Chinese Whispers:

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These systems gives a hold on visual experience because of the experiments conducted and precise findings. Though architecture can implement such theories and findings directly as a means to experience space, they are not necessarily an account of the complete feeling as it is limited to the sight. On account of the five basic senses, new strategies were being systematized during this period to understand sense psychologically.

Haptic experiences

J.J. Gibson, an environmental psychologist understood the five senses as; the visual system, taste-smell system, the auditory system, the basic-orienting system and the haptic system in 1950’s. Out of these the basic-orienting system and haptic system were believed to contribute more towards an understanding of three-dimensionality of experiences. Basic orientation refers to the postural sense of up and down depending on gravity and knowledge about the ground. Any mobilized orientation requires a total balance of the body. While haptic sense is the sense of touch not just limited to hands but the entire body. Perceptions in this case was believed to be formulated through the active exploration of surfaces and objects by a moving subject, as opposed to passive contact by a static subject during tactile perception. To sense haptically is to experience objects in the environment by actually touching them for its different sensations as well as experiencing them for the movement it elicits within the entire body. This sense was proposed by Gibson as the only one which engaged in both acts of feeling and doing simultaneously, having action-reaction characteristics. This model better understands experiences in the individual with respect to the environment for what is ‘felt’. The bodily experiences define the possessions and impact on individuals as a measure of subjectivity of experience for its meanings, as feelings of the environment and architecture.

Semiotic studies

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Semiotics is the study of meaning-making, the study of sign processes and meaningful communication. It includes the study of signs and sign processes, indication, designation, likeness, analogy, allegory, metonymy, metaphor, symbolism, signification, and communication. As a subset of communication and language these studies were also defined as linguistic studies. Ferdinand de Saussure was considered the father of modern linguistics, who proposed a dualistic notion of signs, relating the ‘signifier’ as the form of the word or phrase uttered, to the ‘signified’ as the mental concept. According to Saussure, the sign is completely arbitrary—i.e., there is no necessary connection between the sign and its meaning. Saussure posited that no word is inherently meaningful. Rather a word is only a ‘signifier’, i.e., the representation of something, and it must be combined in the brain with the ‘signified’, or the thing itself, in order to form a meaning-imbued ‘sign’. Saussure believed that dismantling signs was a real science, for in doing so there is an empirical understanding of how humans synthesize physical stimuli into words and other abstract concepts. Hence the underlying characteristic of the signs could be used to signify something else. For example, metaphor is a figure of speech in which a word or phrase


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