"There is an infinity of senses which we lack." -Desnos

Headspace: On Scent As Design

Headspace is a one-day symposium on the conception, impact, and potential applications of scent. This event gathers leading thinkers, designers, scientists, artists, established perfumers as well as "accidental perfumers" (a selection of architects, designers, and chefs invited to experiment with scent) to acknowledge scent as a new territory for design and begin to draft the outline of this new practice.

Excerpts from the interview:

Language doesn’t really seem up to the task of expressing all that scent means to us, or triggers within us. Thus, we are still at the level of the “grunt,” limited to broad terms like good, bad, ugh, and sweet.

With the Enlightenment Era came a certain rationalization of our senses, where knowledge, culture, class, and intelligence were associated directly with our visual senses, whereas smell was associated with bodily fluids, dirt, and poverty. Social history has encouraged a discomfort with our beautifully functional nostrils. It is time to reclaim them!

Smells tend to be used to hide, not reveal. But there’s a lot of potential for use of scent that’s functionalized to reveal, signaling things like danger, sustainability, quality in food.

You can make an analogy between perfumers and typographers: Both are nearly invisible as designers; both create highly refined and nuanced products that are virtually unnoticed by the entire population; and both affect the texture and experience of our everyday lives in countless ways, despite their lack of recognition.

Scent can play a more emotional, expressive, and even functional role in our everyday lives. Since our associations with scent are incredibly strong and cognitively bonded with memory, scents might open up new ways to learn and remember. Becoming more alive to scents will also add texture, depth, and richness to our everyday experiences, ifwe can find ways to incorporate them that move beyond air fresheners and analogs of natural scents.

Moreover, scent can be used to “tag” objects and places and accordingly build associations and habits. It can facilitate a higher sense of symbolism and personalization of design, as in a more direct and human connection to meaning, symbols, and personal histories.

(via Seed)