industrial design engineering, royal college of art david sweeney ...

industrial design engineering, royal college of art david sweeney 2007 

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A quale is a pure experience that cannot be reduced to description. It is the 'what it is like' 

character of mental states. Derived from the Latin, meaning "what sort" or "what kind", Qualia 

are the way it feels to have mental states such as pain, seeing red, smelling a rose, etc. 

"To experience a quale is to know one experiences a quale, and to know all there is to know 

about that quale." (Dennet) 

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Quale is small, intellegent device that sits quietly within our 

environments. It subtly and subconsciously directs our attention to and from important, 

constantly updating information. It learns our habits and routines through observation. It 

provides direction through times of stress and offers inspiration during more relaxed times. 

It does this by paying attention to our behaviour and to our external influences. 

This product harnesses the ability of smell to evoke and to constantly update our perceptive 

states. Presently, we infuse our environments with a static smell to make us feel, well 

whatever it says on the tin, but if our environment's smellscape is in constant flux, our perceptive 

states could also be more dynamic too. 

Quale is a device and system that gives meaning to each of the individual smells that 

make up our environment. The selection of smells that is contained within the device is replaceable 

and is varied. Its physical form encourages haptic interaction. 

Quale is an innovative form of multimedia equipment. 

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Brief 

The brief of this project was chosen to address the fact that smell is generally misunderstood 

and its potential within the product design field is underrepresented. It is accepted 

that western cultures have a difficulty expressing themselves through smell, and also a difficulty 

describing smells through language 1 . These are inherited cultural issues that can 

be overcome. I was very interested in working in an area where the topic is so widely misunderstood 

yet still affects in such a profound and stealthy manner. 

From the outset I aimed to employ smell’s ability to: 

• trigger individual memories, 

• shift our perceptive states, 

• evoke moods that are rich and emotionally variable. 

…and to do this all in an ambient fashion. 

Whatever the implementation of the product, it would provide powerful olfactory cues so 

that memories could be triggered or moods and perceptions could be altered in positive 

directions. 

The device should not just exist as a tool to disperse odour for its aesthetic value, it should 

append further meaning to these smells. This will hopefully challenge those who believe 

that smell only holds an inherent hedonic value with which we perceive. With very few exceptions, 

there is no such thing as a universally good or bad smell. 

I wanted this product to be ultimately perceived in the same light as a television or an 

audio system could be. By this I mean that these devices are infinitely configurable, they 

transmit information to us and can steer our moods and perceptions, each in their own 

characteristic fashion. For this project I intended to design a strong character into the device 

and for the experience of interacting with it. 

Summery of Theory 

The object that I am suggesting is in essence an odour-associative learning tool. Associative 

learning is the process by which one event or item comes to be linked to another 

through experience. It is a Pavlovian process and can explain both how odours can elicit 

emotion and influence thinking and behaviour. 

Our brains operate by the process of association, it is a pivotal cognitive process by which 

our brains accesses memories and formulates meaning. Objects, events and the sensorial 

stimuli that perceive them become linked to the emotions that were present at the time of 

perception. This explains how these objects, etc. obtain their hedonic values. When we 

1 The theory and all other quotes and references not stated within this report can be found in my dissertation 

on the subject “The Smell of Good Design (RCA 2007)”. 

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subsequently experience these sensorial stimuli, the related emotions, and therefore the 

memories of the event, are evoked. Lots of things evoke memories, any of the senses, 

emotions, other thoughts or other memories. Of all the senses however, olfaction is the 

most evocative, and these memories that are evoked are considered to be of a more emotional 

nature. This is due to the fact that the olfactory bulb (receptor) terminates deep 

within the Limbic system, which is known to be the seat of emotional processing. 

Everybody has a hunch that smells have a special relationship with memory, a momentary 

reintroduction with an ex-girlfriend’s perfume alters the train of thought and affects on the 

emotions, the smell of Play-doh, etc. Prof. Rachel Herz has presented other substantiation 

of the smell-evoked memory phenomenon; she claims that there is clear evidence that improvement 

of memory resulted from the presence of an ambient odour occurring in both 

the learning and recall stages. She summarises her hypothesis that odour hedonic perception 

and odour related behaviour results from a learned association between an odour and 

an emotional context in which the odour was first encountered. She imparts evidence for 

possible odour associative learning and describes its simple mechanism as follows: 

1. The emotion paired with the odour imbues it with meaning. 

2. The odour can subsequently recall the emotion. 

This recalled emotion could then initiate a stream of connected memories, which were 

created at the time of first exposure of the smell. 

