Human–Nature Interaction Pattern Design in Landscape Architecture

Abstract

Landscape architecture has long engaged esthetics, ecological process, and cultural meaning, and contemporary practice increasingly embraces systemic and process-based approaches. Yet even within this richness, designers often lack systematic tools for addressing how embodied interaction shapes human–nature relationships. Granted, frameworks such as biophilic design and restorative environments emphasize the importance of contact with nature. Yet they often stop short of specifying the sensory and movement-based interactions through which agency, well-being, and meaning are cultivated. To address this gap, this paper introduces Interaction Pattern Design (IPD) as a theory-grounded and practice-oriented framework for landscape architecture. The first part of the paper outlines what interaction patterns are, how they scale along the continuum from highly domestic to relatively wild environments, and the empirical evidence that establishes their significance. The second half of this paper speaks to designers specifically and applies this IP approach to the design process. Two design tools are introduced. One is Quadrant Mapping, which visualizes intersections of environmental and behavioral wildness within a site. The second is Structuring Interaction Patterns, which organizes design elements through scale, sequence, and co-occurrence. Drawing from case studies, the paper demonstrates how these tools enrich process- and ecology-focused design methods, supporting deeper and more enduring forms of engagement with nature.

1. Introduction

Landscape architecture has long emphasized visual composition, a focus deeply rooted in its historical intersections with landscape painting for aesthetics, Gestalt psychology for spatial form and organization, and environmental planning. In the Western design tradition especially, this emphasis has shaped dominant approaches, from the picturesque gardens to aerial cartography and GIS-based land use planning. This emphasis has shaped methods of representation—plans, perspectives, and photographs—and evaluative standards centered on vistas, forms, and spatial legibility. Iconic design lineages, from the axiality of Baroque gardens to the choreographed views of English picturesque and the photogenic minimalism of many contemporary plazas, reflect this visual tradition. While this focus has yielded enduring works, it has also narrowed the field’s sensory and experiential repertoire, often leaving much lived bodily engagement outside the frame.

Over the past several decades, designers and theorists have increasingly recognized the embodied nature of spatial experience. Architectural phenomenologists such as Holl [1], Pallasmaa [2], and Pérez-Gómez [3] have emphasized the felt, atmospheric, and multisensory qualities of space, focusing on what it is like to inhabit a place rather than to appreciate the views. Ecological psychology, affordance theory [4], and enactive cognition [5,6] position perception as active, relational, and grounded in movement. We do not passively receive the world: we navigate, interact with, and adapt to it through sensorimotor engagement. In turn, landscape scholars and practitioners have extended these insights in design-relevant terms, showing how esthetics unfolds in motion [7], and how bodily positioning, motion, and spatial orientation shape landscape experience [8,9]. Some practitioners have begun to integrate these findings through experiential design [10], movement-focused installations [11], and biophilic strategies [12,13]. Examples include Halprin’s movement “scores” [14] and multisensory biophilic interventions that incorporate sound, light, water, and material texture. Contemporary studios such as Stoss Landscape Urbanism, Z&T studio, Turenscape, Snøhetta, MVVA, and VOGT experiment with sensorimotor cues and vibrant interactions in their urban and ecological interventions.

Despite this growing awareness of embodiment, designers often lack conceptual or methodological tools to conduct systematic inquiries into embodied experience. As a result, intentions toward experience risk becoming diluted or lost in translation, with movement and engagement treated as secondary to form-making. Visual esthetics remain central, while the structuring of experience, the perceptual choreography of orientation, interaction, and unfolding meaning, is often left to intuition and chance.

This article responds to this gap by introducing Interaction Pattern Design (IPD): a conceptual and methodological framework that brings embodied interaction to the forefront of landscape architecture, and more broadly the built environment. IPD asks how people perceive, move through, and meaningfully engage with natural settings, and how those interactions can be actively shaped through design. IPD builds on Interaction Pattern Theory [15,16,17], which identifies recurring, evolutionarily grounded ways that humans engage with the natural world. These patterns, such as lying under the sky, engaging with water, or moving across terrain—and hundreds and indeed thousands of other interaction patterns at varying levels of scale—are not incidental behaviors but relational forms that emerge through the interplay of bodily perception and environmental affordances. IPD treats them as design primitives that can be composed to support deeper, more enduring forms of connection with nature. In this way, IPD unifies experiential and ecological dimensions of environmental design, integrating sensorimotor engagement with ecological processes. It offers a language and logic through which designers can scaffold interaction, perception, and restoration, while also advancing the broader agenda of environmental and cultural sustainability.

2. Interaction Patterns: Theory, Evidence, and Importance

2.1. What Is an Interaction Pattern?

One way to begin understanding what an Interaction Pattern (IP) is, and how it functions, is through a simple exercise.

Step 1: Think about an interaction in nature that you have had and was meaningful.

Step 2: Now characterize it in such a way that you could imagine many such examples of it happening. Even though each example would differ in its particulars, you would have no problem recognizing them as essentially the same form of interaction.

Step 3: If possible, include a verb for what you are doing and a noun for the nature you are doing it with. You might use a preposition to connect them, such as walking along a riverbank, lying under the night sky, or gazing across a canyon.

At this point, you likely have an interaction pattern.

This simple method reveals something important. People regularly participate in recurring forms of interaction with nature, even if they have never named them as such. Each instance of an IP is unique. These patterns are not repetitions in the cookie-cutter sense. Yet they are also recognizable as part of a shared relational form. Like the rhythm of a language, IPs are flexible in their expression while structured enough to remain identifiable across diverse contexts.

The concept of Interaction Patterns (IPs) draws early inspiration from Christopher Alexander’s pattern language for the built environment [18,19], which proposed that good design arises from recurring spatial relationships that support human well-being. For example, his pattern Windows on Two Sides of a Room suggests that people often prefer spaces with light from more than one direction. These patterns are not prescriptive blueprints but general principles open to local interpretation. However, IPs diverge from Alexander’s approach in fundamental ways. While his patterns operate at the level of physical configuration (such as window placement, courtyard proportions, or circulation routes), IPs are defined at the level of lived interaction. They focus not on only what space is, but on what people do: how they perceive, move, respond, and relate within a given setting. In this sense, IPs foreground the experiential unfolding of perception and action, emphasizing the relational nature of human–environment interaction.

We define an Interaction Pattern as a generalizable characterization of the essential features of human–nature interaction. IP is abstract enough to apply across diverse situations, yet specific enough to capture the meaningful structure of that interaction given different types of nature, people, purposes, and moments in time [15]. IPs in their most basic form can be expressed through a simple linguistic structure: a verb that names the human action, a preposition that indicates the relationship, and a noun that names the natural element. For example: running along a ridgeline, lying under a tree, wading into a stream, or sitting beside a fire. This linguistic framing helps designers recognize the recurring forms of embodied engagement that may otherwise go unnoticed and provides a vocabulary to design for them intentionally.

2.2. Key Characteristics of Interaction Patterns

We think that all IPs, by virtue of being patterns, share certain core characteristics. Five are highlighted here.

• Structure of Engaged Activity

Many scientific disciplines study patterns in nature, such as the chemical configuration of a molecule, the fractal geometry of a tree, or the orbital pattern of a planet. These describe physical or formal regularities, but they are not Interaction Patterns. An IP instead identifies the patterned form of human engagement with the more-than-human environment, including how we move, perceive, and act in relation to nature. It is not just a behavior, but a structured interaction co-emerging with the environmental affordances.

• Limitless Variation in Instantiation

The instantiations of any given IP are limitless because they vary with the specific qualities of the natural setting, the person involved, the context, and the moment in time. Consider the IP walking along a forest trail. The path may be the same in general form, yet each walk is different, shaped by the season, weather, lighting, and subtle changes in the forest floor underfoot. Variation also arises at the human level: one’s physical strength that day, mood, intentions for the walk, pace, attentional focus, and openness to unplanned encounters all influence how the interaction unfolds. The same holds for countless other IPs: no two enactments are identical, even when they belong to a shared pattern of embodied engagement.

• Distinct from Psychological Experience

An IP is not the same as the psychological experience it may evoke. IPs can elicit emotions and cognitive states such as joy, awe, humility, fear, happiness, focused attention, surprise, thoughtfulness, vastness, curiosity, or calmness. these affective responses are not what define the pattern itself. Distinguishing the structure of interaction from its possible psychological outcomes brings clarity and flexibility to the concept. The same IP may generate a range of experiences depending on the person, the context, or the unfolding dynamics of the moment.

• Combinatorial in Practice

In lived experience, IPs usually occur alongside other IPs, overlapping and unfolding together, each adding layers of engagement and meaning. A useful analogy is a word in a language. Words have definitions and can be identified on their own, but they most often appear in combination with other words, forming sentences, paragraphs, and larger narratives. Similarly, although it is useful to identify an individual IP for clarity, it is important not to lose sight of how multiple IPs combine in practice. For example, swimming in the ocean might simultaneously enact encountering a nature that can hurt, being moved by water, interacting with periodicity (of waves and tides), and reading the signs of nature (such as currents, weather, and the presence of marine life). These patterns coalesce dynamically, producing a richer and more complex engagement than any one of them could alone.

• Keystone Interaction Patterns

For many purposes, including in the design process, it is useful to recognize that some IPs play a disproportionate role in human–nature interaction because the specific interaction (a) is itself highly beneficial or meaningful, (b) engenders dozens or even hundreds of complementary, subsidiary, or overlapping interaction patterns, and/or (c) if lost, leads to the subsequent loss of dozens or even hundreds of such patterns. These IPs are referred to as keystone interaction patterns. This term partly mimics the use of keystone species in conservation biology, which refers to a species, such as a top predator, that has a disproportionate benefit to its environment relative to its abundance [20,21]. For example, if the wolf, a keystone species, is removed from areas such as Yellowstone National Park, elk grow more abundant and stationary, overgrazing vegetation, which leads to the loss of habitat, increased erosion, and the loss of biodiversity. Similarly, in terms of IPs, when air pollution in cities such as Beijing or Mexico City is so severe that it prevents people from being outside, the loss of that single interaction pattern cascades into the loss of every human–nature interaction that requires being outdoors. In this way, being outside is a keystone interaction pattern, one of the broadest and most fundamental of them all.

2.3. Interaction Patterns Across the Continuum: From Relatively Wild to Highly Domestic Nature

Not all nature is the same. Children lying on their backs in an open field watching clouds drift across the open sky are not engaging in the same nature as children glimpsing a patch of sky through the windows of a classroom or between city buildings. While both may offer esthetic value or moments of calm, their affordances for deeper human–nature connection diverge in important ways. More wild settings, where nature retains some freedom to express its own dynamics, can provoke humility, sensory alertness, and existential reflection. They remind us of a world not shaped for us, but shared with us.

We do not need to learn wildness as much as rediscover it [22]. For tens of thousands of years, we enacted it. It is part of our evolutionary inheritance. Wildness shaped the architecture of our bodies, minds, perceptual systems, and of what counts as meaningful. That shaping has not disappeared. Much of it lives on, dormant or active, in our physiological rhythms, our movement patterns, our ways of sensing the world [23]. And to flourish individually and collectively we need forms of it in our lives.

This is not a call for idealizing untouched wilderness [24]. Nor does it suggest that deeply meaningful interaction cannot occur in managed, designed, or everyday urban spaces. Rather, it is a recognition that the structure of the environment, and how much freedom it affords to nonhuman life to express itself, matters. When rivers are channelized, predators removed, or vegetation shaped to human preference, something subtle yet profound shifts in the human encounter with nature. The affective range narrows. Uncertainty, awe, and discovery give way to predictability and control.

This raises a key challenge for design:

How can we support interaction patterns that remain sensitive to this continuum—from relatively wild to highly domestic—and engage it with nuance?

Interaction Pattern Design (IPD) directly addresses this challenge. Because Interaction Patterns are relationally defined, they flexibly scale across a wide range of environments. Consider, for example, the keystone IP: Recognizing and being recognized by a nonhuman other. As shown in Figure 1, this IP may unfold in the startling moment of eye contact with a wild bear, in the steady gaze of a horse, or in the quiet gaze with a companion dog. Each of these encounters is meaningful. Yet when the other is ecologically autonomous, untrained, and beyond human control something different is activated. There is often greater alertness, humility, and awe. In the presence of the bear, for instance, a person may sense a mutual awareness: recognizing the bear’s consciousness while recognizing that the bear is, in turn, recognizing the human’s consciousness. It is a meeting of otherness, where thought falls away, replaced by stillness and a shared moment before each turns and moves on.

For a second example, consider the IP Movement Away from Human Settlement and the Return. In Paleolithic times, hunters would leave nomadic campsites in search of animals, and gatherers would set out for roots, tubers, nuts, berries, and other plants. The further they went, the more they left the safety of the larger group. Sometimes hunters pursued their quarry alone. On the African savannah, San men on occasion would run down a bull eland in 120-degree heat. Both hunters and gatherers would then return, sometimes empty-handed but often with food to share, looking forward to the reunion with their group and loved ones, to the warmth of the fire, and to the fullness of belly [23]. Today people enact aspects of this pattern every time they leave the comfort and safety of their homes and venture out. In younger years, it is easier to instantiate this pattern in wild ways, covering great distances into remote places. In elderly years, there can be a beautiful domestic form: opening the door and walking outside, perhaps with the aid of a cane. Even a single block out and back, during that phase in life, can be enough to initiate attention, a little fear, sensory enjoyment, challenge, and perhaps awe, for once engaged, this keystone interaction pattern sets into motion other immediate, alive interactions with nature that cannot be replicated indoors.

For a third example, consider the IP Walking along the edge of water and land. At the relatively wild end, it may mean walking along the shifting line between ocean and beach, where waves surge and retreat under open sky, wind carries the scent of salt, and the sand shifts unpredictably underfoot. A more domesticated version unfolds on the trail skirting Central Park’s Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Reservoir in New York City, where the water’s edge is framed by skyline views and the movement of people is choreographed along a defined path. At the more managed end, the pattern might occur beside a ground-level fountain, where the water can be approached and touched, the sounds and reflections offering a mediated but still meaningful experience of a water–land threshold. Across these contexts, the pattern remains recognizable, but its sensory intensity, unpredictability, and ecological depth often rise as the environment becomes more relatively wild.

These examples highlight the importance of preserving access to the full continuum of human–nature interaction. Domestic and managed settings offer crucial opportunities for connection, particularly in urban life, and should not be dismissed. But when wildness is diminished or eliminated, something irreplaceable is lost, not only for ecosystems but for human perception, well-being, and flourishing. As Yu articulates through his urban wildness observations, modern cities increasingly pursue environments that are “smooth, exquisite, elegant, and docile,” where spontaneous habitats and ecological autonomy are displaced in favor of controlled surfaces [25,26]. In this framing, urban wildness is not only ecological but civilizational—offering a counterpoint to the glass-and-metal city. Situating IPD within this discourse shows how the degree of wildness is not simply an environmental gradient but also a cultural and perceptual one, shaping how humans inhabit and make meaning in place.

Indeed, this continuum between domestic and relatively wild nature is central to the IPD framework. Because patterns are defined at a level of abstraction, they can be subtly and incrementally made more wild or more domestic. Such flexibility enables designers to shape experiences that fit the constraints and opportunities of a site while sustaining the deeper evolutionary connections that give the patterns their enduring power. The tools introduced in Section 3—Quadrant Mapping and Pattern Structuring—build directly on this foundation.

