Heritage Sensory Code in Shaping Place Identity for Hospitality Space Design

Indonesia, as a pluralistic society with diverse cultures, has a rich cultural heritage to explore. However, in the design process so far, exploration has focused only on the visual aspect, often resulting in superficial cultural applications. In line with a human-centered narrative, this study examines sensory design phenomena present in everyday life and culture in Indonesia that have not yet been articulated as a more comprehensive design approach. Spatial experiences that engage multiple senses can be a design approach for shaping a sense of place. This research was carried out through a case study of hospitality objects in Yogyakarta. The study developed a methodology to translate the philosophical values of Javanese tentrem. Sensory design theory, as the axis and language of multisensory, supported by the sense-of-place theory for cultural-lens context and emotional design for affective experience reflection, was synthesized into a coding framework. The framework was used for operational analysis in the autoethnographic method to map cultural values onto visual, auditory, olfactory, tactile, kinesthetic, and gustatory dimensions. Additionally, using triangulation data from online travel agent (OTA) reviews, the study develops a tiering analysis to articulate patterns and sub-articulation ratios in diffuse meaning. The results from the OTA reviews show that Javanese identity is actually present in the pre-reflective layer, in a diffuse-meaning. Meanwhile, the most articulated in the gustatory does not carry the main character of the sense of place. Results show that direct multisensory experiences differ from the guests’ review discourses, highlight the limitations of narrative evaluation in capturing embodied and multisensory experiences, and complement the understanding of place identity in hospitality design.