“What if we designed for all our senses? Suppose, for a moment, that sound, touch, and odor were treated as the equals of sight, and that emotion was as important as cognition. What would our built environment be like if sensory response, sentiment, and memory were critical design factors, more vital even than structure and program?” – JOY MONICE MALNAR & FRANK VODVARKA
smell in design
“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 THACKARA
“One simply cannot turn up one’s nose these days at the role of scent in design.” – ASHRAF OSMAN, CLAUS NOPPENEY & NADA ENDRISSAT
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:
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 Eindhoven reports.
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“.
“It is easier to make an airport tunnel smell like real jasmine than to use pictures, a video, or a trompe l’oeil to make people believe that they are walking through a real jasmine plantation in that tunnel.” – CHRISTOPHE LAUDAMIEL
The Lucerne School of Art and Design is the oldest college of art and design in German-speaking Switzerland. In fact, it is celebrating the 140th anniversary of its foundation throughout this academic year. Thus, the school reflects on the history and prospects of art and design education and organizes a sequence of keynote lectures titled: Craftsmen and Visionaries: Art and Design Education between Social Responsibility and Freedom. Here is the program: Ringvorlesung Symposium 2015. In this context, Claus Noppeney has been invited to explore olfaction as an innovative field in art and design (education). Being strongly rooted in craftsmanship, traditional perfumery takes a cultural turn. Innovative products and services (see our Scent Culture News) show how the sense of smell steadily becomes a design parameter. Moreover, the olfactory dimension is increasingly part of contemporary artistic practices.
OUSOS is a research program investigating olfaction, our evolutionarily oldest sensory system.
The French product designer Charline Ronzon-Jaricot wants to train and delight the nose:
The world’s first olfactory alarm clock uses Kickstarter to generate funding for its development and marketing.
There is an increasing interest in olfaction, scent, smell and perfume in major design schools. Here is another great example from London.
Uncovering the smell of the past Révélateur uncovers the smell of the past and adds a contextual layer of information.
On the 19th of September, Claus Noppeney and Ashraf Osman of SCI conducted a class for the Signaletik CAS program (context building), part of the Signaletik MAS (Environmental Information Design) at the Bern University of the Arts, under the supervision of Jimmy Schmid.
Scent is now a topic a Bern University of the Arts. Here is the story: