Introduction
As a qualified architect and Hourly Paid Lecturer, teaching Stage 1 BA Architecture at Central Saint Martins, I frequently reflect on how students’ early design thinking connects, or fails to connect, with lived experience. My students often approach design with a focus on formal or aesthetic concerns, sometimes bypassing considerations of inclusion, access, or social diversity. This mirrors broader disciplinary tendencies where the “user” is abstracted and normative assumptions about the body and space prevail (Boys, 2014; Imrie, 2012).
The Inclusive Practice unit has prompted me to interrogate these patterns more critically, particularly concerning my positionality as a woman of colour from a large, intergenerational family that includes members with visual and physical impairments. These experiences inform my values of care, empathy, and attunement to the subtle but significant ways exclusion is embedded in the built environment. This report explores the development and reflection on an intervention I designed, ‘Mapping Belonging: A Sensory and Spatial Reflection’, to foster inclusive awareness among architecture students through sensory recall, embodied memory, and shared dialogue.
The aim was not to provide a checklist of inclusive design principles, but to begin building the critical empathy necessary for future designers to engage with spatial injustice. In doing so, I draw on frameworks of intersectionality (Crenshaw, 1989), brave space pedagogies (Arao and Clemens, 2021), and spatial justice (Soja, 2010) to reimagine how students might engage more meaningfully with human experience as a foundation for inclusive practice and design.
Context
I currently teach approximately 14 first-year BA Architecture students one day per week during term time. While the cohort is diverse, there is often little opportunity to delve deeply into lived experience or inclusive design within the confines of studio-based projects. The studio environment in architecture schools is historically shaped by individualism, competition, and visual modes of communication (Stevens, 1998). Many students, still adjusting to university life, find it difficult to articulate how social difference impacts spatial experience, let alone design with it in mind in ways that challenge normative spatial assumptions.
This intervention is situated midway through the first term, when students have begun to establish relationships and a sense of peer familiarity. It is intentionally low-resource and designed to be adaptable to short time slots within existing teaching schedules. Crucially, it seeks to shift the pedagogical focus from abstract spatial concepts to embodied, relational, and inclusive spatial thinking. The approach creates a foundation for inclusive learning aligned with UAL.¹
Inclusive Learning and Intervention Design
Inclusive learning in architecture is essential not only for diversifying who enters the profession but for challenging the spatial reproduction of inequality. As Soja (2010, p.19) argues, “justice has a geography”; the built environment reflects and reinforces power structures that marginalise certain bodies and identities. Awan, Schneider and Till (2011) similarly frame architecture as a site of spatial agency, where designers can act politically and collaboratively to reshape exclusionary norms. If architectural education fails to model these commitments, it risks perpetuating the very inequalities it might otherwise seek to challenge (Imrie, 2012; Boys, 2014).
Mapping Belonging responds to this imperative by centring students’ own experiences of spatial inclusion and exclusion as the starting point for critical design thinking. The intervention draws on pedagogies of discomfort (Bozalek and Zembylas, 2017) and the concept of brave spaces (Arao and Clemens, 2021), creating conditions where students can reflect on difficult, emotionally resonant experiences. At its core is the use of sensory memory as a reflective tool. Students are invited to recall how specific spaces made them feel, through sensory details such as light, sound, temperature or atmosphere.
This emphasis on sensation is intentional. Paterson (2009) argues that sensory experience is not neutral but shaped by social and spatial hierarchies, a concept he terms the politics of sensation. Similarly, Howes and Classen (2014) contend that what we perceive and prioritise in space is culturally constructed, shaped by norms that often go unquestioned. By asking students to create sensory maps using drawing, collage or writing, the intervention validates embodied knowledge and opens up neurodiverse and multilingual pathways for expression. It also challenges the dominance of purely visual or technical approaches to design, which can marginalise students who think, feel or communicate differently (Boys, 2014; Bamber and Jones, 2015).
The workshop culminates in a reflective discussion where students share and compare their mapped experiences. This dialogue surfaces both commonalities and contrasts, prompting awareness of whose perspectives are present and absent in the room. The aim is not to reach consensus but to foster critical empathy, encouraging students to identify assumptions and consider how exclusion may be unconsciously designed in. Through this embodied and reflective method, the workshop lays the foundation for more socially attuned and inclusive architectural thinking.
Reflection on Process and Peer Feedback
One of the first inspirations for this work came from watching Chris Laing, a Deaf architect, explore Deaf Space at the London College of Fashion (Wellcome Collection, 2022). Laing reflects on how subtle adjustments, like the placement of mirrors for sightlines or wider corridors to enable sign language conversation, can significantly enhance spatial inclusion for Deaf users. The video shifted my perspective; rather than seeing inclusive design as accommodation, I began to see it as a creative, empathetic, and deeply human act. This embodied example became the emotional and conceptual anchor for my intervention.
When piloting the workshop with a small group of peers, I facilitated the sensory mapping exercise rather than presenting it. This decision modelled the approach I hoped to take with students. The feedback was affirming, as participants described the exercise as “so effective in such a short time” and noted that it allowed them to “know the person better.” They observed that it would resonate with younger students but cautioned against implementing it too early in the term, when vulnerability and group trust are still developing.
Peers suggested beginning with a more physical or collaborative group task to build rapport and then gradually introducing reflective elements. This feedback was pivotal. It forced me to reckon with the ethical implications of asking students to share intimate spatial memories in a potentially unsafe group context. As Arao and Clemens (2021) emphasise, brave spaces must be intentionally cultivated, with clear guidelines around respectful dialogue, active listening, and personal ownership of experience.
Action and Iteration
In response, I propose to restructure the intervention into a two-part workshop, to be delivered in weeks 6 and 7 of the term. The first session introduces a group bonding activity and lighter mapping of daily routines or neutral sensory spaces. This builds familiarity and lowers emotional stakes. The second session deepens the reflection by inviting students to consider inclusion and exclusion in their mapped experiences, supported by a curated selection of case studies and testimonies based around disabled experiences, such as Chris Laing’s video.
This adjustment reflects a broader realisation: inclusive pedagogy must itself be inclusive in its pacing and emotional demands. While my initial ambition was to immerse students in discomfort to catalyse learning, I now recognise that discomfort must be scaffolded with care. This echoes Bozalek and Zembylas (2017), who argue that discomfort is transformative only when students feel supported enough to stay with it.
I also acknowledge that while I intended to explore blind, deaf, and mobility-impaired experiences in depth, this may be unrealistic for a single session. Instead, I propose integrating recorded testimonies, sensory ethnographies, or architectural precedents that students can analyse collectively. In this way, their learning is grounded not in speculation, but in real-world voices and design examples.
Evaluation and Future Directions
If implemented, I would evaluate the intervention’s impact through both informal conversation and formal student feedback. I anticipate that the most telling indicators would not be quantitative, but qualitative: increased sensitivity in design proposals, more reflective spatial language, and evolving student-led conversations around access and inclusion. I would also invite students to suggest improvements and co-develop future iterations of the workshop, aligning with inclusive and participatory pedagogies (Cook-Sather, 2014).
One challenge I anticipate is that some students, especially those who do not see themselves represented in conversations about marginalisation, may disengage or feel disconnected from the aims of the intervention. To address this, I draw on Allport’s (1954) Contact Hypothesis, which proposes that structured interaction across social differences can reduce prejudice and foster empathy when certain conditions are met: equal status, shared goals, cooperation, and institutional support. In my workshop, students work in small, diverse groups with the shared task of mapping spatial experiences, an activity that centres personal reflection while inviting relational understanding.
By allowing students to express differences through sensory and narrative forms, the intervention encourages peer-to-peer empathy without requiring verbal confession or confrontation. This aligns with Pettigrew’s (1998) emphasis on affective ties and the importance of creating space for friendship and insight, rather than only knowledge transmission. Moreover, by structuring the session within a normatively inclusive studio culture and ensuring clear facilitation protocols (e.g. confidentiality, use of “I” statements), the design supports the social conditions needed to encourage participation even from initially hesitant students. While Allport’s theory provides a useful framework, I remain aware that not all contact is experienced equally; intersectional power dynamics still shape who feels safe, heard, or centred in these exchanges (Crenshaw, 1989). This reinforces the importance of intentional facilitation, trust-building, and diverse representation within the learning space.
To evaluate impact more rigorously, I could also draw on qualitative methods such as reflective journaling, short anonymous prompts at the end of each session, or visual analysis of students’ sensory maps across the cohort. These techniques would allow me to identify recurring themes in how students perceive inclusion and whether their spatial thinking begins to shift over time.
Conclusion
This intervention emerged from a deeply held conviction that empathy is foundational to inclusive practice and design, and that empathy itself must be cultivated through experience, reflection, and shared vulnerability. The Inclusive Practice unit has equipped me with theoretical and practical tools to translate this conviction into pedagogical action.
Critically reflecting on the process has taught me to temper ambition with care and to understand inclusion not as a topic to be “delivered” but as a way of being, teaching, and relating. My positionality, as a minoritised woman with lived experiences of disability in my family, has shaped this work profoundly, and so too has the input of peers, scholars, and practitioners.
As I continue developing this intervention, I am committed to refining both its content and its context: ensuring it meets students where they are, while gently challenging them to design and learn with greater justice, empathy, and imagination.
This process has not only shaped this specific intervention but has also shifted how I see my role as an educator. I now view inclusive pedagogy as an evolving commitment, one that requires continual reflexivity, co-learning with students, and an openness to discomfort and growth.
Footnote
¹ The intervention aligns with UAL’s Strategic Plan 2015–22, which advocates for pedagogical approaches that acknowledge diverse identities, challenge systemic bias, and support belonging through curriculum and classroom culture (UAL, 2022). Embedding this work into the studio setting models these principles in action and supports sector-wide efforts to make higher education more equitable (AdvanceHE, 2021).
References
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Allport, G.W. (1954) The Nature of Prejudice. Cambridge, MA: Addison-Wesley.
Arao, B. and Clemens, K. (2021) ‘From safe spaces to brave spaces: A new way to frame dialogue around diversity and social justice.’ In: Landreman, L. (ed.) The Art of Effective Facilitation: Reflections from Social Justice Educators. 2nd ed. Sterling, VA: Stylus Publishing, pp. 135–150.
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Paterson, M. (2013) ‘Blindness, empathy, and “feeling seeing”: Literary and insider accounts of blind experience’, Emotion, Space and Society, 10(1), pp. 95–104.
Pettigrew, T.F. (1998) ‘Intergroup contact theory.’ Annual Review of Psychology, 49, pp. 65–85.
Soja, E. (2010) Seeking Spatial Justice. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Stevens, G. (1998) The Favored Circle: The Social Foundations of Architectural Distinction. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
University of the Arts London (UAL) (2022) UAL Strategy 2015–2022: Creative Education for a Changing World. Available at: https://www.arts.ac.uk/about-ual/strategy-and-governance/ual-strategy-2015-22 (Accessed 8 July 2025).
Wellcome Collection (2022) Exploring Deaf Space at London College of Fashion with Chris Laing. [Online video]. Available at: https://wellcomecollection.org/stories/exploring-deaf-space-at-london-college-of-fashion [Accessed 14 May 2025].