We often encounter a space long before we physically arrive.
We see a photograph, find it on a map, open a website, scroll through a listing or look at a menu, catalogue or interface. By the time we enter the room, we already have an idea of what the place is, who it is for and what we expect to happen there.
That first encounter is part of the spatial experience.
For a rental property, the photographs and booking page may be the first room a guest sees. For a cultural project, a website can establish how someone understands the institution before their visit. For a shop or hospitality space, the way a place appears online can shape expectations about scale, atmosphere, service and even how people move through it once they arrive.
This makes the boundary between physical and digital environments less clear than it first appears. Both have structure. Both have entrances, sequences, hierarchies and ways of directing attention. Both can make something easy to understand or unnecessarily difficult to navigate.
We approach digital environments with many of the same questions we use for physical ones: where does someone enter, what do they see first, what should they understand next, what choices are available, and how does the whole experience hold together?
A space therefore extends beyond its walls. It exists in the images that represent it, the systems through which people find it and the interfaces that prepare them for what they will encounter.
The physical visit may be the centre of the experience, but it is rarely its true beginning.