“Odors are at once evocative and suggestive, redolent with significance.” ION M. LEWIS
Temporary nature
“An everlasting fragrance is a paradox.” – THEODOR W. ADORNO
Smelling whiteness
“White privilege is not just ‘in the head.’ It also is ‘in’ the nose that smells, the back, neck, and other muscles that imperceptibly tighten with anxiety, and the eyes that see some but not all physical differences as significant.” – SHANNON SULLIVAN
Psychological irrelevance
“Taste, smell, as well as hunger, thirst, nausea, and other so-called ‘common’ sensations need not be touched on in this book, as almost nothing of psychological interest is known concerning them.” – WILLIAM JAMES
Rapport with the world
“Odours enable us to have an immediate and lively rapport with the world.” – CLAUDE LEVI-STRAUSS
Perfumer
“A perfumer is someone who masters the behaviour and the perception of volatile molecules by the nose and the brain.” – CHRISTOPHE LAUDAMIEL
Differences between smells are meaningless
“We do not discover the meaning of a smell by distinguishing it from other smells but by distinguishing contexts within which particular smells have a typical value.” – ALFRED GELL
Designing in a complex world
“Even if you could capture the smells, sounds, tastes, and feel of a place, digitize them, and send them down a wire, you’d still never get near the sensation of ‘being there’. Why? Because we humans are not so dumb. Our minds and our bodies are one intelligence.” – JOHN...
Smell in design
“The focus on smell in design does not mean the addition of applied scent to all aspects of the design, but rather the awareness of smell as an inherent dimension of it … This awareness may lead to the realization that the appropriate solution is the removal or masking of...
Smell culture studies
“The investigation of the olfactory is the investigation of everything else.” – HANS RINDISBACHER
Smell in design
“One simply cannot turn up one’s nose these days at the role of scent in design.” – ASHRAF OSMAN, CLAUS NOPPENEY & NADA ENDRISSAT
We smell the way we make sense of it…
“We see what we see, we smell what we smell and feel what we feel, and there seems no more to it. Experiences that make no claim whatever would be truly incorrigible. But we must allow in the first place for the fact that what we see or feel depends...
Olfactory silence
“In their loss, smells have become a literary topic of our time, as much as they are a topic of the world of science and technology and of business.” – HANS RINDISBACHER
Existential
“Whereas with other senses we make a conscious decision to look, listen, taste or touch, with smell it is often just an inherent aspect of existence — if you’re breathing, you’re smelling.” — Brian Goeltzenleuchter
Identity
“It is said that ‘we are what we eat’—but it is also true that we are what we smell like: fragrant or foul, good or bad.” – Antony Synnott
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