2.4. Empirical Evidence for Interaction Patterns

In 2010, the Interaction Pattern Approach began with an ambitious goal: to identify the full repertoire of human–nature Interaction Patterns worldwide [27]. This proved to be conceptually illuminating but practically intractable. Kahn and colleagues then shifted to a more focused strategy: to document IPs in specific settings where sustained observation and investigation could reveal their structure, variation, developmental significance, and practical importance. This place-based approach with cultural sensitivity allowed them to refine definitions, link patterns to environmental gradients of wildness and domestication, evaluate methods, and test hypotheses. The five studies summarized here in

Table 1. Empirical Studies of Interaction-Pattern Theory.

Study	Setting and Participants	Key Methods	Notable Interaction Patterns	Core Findings	Implications for Design
Discovery Park [28]	Urban wild park, Seattle; 320 adult participants	Written narratives analyzed through IP coding	Encountering wildlife, walking trails, gazing at views, exploring beach edges	95% of meaningful IPs occurred in relatively wild areas	Preserving ecological wildness is essential to support rich and meaningful IPs
Girl Scout Study [29]	127 girls, (ages 8–11)	Narrative responses and Presence survey	Embodied vs. visual-only IPs (e.g., hugging trees vs. watching birds)	Embodied IPs were linked to significantly higher Presence	Tactile, immersive interactions can deepen attentional and affective engagement
Fiddleheads Preschool [30,31]	49 preschoolers over 35 weeks	Time-sampled video coding across wild and domestic outdoor areas	26 recurring IPs including caring for, cohabiting with, and responding to nature	Relational and ethical behaviors occurred more often in relatively wild settings	Beyond physical plan, interaction with Wildness affords deeper relational development
Hong Kong Nature Program [32]	54 children (mean age 4.8) in varied nature settings	Observational video coding of 708 IPs	Domination-oriented vs. relational IPs	Wild settings evoked more reciprocal, respectful interactions; domesticated ones fostered control-based behaviors	Domesticated or overly controlled environments may undermine relational ethics with nature
Youth Group Home [33]	Adolescents with Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs)	Mixed methods: 22-month observation + photovoice interviews	62 keystone IPs (e.g., sensing periodicity, encountering animals, seeking refuge)	IPs supported emotion regulation, autonomy, meaning-making, and resilience	Nature-rich environments can act as therapeutic interventions; IPs may guide trauma-informed, healing-centered design

represent the core of this empirical foundation. For the purposes of this article, the summaries are necessarily brief, and readers are encouraged to consult the original journal articles for more detail.

These five studies collectively establish a robust and diverse empirical foundation for Interaction Pattern Design (IPD). Conducted across different populations—including children, adolescents with trauma histories, and urban park users—they demonstrate that Interaction Patterns are not only conceptually sound but observable, codable, and developmentally significant. Across all studies, a consistent theme emerges: relative wild interaction powerfully supports richer, more relational, and psychologically meaningful interactions with nature. Embodied and multisensory IPs foster deeper states of presence, ethical regard, emotional regulation, and resilience. Moreover, the findings show that while IPs can be flexibly expressed in both wild and domestic settings, their relational depth, ethical quality, and restorative potential are amplified in ecologically autonomous environments. These studies pave the way for IPD’s practical implementation—not only as an analytic framework but as a design perspective to cultivate deeper and life-enhancing human–nature connections.

2.5. Environmental Generational Amnesia: Why IP Design Is a Solution

Environmental Generational Amnesia (EGA) is the psychological phenomenon wherein each generation constructs its understanding of what constitutes a “normal” natural world based on the environment experienced during childhood. The crux of the problem is that, as environmental degradation increases, each successive generation comes to perceive an increasingly impoverished natural world as normal. As a result, profound environmental losses go unrecognized, and are thus not addressed, and the resulting decline in well-being of people who now live in these increasingly nature-deprived and polluted environments is also not fully recognized, measured, or prioritized. This normalization of loss erodes both ecological consciousness and the motivation to protect what remains [17,34,35,36,37,38].

A clear illustration of EGA comes from its foundational study by Kahn and Friedman [39] of Black children in inner-city Houston who were interviewed on their environmental views and values. It was found that, despite living in what was then the most polluted city in the United States, most children did not believe Houston had pollution problems. This was not due to a lack of reasoning but to a failure of perceptual baselining. Having never known a less degraded world, they had little experiential foothold from which to recognize loss. The polluted air was simply their normal. This quiet erasure is at the heart of EGA.

The problem is not limited to children in highly polluted conditions; EGA shapes the perceptions of all of us [40,41]. Even when people intellectually understand it as a concept often fail to feel it in a visceral way—because the sensorial and emotional memory of what has been lost is absent or underdeveloped [42]. Thus, addressing EGA requires more than ecological knowledge or appeals to policy. It calls for experiences that restore perceptual depth, emotional attunement, and the embodied memory of what a more vibrant environment can feel like [43]. This is where Interaction Pattern Design becomes a powerful tool. By naming and supporting recurring forms of human–nature interaction, IPD helps counter the generational shifting baseline. It brings back what has faded across generational memory by grounding interaction in what remains possible and that which can be rediscovered.

3. Interaction Pattern Design in Practice: Designing for Deeper Engagement with Nature in Built Environments

This section may matter most for designers in landscape architecture or broader practices of built environments. Section 1 and Section 2 introduced the theory of Interaction Patterns, grounded it to embodiment and environmental psychology, and summarized the empirical evidence. Our framework of Interaction Pattern Theory, particularly regarding the concept of Environmental Generational Amnesia, offers a new lens on how perception and movement emerge through designed interactions with natural settings, and why such embodied experiences are urgently needed.

Still, many practitioners will ask: What does this mean for how I design? What changes in my process, my thinking, or my outcomes? This section answers these questions. It introduces Interaction Pattern Design (IPD) not just as a theory, but as a method.

This section demonstrates how the theoretical framework of Interaction Pattern Design (IPD) operates in practice through two design tools, Quadrant Mapping and Structuring Interaction Patterns; and their application in three keystone interaction patterns case studies. These examples illustrate how IPD translates theory into design analysis and composition, revealing how spatial sequences and affordances shape embodied human–nature interaction.

We introduce two core tools: Quadrant Mapping and Structuring Interaction Patterns. These tools help designers analyze, shape, and iterate environmental factors based on how affordances and embodied behaviors co-arise. They offer practical methods for applying Interaction Pattern Theory in the design process. Before introducing these tools directly, we first clarify the context and design rationale behind them—why interaction patterns matter, and how this method differs from other nature-based or sensory-oriented approaches.

The foundation of IPD rests on a simple but often overlooked premise: that meaningful experience arises not from environmental features alone, but through behavioral–relational acts such as perception, movement, emotional engagement, agency, and intentionality. This relationship is illustrated in Figure 2. Meaningful interaction requires some degree of both environmental affordance and behavioral engagement. One without the other is insufficient. If a place offers ecological richness but a person remains passive or disengaged, the interaction remains thin. Conversely, even if a person is open and curious, a setting that lacks sufficient ecological richness or perceptual affordances may fail to support deep engagement.

Rewilding in even small increments is one possible and important outcome of IPD. But it is not its sole purpose. In some settings, the goal may be to amplify sensory richness, invite attentional restoration, or evoke emotional depth. In others, it may be to support playful exploration, creative risk-taking, or sense of awe. What unites these efforts is a shared attention to how environmental features and behavioral possibilities interact to shape experience. In this sense, IPD is less a prescriptive model than a way of thinking, one that treats interaction as the fundamental medium of design. Core contributions of IPD include:

• IPD moves beyond sensory richness as a proxy for embodiment.

While many design strategies emphasize multisensory features such as light, sound, and texture, they often stop short of addressing how those features invite bodily orientation, movement, or psychological shift. IPD focuses on how perception and action co-emerge through interaction.

• IPD reframes nature as shaping experience through dynamic conditions.

Rather than treating natural elements as fixed or esthetic background, IPD highlights how specific material and immaterial conditions invite bodily exploration, rest, play, or adaptation. These recurring patterns reflect deep, archetypal ways humans engage with landscapes.

• IPD embeds developmental and evolutionary reasoning into design.

IPD offers a developmental and evolutionary rationale for how certain interaction patterns play a critical role in child development, and have been shaped over millennia. By foregrounding such interactions, designers can make more informed choices about which experiences to preserve, amplify, or invite across scales of landscape intervention.

• IPD offers a systematic but flexible method.

Unlike programming checklists or feature-based design, IPD provides a way to identify, prioritize, and compose meaningful interactions based on affordances and embodied experience. It supports site analysis and conceptual design at the early stage, and carries through schematic, design development and detailing.

While Interaction Pattern Theory has been validated through post-occupancy evaluations of built and natural environments, Interaction Pattern Design (IPD) introduces two practice-oriented tools to shift the focus upstream into the design process. In what follows, we introduce the two IPD tools in detail and demonstrate their application across a range of landscape settings.

3.1. Tools for Designing with Interaction Patterns

The two tools introduced here offer complementary ways to support Interaction Pattern Design. Quadrant Mapping helps designers assess how environmental and behavioral conditions shape the potential for meaningful interaction, and can help rewild the design process by shifting attention from fixed features to the dynamic relationship between place and behavior. Structuring Interaction Patterns provides a flexible method for composing these interactions across time and space.

3.1.1. Quadrant Mapping (Tool 1): Designing Across Environmental and Behavioral Wildness

Quadrant Mapping is a tool for analyzing and designing across two interrelated gradients: environmental wildness and behavioral wildness. This helps designers visualize how affordances co-emerge through the reciprocal relationship between setting and action—shaping how people perceive, engage with, and respond to their environment.

As shown in Figure 3, the matrix is organized along two axes:

Environmental Wildness refers to the degree to which an environment operates beyond human control, maintaining its own self-organizing ecological processes, relationships, and temporal rhythms. It is characterized by autonomy, complexity, and ongoing dynamism, unfolding without direct human maintenance. While wildness can exist at multiple scales, even in marginal or overlooked spaces, the depth, integrity, and resilience of wildness often increase with ecological diversity and scope. Vast, contiguous and diverse landscapes typically support more complex and interdependent wild processes than small, fragmented patches.

Behavioral wildness refers to forms of human engagement, both physical and psychological, that are self-directed, situationally attuned, and shaped by the demands and invitations of place. It includes actions like climbing, wading, perching, or exploring, as well as internal states such as awe, curiosity, vulnerability, relationality, or serenity. These behaviors emerge when individuals are free to move and feel invited without rigid scripts or externally imposed rules. Behavioral wildness involves loosened cognitive and social constraints, opening space for embodied presence and emotional depth. In design contexts, supporting behavioral wildness means creating affordances that invite variation, agency, and unplanned interaction, allowing people to respond to landscapes in personally meaningful, enlivened ways.

Many designers may recognize elements of what we describe here but use other terms. Behavioral wildness, in particular, overlaps with concepts like embodied experience, user agency, affordance-based design, or multisensory engagement. In child-focused spaces, similar qualities are sometimes framed in terms of playability, loose parts, or exploratory learning. From a phenomenological perspective, one might describe these as open-ended spatial narratives that emerge through movement, perception, and affect. What the language of wildness adds is a more direct acknowledgment of spontaneity, autonomy, and the unscripted nature of these interactions. It also draws a sharper contrast with behavioral domestication where experiences are overly programmed, passive, or controlled. By naming these patterns as wild, we reconnect them to developmental, ecological, and evolutionary processes that have shaped human perception and action for tens and often hundreds of thousands of years.

This two-axis model enables designers to locate any existing, anticipated, or desired interaction within a conceptual frame that reveals how environmental and behavioral wildness interrelate. It provides designers with a strategic lens for assessing and modulating affordances in response to site conditions, project goals, and cultural context. Take Seattle’s Discovery Park as an example [28]. For most visitors, reaching the beach requires a roughly 1- to 2-mile walk through a sequence of meadows and forested trails. The various routes are rich in environmental wildness—unregulated, sensorially varied, and ecologically alive—and invite a corresponding degree of behavioral wildness as people navigate shifting terrain, encounter wildlife, or pause for unplanned moments. At the same time, the park includes a small number of disability parking spots near the beach, enabling those with mobility limitations to bypass the longer journey and still experience the shoreline. In that case, the environmental wildness of the approach is reduced, but the final destination still offers sensory depth and elemental presence. By enabling multiple combinations of environmental and behavioral wildness, the park creates layered pathways into nature that meet diverse human needs and capacities. Indeed, it can be understood as a form of inclusive design that expands access while maximizing the depth of interaction for everyone.

More broadly, Quadrant Mapping helps designers consider whether experiences are overly clustered in one quadrant and to deliberately extend the experiential gradient across a site. It is a generative tool for expanding the spectrum of wildness in design, whether applied to a single interaction pattern or an entire landscape system.

3.1.2. Structuring Interaction Patterns (Tool 2): Working with Scale, Sequence, and Co-Occurrence

Tool 2 introduces three structuring techniques—scale, sequence, and co-occurrence—that help designers compose Interaction Patterns into layered experiences. Together, they shape how interactions unfold over time, nest within different spatial scales, and overlap in the moment.

Scale: Nested Patterns

IPs are inherently multiscale. As illustrated in Figure 4, a single behavior, such as walking amidst fallen leaves, can be described at many levels of generality. It might be seen as moving through a textured groundscape, experiencing seasonal change, or attuning to the periodicity of nature. None of these framings is more correct than the others. They highlight different dimensions of the same interaction. In this sense, this tool is generative, helping designers to think with various aspects to translate experiential goals (e.g., calm, intimacy, poetics) into a set of more specific interaction patterns, and ultimately into concrete spatial affordance. Similarly, small-scale perceptual shifts, such as noticing light through leaves or feeling cold air along a shaded path, may function as standalone IPs or contribute to broader experiential patterns. Thinking across scales helps designers understand how larger spatial strategies can be unpacked and grounded in concrete, embodied acts with finer grain of human scale design, and how momentary interactions may accumulate into lasting impressions.

Sequence

Composing the Order of Engagement. IPs also gain meaning through their sequential relationships. The same set of patterns, rearranged, can yield distinct emotional tones, such as playful, restorative, disorienting, or transcendent. To further unpack the IP mentioned above, “noticing light through leaves” is more likely to happen when the space invites a pause or shifting views; and “feeling cold air along a shaded path” will be more heightened after an effortful hike or moving through contrasting thermal thresholds. As indicated in Figure 5, another example can be: (i) building a fire at night, followed by (ii) warming body by fire, and then (iii) plunging into a cold river engenders a different phenomenological experience than the sequence of first (iii) plunging into a cold river and then emerging cold and shivering, and then quickly trying to (ii) build a fire, and then finally (iii) getting warmed by the fire. Designers can shape these sequences deliberately, leading people through contrasting transitions or drawing out prolonged buildups toward immersion, anticipation, or stillness.

Sequencing is not always linear. In many environments, interaction patterns form loops or branching chains: walking a trail may lead to pausing on a bench, which opens attention to bird calls, which draws awareness to light filtering through leaves, and so on. Each step modulates perception and primes the next. These micro-sequences can build momentum or shift focus—creating perceptual cascades that ripple outward through time, space, and body.

