A car is a means of transportation. This is obvious. What is less obvious however is that the car shows specific sensory or even olfactory qualities: A car uses smelly petrol or diesel. Driving a car even turns the vehicle into an openair-design machine. At the end of the day...
A sociology of smell
Smell is in the nose of the smeller, but also in the culture of the smeller. – Antony Synnott
Designing products for a new scent culture
The ongoing normalization of ambient scent creates a growing need for diffusers. In most cases diffusers convey some distinct atmosphere: it might be somehow esoteric or rather technical. But there are very few products we have seen so far that seem to resonate with current design culture.
When will there be a professor for olfaction & space? And where?
The University of Applied Sciences & Arts Hildesheim is looking for a new professor for “light & space” for its department of lighting design. Reflecting on the olfactory turn we slightly rewrote the official job opening:
Odorama on car smells at Mediamatic
We have been looking at cars as “olfactory artifact” for quite a while. In fact, the automobile sector is part of a larger interest in the aesthetic and experience economy.
Scents beyond conventional perfumery
There is a long lasting history of dealing with scent in pop music. More recently, Jeans for Jesus, a widely known player in the local pop music scene in Switzerland, made an interesting move:
Smelly theory of private property
The genesis of private property has been a recurring theme in political philosophy since ancient times. In his essays on the five senses the French philosopher Michel Serres proposes a “smelly theory of private property”:
Scent design influences the behaviour of people in crowds at Eindhoven
In addition to light, sound, color and other design dimensions scent is increasingly used to influence human emotions and behavior. Aromatherapy is the discipline that has developed this expertise and knowledge of centuries. Scent Marketing is currently an obvious case. But there are also non-commercial contexts as this story from...
Smithsonian Design Museum: Design Beyond Vision!
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum will present “The Senses: Design Beyond Vision” . In the 1980s the Swiss design thinker Lucius Burckhardt coined: “Design is invisible“.
Olfaction is the message
There are different ways how to address smell in advertizing. Campaigns in perfumery are an obvious case. Moreover, we recently discussed how even negative feedback on the olfactory quality of a product is used in advertizing. The example of today stands out in a different way.
Collector at Art Basel: “You have buried the smell of the oilstick…”
In today’s art world the sensorium is focused on the visual. A closer look however reveals that the sense of smell should no longer be neglected. Here is an ethnographic story from hanging out with art collectors at a recent edition of Art Basel that might be more telling and...
Fragrant patterns in big data !
The web facility Google Trends shows how often a particular search-term is entered relative to the total search-volume across various regions of the world, and in various languages. The horizontal axis of the main graph represents time (starting from 2004), and the vertical is how often selected terms are searched for...
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