Kerstin Thompson Architects : exploring affect in interior's sticky design process

Physical things influence emotions and feelings and can contribute to our sense that buildings and rooms are appropriately designed for their purposes. The sense of appropriateness extends, and is often noticed, through the pre-emotive effect of a structure’s shapes and dimensions. In interior discourse the relationship between the physical and pre-emotive is indicated with various terms (such as “affect”) and the design process of achieving appropriateness in objects and affect can be termed “stickiness”. In this paper we extend Sara Ahmed’s characterization of affect as a sticky connective element, which allows objects and ideas to generate attachments with us. And we ask, how can we understand interior practices and design processes through the concept of affect – as sticky? We explore this question first by discussing affect’s stickiness, and second, by an empirical study of the design process of Kerstin Thompson’s Monash University Museum of Art. The specific project involves alternating design methods that Thompson uses: an intuitive hunch-driven process, and a more defined literary-driven process. Our interest is to consider how she shifts from one to the other so we can better understand interior practice and its design process through the concept of affect. Finally, we conclude by addressing how the study of affect contributes to our understanding of interior practice and its design process, and more significantly, how, in exchange, might interior practice offer to recent theories of affect. Interior practice as changeable, spatio-temporal and material processes offer potentially fertile ground to explore affect as mediating layer, bridging human and non-human forces.