Co-Occurrence: Supporting Embodied Immersion

In real environments, interaction patterns rarely occur one at a time. Consider a person lying on sun-warmed rock beside the ocean. During that time, indeed in a single moment, they might be feeling heat on skin, smelling salt air, watching birds wheel overhead, and listening to the crash of a surf. These are not separate episodes but simultaneous streams of interaction, creating an immersive, layered field of experience, as illustrated in Figure 6.

Designers can work with this polyphonic quality by supporting environments that allow multiple patterns to co-occur and reinforce one another. The goal is not maximal stimulation but creating conditions where embodied, emotional, and perceptual dimensions align in personally meaningful ways. This can be especially powerful in transitional spaces, such as thresholds between wild and domestic, solitary and social, or open and enclosed, where a few well-composed interactions can catalyze deeper awareness or immersion.

In summary, understanding how interaction patterns nest across scales, sequence, and co-occur enables designers to think not just about individual affordances but about how experiences are composed across time and space (Figure 7). These structuring dynamics provide a foundation for crafting spatial experiences that move people physically, psychologically, and emotionally.

3.2. Applying IPD: Keystone Interaction Pattern Case Studies

The tools introduced above—Quadrant Mapping and Structuring Interaction Patterns—equip designers to think relationally about space, affordance, and embodied experience. In this section, we demonstrate how these tools work in practice through three keystone interaction patterns: lying under the sky, engaging with water, and moving across terrain. These patterns were selected because they appear across a wide range of landscapes and activate perceptual and emotional depth. More importantly, they reflect archetypal ways that humans interact with the natural world, reconnecting people to ecological rhythms and primal ways of sensing. As Norberg-Schulz [44,45] writes, they “connect human beings with the earth. It speaks of permanence, belonging, and the rhythm of nature” as “the grounding forces of dwelling through sky, earth, mortals, and divinities.”

3.2.1. Lying Under the Sky: Grounding and Receptivity

Lying down on the earth beneath the sky is one of the most ancient and archetypal gestures of human presence. Though seemingly passive, this posture reorganizes spatial orientation. The body shifts from vertical scanning and locomotion to horizontal grounding and receptivity. In doing so, attention slows down, and breath deepens. Light, air, temperature, and sound begin to register differently. Across cultures and life stages, this interaction pattern evokes rich associations such as childhood play, sunbathing, stargazing, or mourning, which invite a sense of intimacy, awe, or spiritual surrendering.

Interaction Pattern Design (IPD) treats lying under the sky not as a fixed behavior but as a relational possibility. The act emerges through terrain, materiality, atmospheric openness, and bodily readiness. When designers apply the IPD tools to this pattern, they can analyze and support it in ways that invite deeper interaction with nature and foster moments of openness and reorientation.

• Quadrant Mapping (Tool 1): Modulating the Conditions for Rest and Reorientation

Quadrant Mapping helps clarify how environmental and behavioral wildness interact to support or suppress this pattern. Lying under the sky can occur in wild alpine meadows. It can also emerge in urban parks, rooftop gardens, or designed terraces. What matters is not just the presence of sky, but the alignment of terrain, comfort, and cultural permission that invites the act.

Each of the following examples corresponds to a quadrant in the matrix introduced earlier in Figure 3, illustrating how affordances and behaviors co-arise in different ecological and cultural contexts. The “×” denotes this intersection, pointing to a specific configuration in which qualities of the environment (such as wild or domestic) combine with types of behavioral engagement (such as emergent or programmed):

• Wild × Emergent

In remote settings, this pattern often arises spontaneously. People lie in a forest clearing, on a sun-warmed bluff, or along a moss-covered rock (Figure 8a). The environment holds its own rhythms, and people surrender to the moment, shaped by light, mood, or terrain. The interaction co-emerges with setting.

• Wild × Programmed

In national parks or backcountry campsites, designers may formalize this gesture through leveled tent pads, platforms, or clearings. These preserve ecological integrity while signaling where lying is welcomed. A small intervention in an otherwise wild context can create this invitation. (Figure 8b).

• Domestic × Emergent

Urban lawns, sloped berms, or elevated decks can invite reclining without scripting it. For example, at Gas Works Park in Seattle visitors often lie on the grassy hill without benches or signs (Figure 8c). Soft surfaces, gentle slopes, visibility of sky or shaded area in summer can help make the act feel natural and unprescribed (Figure 8d).

• Domestic × Programmed

Rooftop lounges or terraced seating areas may support lying through cushions, shade structures, or sun decks. These more controlled settings still enable perceptual shifts and offer moments of pause in an otherwise structured landscape.

As indicated in the diagram (Figure 9), the environmental factors shift from a wild state park to domestic urban lawn, while the behaviors stay unprescribed and organic. Designers can use this tool to modulate the experience across a gradient of wildness. Small decisions, such as canopy spacing, surface texture, and sky framing, can make a posture feel spontaneous or constrained. The goal is not to prescribe lying, but to enable the conditions for it to arise.

Quadrant Mapping functions not just as an analytical tool but as a design framework. When thoughtfully composed, these features offer degrees of freedom. The precedents from Figure 10 shows variations in design factors, reflecting modulations among both the environmental factors and behaviors axis, as indicated in Figure 11. It demonstrates how different design factors can invite and shape the experience of lying under the sky. The body can choose not just whether to lie down, but how, where, and with what level of openness. By locating interaction patterns among the quadrant spectrum, designers can evaluate site conditions, ecological potential, and cultural expectations, then modulate the factors to deepen engagement with respect to project goals, budget, and users.

• Structuring Interaction Patterns (Tool 2): Scale, Sequence and Co-Occurrence

As indicated in Figure 7, we propose three ways to structure interaction pattens: Scale (Nested Patterns); Sequential patterns, and Co-occurrence patterns. Moving beyond a singular interaction pattern, this tool helps designers to curate experiences through spatial compositions and across time.

• Scale: Nested Patterns

This principle operates across multiple scales of interaction pattern. At the generic scale, it suggests tectonic spatial organization such as landform and orientation. Moving toward the specific scale, it prompts consideration of location and degrees of immersion or enclosure—lying by the water or among groves offers distinct experiences. At body scales, it considers the sensation of contact—skin against grass, stone, or sand—heightening awareness of texture and temperature. Moreover, the posture can shift to reclining or sitting, depending on the readiness of body.

• Sequence and Co-Occurrence:

Lying under the sky rarely occurs in isolation. A typical sequence might begin with environmental cues—warmth from the sun, the coolness of wind, a magnificent view—that invite a pause. Or after an effortful hike, the person slows, finds a spot, lowers their body to the ground, shifts posture to align comfort and view, and then directs gaze upward. As the gaze expands to the open sky, attention shifts from immediate surroundings to the vast overhead field, creating a perceptual cascade from tactile grounding to expansive visual immersion. As indicated in

Table 2. Examples of Co-Occurring Patterns for lying under the sky.

Co-Occurrence IP	Perceptual/Behavioral Description	Design Implication
Resting in dappled light	Choosing filtered shade beneath canopy	Use deciduous trees to modulate light seasonally; allow sun patches and shade to coexist
Listening to natural sound	Attuning to the ambient sound such as wind or leaves weaving	Sculpt acoustic texture with canopy, planting, and terrain
Feeling ground texture	Skin contact with grass, moss, warm stone or wood	Offer tactile variety through diverse materials
Co-resting with others	Social or animal presence during stillness	Design for plural seating or proximity without crowding; restoring ecological habitat

, along the way, co-occurring patterns emerge—listening to wind, feeling ground texture, resting in dappled light—each deepening sensory engagement. Designers can amplify these layered experiences through spatial rhythm and sensory variety.

• IPD Insight: Rewilding Rest:

The power of this pattern lies in its shift from doing to being. Posture changes, and with it, perception follows. Lying under the sky reorients perspective and opens the sensory field. When supported with care, the pattern becomes a site of quiet openness: sensory-rich, embodied, and attuned to the more-than-human world. IPD invites designers to shape the conditions that allow this possibility to emerge.

3.2.2. Engaging with Water: Immersion, Motion, Attunement, and Rejuvenation

Water holds a unique position in landscape architecture—it is elemental, symbolic, and multisensory, and with ecological aliveness. Biophilic design recognizes the “presence of water” as a key factor in promoting restorative and esthetic experiences. Among the most compelling and recurrent of Interaction Patterns, engaging with water offers a multisensory encounter that can refresh, stimulate, or calm. This pattern spans a wide spectrum, from wading through creeks, swimming in lakes, and showering under waterfalls to cupping water in the hands or simply sitting beside a slow-moving stream. The presence of water invites motion and touch. It amplifies sound, refracts light, and conveys temperature. These dynamics speak to our ontological attunement: bodily, perceptual, and emotional. When thoughtfully supported, this engagement becomes not only immersive but rejuvenating, offering a form of embodied renewal that links humans to deeper rhythms of the natural world.

• Quadrant Mapping (Tool 1): From Feature to Interaction

As indicated in Figure 3, Quadrant Mapping reveals how design choices and site conditions shape the way water is encountered. A landscape may include water, but the pattern of engagement varies dramatically depending on the degree of environmental wildness and behavioral openness.

• Wild × Emergent

A shallow river with seasonal flow variation, unbounded edges, and open access may invite people to wade, sit in current, or explore. The sensory variation—temperature, sound, wetness—fosters immersion and play. The terrain offers spontaneous openings. Swimming in the ocean or encountering a sea turtle in the wild exemplifies this kind of unscripted, embodied reciprocity.

• Wild × Programmed

Naturalistic water bodies may still support design interventions that guide behavior. For example, Zumthor’s Therme Vals (Figure 12a) choreographs immersion through controlled spatial sequences—hot and cold pools, changing temperatures, and soundscapes—all within architectural space located in the Swiss Alps. The design blends architecture into the mountainside and the materiality of local quartzite creates a cave-like atmosphere. These features heighten awareness without prescribing actions.

• Domestic × Emergent

In urban parks or plazas, small-scale rills, shallow pools, or misting installations can invite spontaneous engagement. At the Oslo Opera House by Snøhetta (Figure 12b), the sloping public plaza merges with the fjord, offering unmarked yet open contact with ocean water. At the Diana Princess of Wales Memorial Fountain in London (Figure 12c), people walk barefoot through textured, flowing water. Children touch, play, and wade freely, responding to tactile cues and the invitation to move. At FLO, a misting installation in Boston’s Olmsted Park (Figure 12d), the artist selectively set up misting devices along the Olmsted Park, allowing people to walk in the landscape while encountering fog and the sensory immersion it offers. The fog installation creates a series of spatial experiences depending on the landscape characters such as a dreamy fog floating toward the lake, or gathering at the valley. They spark emergent interactions: playing and hiding in the fog, chasing and touching the cloudlike mist, walking through a moist threshold and get lost in its mystery, or just simply observing how it faded into the groves. Similarly, The Cloud Paradise Park in Chengdu, China, designed by Z + T Studio, weaves together variety of water elements via constructed eco-systems: fountains, shallow ponds, streams, and mist—into a rolling terrain of gentle hills. The design uses elevation and planting to choreograph bodily movement and microclimatic variation, enabling people to engage with water in different forms and intensities. Children run through mist rings, dip hands into reflective pools, or follow water flowing through sculpted channels. These layered, open-ended interactions enrich urban park experience beyond walking or viewing, deepening the connection with natural elements, and offering a sense of rejuvenation in everyday life.

• Domestic × Programmed

In structured urban settings such as splash pads or ornamental fountains, water is choreographed in predictable, regulated ways. These features often prioritize visual and auditory presence—through jets, cascades, or reflective surfaces—while limiting physical engagement due to safety considerations, formality, or maintenance concerns. Interaction may be passive or observational: children might dash through timed sprays, but adults often remain peripheral, admiring from a distance. These spaces cool the air, animate plazas, and contribute to atmospheric liveliness, but typically emphasize programming over emergence. While bodily immersion is constrained, such features can still offer moments of multisensory pause—sound, sparkle, and the microclimate of water in motion—providing esthetic relief or ambient enjoyment within the everyday urban routine.

The goal in using this tool is not to mandate full immersion, but to assess where interaction can deepen. Designers might ask: Can a stone be placed low enough to dip a hand? Can the edge be lowered and softened for barefoot wading? Might natural flow, temperature, or rhythm be registered to support the everchanging fascination and delight with nature?

Water’s relational quality is further illustrated through variations on the IP: crossing the water. The following examples show how this interaction manifests differently based on contextual setting and design modulation.

Figure 13a shows stepped access at a tidal edge, where water levels change with weather and season. Walking into the lake becomes an unscripted extension of movement, shaped by rain, sun, and courage. The person can simply hop into the lake for a swim. Both environmental and behavioral wildness are high. Figure 13b features stepping stones in the Seattle Japanese Garden. The stones invite careful, deliberate movement across shallow water, where flow connects to the site’s larger hydrology. The interaction is intimate and reflective, cued but unprogrammed. Figure 13c,d depict Lawrence Halprin’s fountains in downtown Portland. Though situated in an urban plaza, they invite running, splashing, and climbing. Waterfalls enhance microclimate and enclosure, enriching both acoustic and thermal experience. Figure 13e shows a more contemplative interaction at the Clark Art Institute, domestic in context, yet within the wild surroundings of rolling hills and forest. The designed water system accommodates ecological value of retention and filtration. A quiet pond is crossed through delicate stone slabs, offering a poetic juxtaposition between art, nature, and self. Figure 14 demonstrates how precedents in Figure 13 can be located along the environmental and behavioral wildness axis.

• Structuring Interaction Patterns (Tool 2): Scale, Sequence and Co-Occurrence
• Scale: Nested Patterns

This interaction pattern operates across multiple scales. At the tectonic scale (Figure 15), water is a foundational element in spatial organization—its presence shapes landform, habitat, and climate. At the site-specific scale, the location and type of water body (sea, riverbank, tidal pool, mountain stream) determine degrees of accessibility, immersion, and sensory intensity. Water appears in dynamic forms: as a still collection of water or energetic waterfall, as the everchanging weather of rain, fog, snow and ice. At sensory scales, the experience narrows to tactile and thermal qualities—skin sensing temperature, current, or surface texture. In terms of actions, engagement ranges from a fingertip touch to wading, splashing, swimming, or floating.

• Sequence and Co-occurrence:

Engaging with water often unfolds as a sequence of small, embodied acts. The interaction often begins with distant cues—the sound of water, flashes of reflection, or cooler air—drawing the person closer. Initial visual contact may prompt a tentative touch, followed by deeper immersion: crouching to scoop water, wading into shallows, or floating in deeper areas. These moments blend seamlessly with other interaction patterns—perching on rocks, watching reflections ripple, noticing aquatic life. These micro-engagements layer into a felt experience of responsiveness and presence. Designers can heighten these layered engagements by shaping varied edge conditions, supporting biodiverse habitats, and choreographing movement from exposure to immersion (

Table 3. Examples of Co-Occurring Patterns for engaging with water.

Co-Occurrence IP	Perceptual/Behavioral Description	Design Implication
Touching water	Dipping fingers, feeling coolness or texture	Design hand-level access, boulder edges, or shallow flow zones
Listening to water	Attending to drip, splash, or rush	Shape height, material, and flow rate to sculpt acoustic texture
Moving along the edge	Tracking or following flow	Create permeable thresholds; vary substrate and elevation
Immersing the body (or partially) in water	Wading, stepping, reclining in shallow water	Provide varied depth and textures to accommodate different safety needs
Resting near water	Pausing, observing surface dynamics	Provide informal seating or terrain-modulated rest zones
Evading or negotiating wetness	Skipping puddles, choosing dry paths	Design for behavioral variation and agency
Playing with water	Splashing, chasing ripples, spontaneous motion	Allow space and material cues for safe, unscripted play

).

Designers can support these cascades without scripting them. A subtle slope, a shift in surface texture, or a soft edge may be enough to invite interaction. In many Scadinavian cities, this can be as simple as a ladder at the waterfront edge, blending a moment of intimacy with nature into urban life. These patterns build attentional momentum, shifting the visitor from observation to participation, from visual appreciation to bodily engagement.

• IPD Insight: Rewilding Water Engagement

Designing for the presence of water is not enough. What also matters is whether the environment affords meaningful interaction, such as through movement, touch, felt temperature, and sensed rhythm. IPD reframes the question from “Where is water?” to “How might people engage with it, and what perceptual shifts become possible?” Whether in a wild stream or a designed misting grove, engaging with water becomes a way of tuning into the world through the body, through sensation, and through emergent acts of noticing and response.

3.2.3. Moving Across Terrain: Orientation, Effort, and Encounter

Moving across terrain draws the senses outward while simultaneously rooting them in the felt texture of place. Inclines, substrates, and environmental conditions invite different bodily rhythms. Wayfinding requires orientation to distant landmarks. Traversal over time allows sequences of interaction to unfold. Each of these elements—directionality, effort, curiosity, and attunement—contributes to a sense of participation within a living, dynamic landscape.

Interaction Pattern Design (IPD) highlights this keystone pattern as one that inherently involves structuring across space and time. It is a form of embodied engagement that opens the possibility for deeper encounters with landforms, ecological transitions, and atmospheric variation. Movement across terrain can be casual or effortful, solo or social, goal-directed or exploratory; but in all cases, it offers layered affordances that can be shaped and supported by design.

• Tool 1: Quadrant Mapping—Modulating Path Conditions and Possibilities

Moving across terrain can emerge in a variety of environmental and behavioral contexts. Applying the quadrant framework helps clarify how design can shape whether this pattern feels intuitive, challenging, or even possible. A steep ridgeline may invite climbers in one context, but discourage engagement in another if access or cues are lacking. The examples below illustrate how path-based movement can be supported across the quadrant diagram in Figure 3.

• Wild × Emergent

In remote land settings, people often move along animal trails, weather-worn ridges, or dried streambeds. These routes are not formally marked but follow natural topographies that suggest a direction. Here, movement is guided by attention, curiosity, and subtle cues—wind in the trees, a break in the underbrush, or the orientation of rock.

• Wild × Programmed

Designers working in national parks, preserves, or alpine zones may formalize movement through switchbacks, cairns, or minimally constructed trails. These pathways negotiate steepness or sensitive ecosystems while still maintaining a wild character. The programming is subtle, often using materiality and spacing to mark direction without over-scripting behavior.

At Artipelag Museum in Sweden (Figure 16), emergent trails are implied rather than built. Sculptures, open terrain, and subtle clearings suggest direction without prescription, preserving the integrity of the archipelago geology while inviting embodied exploration.

• Domestic × Emergent

In urban or peri-urban contexts, people may carve their own routes through grassy fields, drainage corridors, or along waterfronts. These “desire paths” reflect where movement feels right, even when not officially sanctioned. Designers can read these emergent behaviors as cues, responding by adjusting planting, grading, or access points. In Gasworks Park in the heart of Seattle (Figure 17), the design offers a major paved path for accessibility, while allowing people to stroll and hike off-path to find their own way among the gentle hills. It encourages organic movement and the relief at the prospect, which provides a micro but valuable experience of escape from the domestic cityscape. At the summit, the expansive view of the city and water rewards both experiences—but the meaning of arrival is shaped by the effort and agency that precedes it.

• Domestic × Programmed

Highly constructed environments such as urban parks, campuses, or museum gardens use programmed movement extensively—via stairs, ramps, promenades, or wayfinding signs. These can intentionally choregraph movement, suggesting ritualized rhythm, pause points, and sensory framing along the way. In Woodland Cemetery in Stockholm (Figure 18) the highly curated path offers a journey of contemplation, creating a transcendental experience through embodied movement and framed viewpoints. Topographic pacing, framed vistas, and spatial compression combine to structure an emotional arc across terrains.

Quadrant Mapping helps designers think beyond accessibility or circulation alone. Movement can be structured to invite flow or friction, curiosity or contemplation. Grading, edge conditions, surfacing, and visual framing can all shape how the body relates to terrain and how perceptual and affective experience unfolds across it. Topographic rhythm, such as alternating slope and rest, can build a bodily narrative. Surface variation from gravel to boardwalk, from soil to moss may enriches tactile feedback. Directional cues, such as framed vistas or shadow corridors with lights, offer orientation and curiosity. Microclimate transitions, like sun-breaks or breeze channels, can shift sensory atmosphere and mood. In combination, these factors transform terrain into a medium for attentional and affective engagement.

• Structuring Nested Patterns (Tool 2): Scale, Sequence and Co-Occurrence

Moving across terrain is inherently sequential. It involves co-occurring bodily and perceptual sub-patterns that build meaning through progression (

Table 4. Examples of Co-Occurring Patterns for moving across terrain.

Co-Occurrence IP	Perceptual/Behavioral Description	Design Implication
Navigating Trails	Visual tracking of path edges, obstacles, cues	Shape with edges, color variation, subtle curvature or lighting
Climbing or Scrambling through Topographic Changes	Engaging hands and feet to navigate slope or rock	Offer options at different physical levels; encourage exploring via material hints
Pausing, Ascending or Descending for Views	Drawn toward or fascinated by a view; effort amplifies anticipation and reward	Frame distant views; design sequential reveals; include places to pause, orient, and rest
Walking through Sensory Thresholds	Attuning to changes in dynamic sensory zones, such as visual, acoustic, olfactory or thermal	Highlight sensory transitions; curate sensory zones beyond vision.
Following Light through Corridors	Feeling a sense of wonder, disorientation, or anticipation as light leads forward	Use light to suggest direction; design for compression and release; layer light across surfaces
Noticing Others in Nature	Moving in rhythm with others; sensing presence through shared view, sound, or motion	Vary path width for shared or solitary travel; position paths for overlapping visibility; provide access to ecological flows; restore ecological habitat

). In IPD, composing such patterns supports attunement, orientation, and connection—transforming landscape experience from passive passage to participatory journey.

These nested and co-occurring interactions create a temporal structure. A well-designed trail might begin with a low gradient, draw attention to nearby detail, open suddenly to a vista, then move into shaded intimacy before offering a place to rest. Rather than a generic “flow,” the experience becomes memorable through contrast and rhythm.

• IPD Insight: Composing Movement as Encounter

When thoughtfully supported, moving across terrain becomes more than getting from one place to another. It becomes a form of encounter. The body works, the senses open, and the mind adapts (and often slows) to the pace of land. IPD invites designers to treat terrain not just as surface but as sensible structure, capable of shaping meaning, memory, and ecological presence through motion itself.

In cases like the Bloedel Reserve (Figure 19), the experience of moving cross terrains consists of structured and diverse IPs. Visitors move through a series of “garden rooms” with varying spatial compression: open meadows, dense forests, shaded edges, and reflective clearings. Pathways curve and hide views before revealing water features or framed sky. Here, climbing is gentle, but the psychological arc is equally potent: disappearance and return. Movement through the site is designed to foster shifting states of attention—from scanning to settling, from openness to containment, from seeing to sensing. This curated sequence unravels co-occurring IPs: walking, pausing, gazing, sitting, and listening. They generate a composite experience of moving toward and into wildness, even in a highly curated setting.

In this sense, IPD builds on theories of landscape as a temporal and narrative medium. Pashman [7] likens the unfolding of a park to turning the pages of a book, where story is choreographed through terrain. Spirn [46] describes the landscape as a journey, framing landscape as a “native language,” where spatial sequences speak through terrain and time. Corner’s [47] call for design as the catalyst of events—rather than a final form—supports IPD’s focus on designing sequences of engagement rather than static experiences. IPD brings this narrative logic into embodied form, by tracing how movement reveals, conceals, and transforms the way people relate to land, to the otherness, and to themselves. Therefore, rather than simply “passing through” landscapes, IPD encourages a participatory journey.

4. Discussion: Toward Relational, Rewilded Design Futures

The preceding sections established the theoretical foundation and demonstrated IPD’s practical application through design tools and case studies. This final section draws these threads together, situating IPD within broader discourses of phenomenology, ecological psychology, and embodied cognition, and reflecting on its implications for design, pedagogy, and ecological ethics.

At its core, Interaction Pattern Design (IPD) reframes landscape architecture around the primacy of interaction: how perception, movement, and material form co-produce meaning and attachment in place. By identifying and intentionally shaping recurring forms of human–nature engagement, IPD links theory with process, affordance with form, and ecological function with lived experience. It offers a relational design logic that grounds ecological and cultural renewal in everyday acts of participation.

4.1. Implications and Future Directions for Design and Pedagogy

IPD’s deeper contribution lies not only in what it enables designers to do, but in how it redefines where design itself resides. Design no longer begins with form and ends with experience; it begins in relation. Building from this foundation, IPD complements biophilic strategies and experiential design schemas while extending their scope through a unified focus on embodied inter-action. Whereas biophilic design often emphasizes the presence of natural elements, IPD emphasizes participation: the sensory, motor, and perceptual interactions through which people come to feel connected with the living world. This focus challenges the visual dominance of conventional design and reframes environmental experience as embodied and relational.

Similarly, while nature-based and sustainability frameworks assess ecological outcomes such as biodiversity or resilience, IPD grounds these broad goals in the experiential realm: how ecological health is felt, perceived, and enacted through daily engagement. Through this lens, cultural renewal refers to the recovery of ways of perceiving, moving, and caring that allow human life to unfold within, rather than apart from, the natural world. Ecological restoration refers to the recovery of living systems themselves, the vitality of soils, waters, and species. These two processes are often treated separately, yet they depend on the same underlying dynamic: recurring patterns of interaction through which people come to know, respect, and sustain the life around them. IPD broadens the ethical and ecological horizon of landscape architecture by showing how design can cultivate these patterns and, through them, the reciprocity between human culture and ecological vitality.

For both pedagogy and practice, IPD provides a language and logic for intentionally scaffolding patterns of interaction rather than leaving embodied experience to chance. In education, it helps students translate perceptual and ecological theory into design moves that engage the body and senses. In professional settings, IPD offers concrete questions to guide each phase of design, from programming and site analysis through design development and post-occupancy evaluation. For example, at the level of site planning, Quadrant Mapping supports designers in assessing affordances and envisioning conditions that invite meaningful interactions with flora, fauna, water, and ecological systems. At the level of programming and design, IPD provides a framework for balancing liability, accessibility, and maintenance constraints with opportunities for deeper forms of connection with nature.

Looking forward, IPD can be integrated with sustainability metrics that evaluate biodiversity, ecological resilience, and human well-being, as well as with participatory design processes that link embodied experience to community contexts. Emerging technologies such as virtual and augmented reality can serve as design aids, enabling designers to simulate and test potential interaction patterns before implementation. Yet even as these tools extend participatory and experiential dimensions of design, their limitations highlight the irreplaceable value of direct, embodied engagement with living environments. Recent research continues to demonstrate the attentional and restorative benefits of immersion in real nature [48,49], while frameworks such as the twenty-minute neighborhood [50] emphasize the importance of everyday, embodied encounters with nearby nature. By situating design within these lived dynamics of perception and action, IPD aligns with inclusive and universal design principles, supporting more equitable and accessible ways of engaging with the natural world. These implications point toward the need for further validation and expansion of IPD across contexts, as outlined in the following section.

4.2. Limitations and Scopes

A primary methodological concern in interaction pattern (IP) research involves the reliability and repeatability of coding across sites and researchers. This challenge is inherent to studies of embodied experience, where the richness of interaction can resist simple categorization. Yet IP research has taken systematic steps to establish consistency and transparency. Across core studies, independent coders have achieved good to very good agreement using standard statistical measures [51]. In addition, detailed coding manuals for these studies have been published as technical reports to enable replication, critique, and transparency [52,53,54,55,56]. The next step is broader validation across independent research groups and ecological contexts to test the robustness and adaptability of IPD beyond its initial development sites.

Second, current IPD studies remain largely Western and urban in focus, with most conducted in the United States. Expanding research across diverse cultural and ecological contexts is essential for testing and extending the framework globally. The Hong Kong study provides an initial step in this direction, showing that children interacting with relatively wild nature, compared with domestic nature, engaged in fewer dominating and more relational behaviors [32]. At the same time, IP theory and IPD are especially well suited for cross-cultural inquiry. Because interaction patterns describe recurrent ways that humans perceive and act in relation to the natural world, they offer a structure for distinguishing what is universal in human–nature engagement from what is culturally specific. Broader international research collaborations could therefore deepen understanding not only of ecological and social variation, but also of the shared perceptual and moral ground of human life within nature.

Third, key concepts within IPD, such as environmental and behavioral wildness, remain conceptually robust but not yet operationalized as standardized instruments. Their flexibility is valuable for design practice, allowing designers to interpret gradients of wildness contextually, yet this same openness poses challenges for comparison across studies. Future work could refine these constructs through cross-cultural measurement and mixed methods that integrate perceptual, behavioral, and ecological indicators of wildness. Additionally, while we sought to include visual examples from a wider set of global projects in Section 3, image permissions were only granted for certain studios. The presented images therefore reflect the permissions received rather than the conceptual scope of IPD.

Finally, IPD focuses primarily on perceptual and ecological dimensions of design, with less direct attention to economic, political, and management factors that shape human–nature relationships. We see IPD not as a replacement for those frameworks but as a complement: a structured way for designers to intentionally evaluate trade-offs and engage complexity without defaulting to control and predictability.

4.3. Conclusions

Interaction Pattern Design (IPD) reframes landscape architecture around the primacy of interaction. It provides a systematic yet flexible framework for designing with embodied perception and action at the center, guiding how people encounter, move within, and care for the living world. Through this lens, landscapes are not static forms but living fields of relation, continuously shaped through use, perception, and reciprocity. The framework advances concrete tools, such as Quadrant Mapping and Structuring Interaction Patterns, that help designers compose experiences across gradients of environmental and behavioral wildness. These tools link theory to practice by clarifying how interaction patterns can be nested, sequenced, and scaled to support deeper engagement with ecological processes.

IPD also offers one of the most powerful responses to Environmental Generational Amnesia [34,37,39]. Each generation, growing up amid more diminished forms of nature, comes to accept a lower baseline of ecological richness as normal. Over time, what counts as biodiverse, healthy nature and as meaningful human–nature interaction quietly recedes. People may recognize the problem intellectually yet still fail to register it perceptually or emotionally, and therefore underestimate its significance for both planetary health and human flourishing. IPD addresses this amnesia by cultivating direct, embodied encounters with nature in its more vital, less domesticated forms. This is why rewilding is not a peripheral theme within IPD but its perceptual and moral core. By inviting engagement with the textures, movements, and presences of even slightly wilder environments, IPD helps restore the sensory and emotional ground from which ecological consciousness grows. In doing so, it becomes a practice of cultural remembering, a way of reawakening the felt reciprocity between human life and the living Earth.