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 masquerade!
This iconic narrative from the Judeo-Christian tradition is full of olfactory references that are topical today:
New product scents
The Swiss retailer www.digitec.ch is currently running a thought provoking advertizing campaign. It is basically broadcasting what customers wrote about a product on the retailer’s website. This feedback needn’t be positive. It can be devastating. But it must be interesting. And in fact, the product scent – intended or accidental...
Re-odorizing & its normalization
The campaign aims at the general public. By now air care is normal! Stay updated and enter your email address to follow us!
Scent Culture Monitor
In 2015, we started Scent Culture News to shape and build scent culture as field. Following our mission we have highlighted and connected fragmented themes, ideas, references, and projects that relate to the sense of smell in culture, business and society. More recently, we made a pause and reflected on recurring...
Feedback
The campaign is a real thing in Switzerland right now. Stay updated and enter your email address to follow us!
Olfactory turn: Smellshots
A snapshot is a “casual photograph made typically by an amateur with a small handheld camera”. It is an “impression or view of something brief or transitory“. And what is a smellshot? Our new category smellshot aims at exploring this notion. Stay updated and enter your email address to follow us!...
Enchanting worlds
It was the social theorist Max Weber who identified progressive disenchantment as an underlying process of modernity. More recently, this creed of modern thinking has increasingly been challenged. Thus, enchantment often evokes the sublime and refers to an aura of authentic presence. Moreover, enchantment has been used as an analytical...
Smelly wheels: In search of alternatives
Visual representations of smell are one of the core themes of our presence on Instagram: Wheel, circle, and pie have recently appeared as recurring and influential visual metaphors. The fragrance wheel created by Michael Edwards is perhaps the most prominent example these days. But the history of visualizations demonstrates that...
Automobility & Scent Culture: Another Market for Olfactory Nostalgia?
The olfactory dimension of automobility is the core theme of a recent essay by Claus Noppeney published in “Das Magazin” a weekly supplement to several Swiss newspapers.
Culturalizing Scent!
We have fleshed out some of the guiding ideas for Scent Culture Institute in our contribution to Designing with Smell: Designing with Smell: Practices, Techniques and Challenges – an impressive volumen honoring the work of Victoria Henshaw : Culturalizing scent!
Mission
Smell may not seem a profound enough problem to dominate all the life sciences, but it contains, piece by piece, all the mysteries. – Lewis Thomas
Sensory turn in in management education
Some insights from our recent sensory turn in management education: