Multisensory Design and its Management Implications at Sites of Heritage, Art and Tourism.
Edited by Dorit Kluge (IU Internationale Hochschule) and Alexandra Skedzuhn-Safir (BTU Cottbus-Senftenberg).

People are connected in many ways to the multisensoriality of architecture, urban space, and landscape. These spaces represent places of experience on the one hand and places of agency on the other (Liu et al., 2017), as they express people’s will to design and, thus, their will to experience individually and collectively. It concerns, therefore, (un)conscious sensory perception and conscious creation of meaning for places at the same time. This dualism has been reflected for several centuries, for instance in philosophy (Böhme, 1995), anthropology (Classen, 2017), geography (Tuan, 2012), art history (Pichet & Kluge, 2023), and marketing (Biehl-Missal & vom Lehn, 2015).
Depending on the proximity to the set stimulus, spatial experience involves various qualities and quantities for sensory perception, whether in a concentric arrangement or as a phenomenon of overlapping perceptions. This can relate to a single form of stimulus (sounds) and thus perceptual modality (hearing) or multisensory combinations of stimulus forms and perceptual modalities, whereby the degree of complexity in stimulus perception and processing increases. A temporal dimension supplements the spatial experience. People perceive stimuli sequentially, which transforms perception into a process. However, people also activate their (sensory) memory and implicitly recall previous perceptions and associations. Hence, the temporal dimension of impact does not necessarily have to coincide with the spatial dimension of site experience.

The edited volume will focus primarily on heritage sites and on artistic and tourist locations (Staiff, 2015), whereby open and closed spaces will be considered. We are focusing on two key issues: How are places designed so that they can unfold their potential for multisensory perception? What implications do the specific design approaches have for the management and marketing of these places, and for instance, what needs to be rethought in museum, destination, or tourism management and marketing? How can the audience play an active role in multisensory design, and what are the consequences for the management of places?

We invite researchers to submit article proposals for this volume. These proposals can be individual case studies, comparative analyses, or theory-based contributions. We welcome authors working transdisciplinary, establishing a link between the past, present, and (digital) future, and presenting examples from different cultures worldwide. We are looking for original contributions with critical approaches that provide new insights into the research of multisensoriality and management issues. We do not consider previously published material.

Submission Instructions:
The volume will undergo a double-blind peer review, and full-length papers will comprise between 30,000 and 50,000 characters (including footnotes, bibliography, and spaces). Papers should be submitted in English, and all submissions will only be published if recommended by peer reviews and accepted by the editors.

In the first round, we ask you to send the following elements in a single PDF by 30 May 2025 to sensorydesignmanagementgmail.com including:
- abstracts of no more than 400 words in length,
- supplemented by a short bibliography,
- 5 keywords,
- and a short CV of max. 200 words.

After an initial review by the editors, selected contributions will be invited to submit a full-length article, with a submission deadline expected to be set for the end of August 2025.