the approaches for improving sensory stimulation still need to be studied in the context of a university campus. Especially, there is no specific investigation and analysis has been conducted under the environmental context for a university campus in an urban area with hot-humid climates. As the role of sensory stimulation in university open spaces is inadequately defined, this paper aims at investigating the sensory design in campus open space to support outdoor experience, which is potential to improve the environmental satisfaction and promote wellbeing in urban universities in the hot-humid area.

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