Interiority
Vol. 2 No. 1 (2019)

Contested Interiority: Sense of Outsideness/Insideness Conveyed through Everyday Interactions with University Campus Doors

Lisa Stafford (Queensland University of Technology)



Article Info

Publish Date
30 Jan 2019

Abstract

Our sense of place in the world is mediated through our everyday interactions with both people and space (Seamon, 1985). Everydayness is one of the most profound levels and shapers of human experience, yet too often this level of relation is overlooked and taken for granted in the design of environments (Dyck, 2005; Tuan, 1977). In this article, I present a first-person phenomenological account of my everyday interactions with doors on a university campus to uncover contested notions of interiority. My body-space routines reveal how a sense of outsideness/insideness is controlled through my interactions with objects such as doors, door handles and thresholds. These accounts suggest that given our everyday activities are intrinsically linked to designed environments (Upton, 2002) and that interiority is relational (Atmodiwirjo & Yatmo, 2018), adopting an everydayness frame from diverse users’ perspectives is imperative to improve human experiences and spatial justice within design practice. This is critically important for non-normative bodies like mine whose subjective experience of interiority is constantly being disputed and denied by hostile materiality.

Copyrights © 2019






Journal Info

Abbrev

journal

Publisher

Subject

Arts Humanities Civil Engineering, Building, Construction & Architecture Social Sciences

Description

The journal presents the discourses on interiority from multiple perspectives in various design-related disciplines: architecture, interior design, spatial design, and other relevant fields. The idea of interiority emphasises the internal aspects that make and condition the interior, which might be ...