Many important moments of our lives take place in a car. From when you are born, to the last ride, the smell of the car gets infused with different and sometimes untraceable scents. It can be seen as a true olfactory diary. Wet dog, unidentified fungus, a family pack of sugary soda, or a flowery synthetic scent. Cars have determined urban scentscapes since its invention to the present. For this month's Odorama curator Caro Verbeek took the initiative to bring together a promising mix of backgrounds & interests in the smell of cars: iScent marketeers Jorg Hemp and Matthijs Bastiaan Medendorp as well as car freak Justus Tomlow and Claus Noppeney. They all paid tribute to the smell of cars. Here is a post summarizing the concluding section of Claus Noppeney's talk.
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.
Smelling in the creative economy
“Duft, Design & Kultur: Wo bleibt das Riechen in der Creative Economy?”, this is the title of an upcoming talk (24 January 2018, 19.00) at the Inatura in Dornbirn.
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...
E Nase voll Alltag – an der Bar
Der Start unserer neuen Serie von Events in Zürich ist geglückt. Es geht dann weiter am 13. März 2018 ab 18.00. In der Exer Bar stand beim 1. Mal der Alltag auf dem Programm:
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...
Niche & mainstream consumer culture
It is holiday season. This is the time of the year to feature perfumery on the front page. One would expect a portrait of one of the big brands, a review of celebrities, some sort of general interest.
“I sense therefore I am”
Cogito ergo sum is often regarded as the fundamental element of Western thought that laid the grounds for rationalism, scientific progress and modern dichotomies: I think, therefore I am. The title of this post is less well known: I sense therefore I am.
Do the captives actually smell the fire?
A few days ago, I happened to come across this visualization of Plato’s thought provoking Allegory of the Cave. What the captives see and hear are shadows cast be objects they do not see. But what about the fire?
Creating applications for little trees
Little Trees seem to be ubiquitous these days.
Olfactory demonstration
Tobacco smell is pretty marginalized these days. In many professions smokers are stigmatized. Public health is certainly an argument. Culturally, it is an extreme change compared to previous times. The new smoke-free is normalized.