Sculpting With Scent

What a fascinating world is that of scent. Our sense of it is deep within our own genes and its materials it seems come from deep within both the mysteries of the natural and the synthesis of human sciences. Take Ambergris for example, a substance used in perfumery that is more valuable than gold. Why? Because it is basically Sperm Whale fur balls. Formed from detritus in the gut of whales over many years, it is regurgitated and floats in lumps around the oceans, fished up by humans who long ago discovered its odour is surprisingly pleasing to us.

How would you create a sculpture or narrative that is experienced only through your sense of smell? What would be the nature of that experience?

This study aims to produce a reactive environment that uses the unique characteristics of scent perception to provoke an emotional state or communicate an idea to an audience.Moksha is a new agency creating content and experiences for brands so this pilot would be directly relevant in terms of creating knowledge and experience that could potentially be transformed into service offerings. The Sandbox funding is creating the space to do invaluable R&D, not constrained by the requirements of a client. It’s normally incredibly difficult for agency businesses to have the freedom do this kind of pure research and is helping us to produce innovative services in a crowded marketplace.

Smell creates powerful types of sensory meaning that other types of stimulus cannot but is very underexplored as a design medium in contrast to sight and sound. The potential exists to create a new language of design. Smell is a pervasive medium – it’s inextricably environmental. So understanding how to use it in a structured way is inherently about time, space and place. All the technologies exist to design with scent (e.g. dry air scent dispersion, scent injection molding, PIR and motion sensors) but tools haven’t been produced to model these into powerful experiences. Because comparatively little work has been done in this area, our study will be highly experimental. We’ll seek to collaborate and seek the services and advice of technologists at University West of England, Bristol University and Microsoft Research to develop a testable prototype environment.

1% of all human genes are devoted to smell – far more than sight, hearing or touch. Despite this scent is very rarely used in either art or design. Smell produces powerful and unique sensations so there is the potential to produce new types of experience for an audience already saturated with visual and audio content. Scent is a threshold experience: before you smell something you’re not ‘there’ but when you smell it you enter into an experience, whether it’s a space, a moment, a feeling. What new avenues of communication can be opened to audiences by developing a design language for scent?

Because of its connection to the Limbic system, smell is often linked to memory, which is intensely personal. This study will seek to reliably produce common responses in experimental participants.

The evaluation is expected to include sensor data from experimental participants as well as qualitative (interview) evaluation.

We aim to deliver:

1. A functional prototype for use in experimental evaluation.
2. A research report (to be made publicly available), sharing findings and hopefully new tools, techniques and technologies for use in scent experience design.
3. A public wiki for practitioners looking to collaborate and share knowledge in scent experience design.

Potentially there’s a natural value for Moksha in building expertise in a particular aspect of experience design because it can become part of our creative practice. In addition we really want to explore opportunities for creating new IP – this is a field where few practitioners are innovating, so being first to market with an idea that can be licensed is very exciting.Future applications for scent-based installations could be retail, entertainment venues, museums, cinemas and high-end brands looking to give their visitors a new experience.