Experience design

Because the best way to experience smells is to 'glimpse' them, managing the duration of that interaction is very important otherwise you overload the users olfactory system, which temporarily 'burns out'. We also want the user to experience a number of smells sequentially so the order in which you smell the components is very important. And finally the user needs to know they're actually having an experience and to have some control over it.

So the form that we arrived at is a group of inviting, smart objects that carry the individual scents and that tell the user the order and duration in which to smell. The experience is a combination of the individual scents, the physicality of the objects and the state changes in the objects that pull the user through the experience.

Dan Williams, the PM Studio's creative technologist has worked out how to pack a light source, a vibration motor and a tone generator into the objects and we're experimenting with what combination can best be used to alert the user to the order and duration with which to interact with the object. The objects also contain an accelerometer so it can detect when it's been picked up as a trigger to change it's behaviour.