Architecture education, by being enclosed in studios has been detached from a direct sensory experience of space. To overcome this limitation, I suggest an interdisciplinary educational approach based on the use of objects-to-sense-with. Alluding to Seymour Papert’s term “objects-to-think-with” Idefinethe term “objects-to-sense-with” to refer to computational tools that provide a body-centric, self-directed, and situated learning of space focused on the senses. To offer a framework for the proposed method, I first discuss the sensory pedagogiesformulated in the Montessori method and the Bauhaus School.
Then, I discuss the process and results of a workshop that I co-taught at MIT where students made their ownobjects-to-sense-with with embedded sensors, explored different physical spaces with these tools, and then documentedtheir sensory interactions in space. Finally,to provide further evidence on the pedagogical implications of such tools, I discuss the method, process, and results of a controlled study with participants exploring physical spaces on MIT campus while using a wearable tool –an object-to-sense-with- that I developed