THE CHOREOGRAPHY OF PERCEPTION
Not everything moves.
Not everything breathes.
Not everything shapes the world around it.
But what does,
what defines how we perceive,
what moves through space and time,
becomes identity. Becomes rhythm. Becomes atmosphere.
Carolin Vedder
If WE PERCEIVE multiSENSORY, design must be crossmodal.
Visual Design asks:
How should it look?
Motion Design asks:
How should it move?
Multisensory Design asks:
How should it be experienced?
Perception is MultiSENSORY. Not Multi-Layered.
Multisensory Design is not about adding more layers to a visual format.
Human perception operates through interaction between vision, motion, memory, rhythm, temperature, texture, space and scent. Not five isolated senses, but integrated modalities that shape interpretation.
If you only design the visuals, the rest still determines what people feel.
Perception → Input
Cognition → Interpretation
Multisensory Design → Controlled Input → Directed Interpretation
"DO WE REALLY NEED MULTISENSORY? IT'S JUST A VIDEO!"
Video already triggers multiple modalities, usually unconsciously.
Sound, motion, timing are being structured, but not crossmodally aligned with temperature, weight, density, texture, sharpness. But that alignment is where interpretation is designed.
WHERE DOES IT MATTER?
Museums with sensory ambition but no systematic approach.
Brands entering physical experience for the first time.
Creative leads tasked with delivering worlds, not just files.
Campaigns spanning print, digital, motion and space.
Agencies pitching cross-sensory ideas without perceptual logic.
Corporate identities missing sound, motion and thermal definition.
Exhibitions aiming to guide perception, not just fill rooms.
From Motion Graphics to Crossmodal Systems
My foundation is motion design. For over 25 years, I’ve created time-based designs for clients like MTV, Nickelodeon, ZDF, Mercedes, VW, Siemens, BMW, Audi and CERN.
In 2012, I began working with scent as an art form. In 2019, my Bauhaus Missing Scents prototype exposed scent’s structural role in design and surfaced my own synesthetic perception as a functional tool within the process.
That led to the development of my crossmodal translation model and a published research framework on scent transmission (Zenodo, 2025).
MULTISENSORY design systematically aligns all modalities.
The perception of scent is the moment when past and future memories collide.
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