26 July, 2022

CultureCast Update: Dig Agency And T Garage Return To Talk Multisensory Wellness

By B&T Magazine

In a market of rising instability and change, T garage + Dig has launched CultureCast – a program that will help brands and businesses go beyond trends, to become part of the meaningful and lasting changes that shape our culture.

The first iteration of CultureCast resulted in 9 macro themes or cultural shifts that capture not only what we’re doing as a society, but also how we’re thinking, what we feel, and what we value, now and into the future.

Every few weeks T garage + Dig will give B&T readers a peak into the world of CultureCast with a discussion of one of these 9 key themes. This week, we explore the cultural shift towards Multisensory Wellness.

Health and wellness continue to stretch across new areas of our lives + experiences, embracing the idea of multisensory wellbeing.

All our senses are being engaged as business, brands and services recognise the opportunity to engage multiple senses and create a greater sense of personal, social and environmental wellbeing. Buildings that create positive touch sensations, food experiences that ask us to listen, and places that trigger tastes are all part of this emergent theme.

We’ve been embracing the benefits of touch and sound for a while. Weighted calming blankets have been re-thought in line with a growing importance of ‘touch’ in fabrics and businesses such as H&M Lab Wearable Love have embraced the concept as fashion in an innovative jacket with which you can send touches to yourself anytime and anywhere.

Audio is firmly centre stage in the drive towards greater wellbeing, music, sound therapy and autonomous sensory meridian response (ASMR) and we continue to tune into a world of mindful listening in our search for self-care and physical wellness:

A New Mindful Mix: the LEGO Group releases a soothing soundscape created with thousands of LEGO® bricks
Sona is a new music therapy app for anxiety that launched at CES 2022. “We’re on a mission to validate music as medicine,”
In October 2021, audio-experience startup Spatial partnered with Catalyst by Wellstar and the nonprofit digital streaming platform HealthTunes to utilize the restorative power of sound for healthcare workers.

Beyond touch and sound, new sensory experiences and ways to engage multiple senses are emerging to meet our collective need for greater wellbeing:

Calming your mind by focusing on your environment instead of your thoughts. Lego again is at the forefront with its Bonsai tree models
LuluLemon emphasises ‘buttery’ as textural element of its design – evoking much more than touch in relation to fabrics
Turning to pleasure – Nomadica is a wine brand that evokes the multisensual – visual, sound & taste

The next frontier lies in expanding Multisensory Wellness from a more personal realm into the larger social realm of our built environment, weaving it into our cities’ infrastructure and architecture. There’s already a clear shift from sensory deprivation in modern buildings towards evoking the senses:

Visually – via curves vs. angular interruptions
Auditory – not just the absence of sound – but also the benefits of certain sounds & soundscapes

We are rejecting the ‘sick building’ syndrome of old and looking towards ways our built environment can contribute to our collective wellbeing, both socially and environmentally.

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