The Digital Sensorium: Considering the Senses in Website Design

Sensory experience is gaining attention in rhetorical studies and has become an important feature of many digital environments. In this article, I argue that students and instructors can benefit from a developed and strategic understanding of the available means of sensory communication in the Web interface. To help them conceptualize these available means and create effective websites, I provide a planning heuristic for thinking through the digital sensorium in Web composition. In the first phase of this heuristic, I describe the importance of considering basic rhetorical issues relevant to design tasks. In the second phase, I encourage students and instructors to think through interactivity and agency so that they can maximize their design in ways specific to site goals. Finally, I provide groundwork for determining which sensory interface objects may be most productive. I ground my heuristic in a discussion of sensory design inside the field of digital rhetoric and provide examples to illustrate how the heuristic can function in context.