Sensory Groundworks

Abstract

Heat lingers, sound accumulates, and movement accelerates across workplace landscapes, shaping how space is felt before it is understood. These conditions intensify at Google’s North Bayshore campus in Mountain View, exposing employees to environmental stress while limiting autonomy. This uneven exposure is experienced differently across bodies and sensory thresholds. While academic settings offer forms of support for neurodiversity, these rarely extend into the workplace, revealing a gap in spatial conditions that engage sensory sensitivity across public and community landscapes. For some, this extends beyond discomfort, accumulating into isolation, affecting well-being and spatial experience. Sensory Groundworks proposes experiential gradients –Thermal, Sonic, and Pace– as sensory node interventions within West 8’s “Green Loop”, a landscape vision unfolding over the next decade. These gradients allow moments of recalibration, shifting from exposure toward balance. By replacing uniform comfort with environmental variation, accessibility emerges as a sensory condition where space responds to the body’s rhythms.