[Ways of Seeing]

Sight is our most dominant sense. Rather, sight has become, or perhaps been trained to be, the most dominant of our senses. Everything in our culture is based off of seeing unless it is being specifically designed for someone who cannot see. In our world seeing has literally become believing.

And yet sight might be one of the least objective of the senses, the sense that tricks us most. Perhaps this trickery comes about not by sight itself, but rather what we pull out of what was seen, the perception of the seen. What we see is a woman; what we perceive may be a variety of things, such as beauty, cruelty, confusion, or any other number of emotions that arise. With sight being the dominant sense, we attach far more of our own personalities to it than we might touch. (This of course, is generalizing; each sense does have a subjective bend in it due to our experiences, i.e. a lover's touch, the smell of a house, etc. However, these senses are far less likely to vary beyond the exact triggers than sight)

Sight is also easily manipulated by the other senses. Take the example from John Berger; if we view the same painting in two different ways with two different pieces of music in the background, we see that our perception is changed forever. The sound effects how we perceive what we are hearing. Take for instance, someone who once tasted or was sick on a certain food. The mere sight of that food could make them convulse. 

When we take all this into account, our view of design will change greatly. Aesthetics suddenly goes beyond our dominant sense, and must now cater to all five of them. We must consider the touch and sound of an object just as much as the sight, even considering how touch and sound might manipulate what we see. It also becomes clear that the setting that our object will be in will effect a persons understanding of it; taking this into consideration becomes important as well.