Beyond the Eye: Sensorial Design and the Italian Thinkers Who Saw It First
We are trained to think of design as a visual discipline. Form, proportion, composition — these are the terms we reach for when we talk about what makes something well-designed. But every object we touch, every space we enter, every material we handle is a full-body experience. The warmth of wood grain under your fingertips. The hollow click of a poorly made latch versus the satisfying weight of a good one. The way a room's acoustics tell you something about care before you've looked at a single detail.
This is the territory of sensorial design — an approach that treats the full spectrum of human perception as design material. And while the concept has gained fresh momentum in recent years through exhibitions like The Senses: Design Beyond Vision at the Cooper Hewitt in 2018, its intellectual roots run deep into the experimental culture of Italian design in the 1970s and 80s.
Design Primario: Castelli's Revolution of the Intangible
Clino Trini Castelli may be the single most important figure in establishing sensorial thinking as a rigorous design practice. Working from his Milan-based studio beginning in the early 1970s, Castelli developed what he called Design Primario — Primary Design — a framework that redirected attention away from an object's sculptural form and toward what he considered its more fundamental qualities: color, texture, finish, surface, light, sound, and microclimate.
Where mainstream industrial design was obsessed with shape-making, Castelli was interested in the atmospheric. He called these the "soft structures" of the built environment — the immaterial qualities that actually constitute our lived experience of objects and spaces. His concept of "No-Form" proposed that the emotional identity of a product lives not in its silhouette but in its sensory surface: the way light plays across a finish, the tactile warmth or coolness of a material, the chromatic relationships between components.
This wasn't abstract theory. Castelli put it into practice through his pioneering work in CMF design — Color, Material, and Finish — a discipline he essentially invented. Through projects with Fiat, Olivetti, Herman Miller, Cassina, and Mitsubishi, he demonstrated that the sensory "skin" of a product was not decoration applied after the fact but a primary design decision that shaped emotional response. His Umbrella Diagram, developed beginning in 1978, became a forecasting tool for understanding how color and material languages evolve across decades — treating sensory trends with the same analytical rigor others applied to structural engineering.
Branzi and the Freedom of the Senses
Andrea Branzi approached sensorial design from a different angle — through radical questioning of what design was for in the first place. As a founding member of Archizoom Associati in the 1960s, Branzi was part of the Italian Radical Design movement that challenged the modernist assumption that good design was rational design. Where functionalism treated the designed object as a solution to a problem, Branzi insisted that objects are segments of a human universe made up of relationships, both material and immaterial.
In his theoretical writing and his experimental furniture — pieces that combined raw wood with industrial elements, natural forms with synthetic materials — Branzi championed the expression of an object through its sensory qualities: its material presence, its color, its texture, the way it occupies and alters a room. He argued for what he called a "weak and diffuse modernity," a design philosophy that embraced fragmentation, emotionality, and imperfection rather than the total logic of industrial rationalism.
Branzi's point wasn't that we should abandon function but that we should stop pretending function is the whole story. The relationship between a person and an object is ecological, emotional, sensory — and design that ignores this impoverishes both the object and the person. His later work became increasingly concerned with design's sensitivity to ecological, social, and emotional contexts, anticipating by decades the sustainability-centered, human-centered design conversations we're having now.
Domus Academy: Where Sensorial Thinking Became Pedagogy
What connects Castelli and Branzi — beyond their shared Milan geography and their overlapping professional networks — is Domus Academy. Founded in 1982 by Branzi, Alessandro Mendini, Maria Grazia Mazzocchi, Valerio Castelli, and Alessandro Guerriero, Domus Academy was Italy's first postgraduate design school and a deliberate experiment in rethinking design education from the ground up. castelli and branzi were my professors at domus.
Branzi served as cultural director for the school's first decade, and Castelli taught there throughout the 1990s. Both brought their sensorial commitments into the pedagogical framework. But the school's real innovation was structural: Domus Academy was conceived not as a place to transmit established knowledge but as what Branzi described as a school founded "not to transmit knowledge, but to teach in order to learn." It drew leading designers like Ettore Sottsass, Denis Santachiara, and Philippe Starck into a context where students and faculty from around the world could meet and exchange ideas across disciplines.
This pedagogical philosophy — learning through making, across boundaries, in dialogue with working practitioners — created fertile ground for sensorial design thinking to grow. In a traditional design school of that era, Castelli's interest in color atmospherics or Branzi's interest in emotional ecology might have been marginalized as "soft" concerns. At Domus Academy, they were central.
Why This Matters Now
We are living through a moment when the designed world is overwhelmingly visual and screen-mediated. Our interfaces are flat. Our environments are optimized for efficiency. Our products are designed to photograph well. In this context, the sensorial design tradition that Castelli and Branzi helped establish isn't a historical curiosity — it's a corrective.
Sensorial design asks us to remember that people are not eyeballs. We are bodies moving through space, hands reaching for objects, ears registering the quality of an environment before our conscious mind has caught up. When we design for the full sensorium — not just for the retina — we design for richer, more humane, more memorable experiences.
There's also a deep connection between sensorial design and sustainability. When an object engages us through multiple senses — when the material is warm to the touch, when the mechanism has satisfying resistance, when the surface ages gracefully — we form attachments. We keep things longer. We repair rather than replace. The sensory richness of an object is one of the most powerful antidotes to disposability.
For those of us working in design and design education, the lesson from Milan is clear: we need to teach designers to design with their whole bodies, not just their eyes and their screens. We need studios where students handle materials, listen to spaces, attend to the micro-experiences that make the difference between a product someone tolerates and a product someone loves.
Castelli and Branzi showed us that the most important design decisions are often the ones you can't see in a photograph. they werre not alone in the quest as the danish designer, hans wegner, would advocate that all humankind knew wood as a sensory material through touch and smell. the finnish architecT, alvar aalto, tuned the passageways within his buildings by considering the changing cadence of materials underfoot or those that surrounded the human experience. the question for the next generation of designers is whether we have the courage — and the sensory literacy — to follow where they led.