Why this is important can be understood if we realise that every odour that we have ever 

smelt has previously been associated with the emotion that was present during the first 

encounter with the smell, maybe not definitively, but it will have ultimately effected future 

perception in some way. Herz, in order to carry out her experiments to observe whether a 

smell can prompt recall of memory, needed to employ a novel smell as the target odour. 

The test required that no emotion had previously been attached to the smell in the past; 

this was to ensure that the learning experience during the test would have been the unique 

association of the scent, i.e. a smell with only one association, and that association was 

controlled to occur within the test environment. 

A novel smell is a clean slate for associating emotions to. 

While a number of companies have produced aroma generators designed to enhance 

computer games or TV shows, they have failed commercially because they have been 

very limited in the range of smells they can produce. 

Before I explain the direction I am proposing to take, I just want to run over a few points 

regarding the sensation of smell: 

Firstly, to state the most important, empirical fact in olfaction: 

“No two molecules differing in structure have ever been found to smell identical” 

Luca Turin, 2006 

What does this mean? To create the sensation of yellow (experience the quale that is yellow), 

I can shine a yellow lamp OR I can shine both a green and a red lamp. Green and 

Red can be considered to be primary colours. This doesn’t apply to smells. Good approximations 

are possible, but there are over 350 different types of receptors in the nose (compared 

to just four in the retina). The old lock and key theories of smell perception could infer 

that this limits the number of possible primary odours to 350. Only recently, the vibration 

theory of smell perception has been accepted as the probable mechanism for the 

sensation of odour, and this shatters the concept of primary smells. So, unless you want to 

create a smell that is a mixture of just the smells in your primary scent collection, you can 

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never hope to truly recreate other exact smells. Hence, the resulting poor performance of 

the above devices. When you want to give an impression of a murky crypt, or of burnt rubber 

for a computer game, these systems can provide that impression.... 

But if you want to evoke the memory of the occasion when you recorded that smell, you 

need to be more exact. Remember that a smell bypass cognitive processing here, there is 

no fooling your subconscious. 

I believe that it is for this reason that so many of the following prior art in this field has been 

so far unsuccessful and why so many of the commercial home fragrance devices are perceived 

as low quality. Attempting to replicate the smell of the autumn forest from synthetics 

is equivalent to attempting to recreate strawberry flavour in our food. There will always be 

some part of us that is not fooled, and therefore the emotional experiences of both will not 

be equivalent. 

Prior Art 

Here we have the iSmell from DigiScent, one of the first 

efforts to create specific smells from a selection of primary 

essential oils, mixed and then wafted your way by means 

of a fan. This USB device takes its input from a PC, via 

Smell XML protocol. 

The Aroma Geur is a similar device as the iSmell soon to be 

introduced by NTT Communications - the corporate business 

arm of Tokyo-based Nippon Telegraph & Telephone Corp and 

Tokyo FM Broadcasting - it comes loaded with six oil-based 

perfume compounds. 

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A team from the University of Glasgow have created 

software and hardware to let computer users attach distinctive 

smells to a batch of images. The system, dubbed 

Olfoto, then lets users sort through their image collection 

simply by following their noses. Brewster and colleagues 

tested volunteers' ability to search through their own 

digital photos by smell. Each user first attached smells to 

different images, and then tried searching for a particular 

snapshot by selecting its odour. The researchers looked 

at how well the participants could sniff out their images 

compared with sorting by conventional text tags. 

Although sorting by smell was far slower, the results 

were still encouraging. 

The project Scentient Beings by Jenny Tillotson implants 

smell technology into multi-sensorial clothing and turns 

the living dress into a sensitive Smart Second Skin. Just 

like the scent of the skin changes with emotion, the 

Smart Second Skin fabric interacts with human emotions 

whereby the aroma dimension is an integral part of the 

wearers wellness sensory experience. The interactive 

fabric emits a selection of scents depending on your 

mood. Aromatic messages are actively 'pulsed' electronically 

through a cabling system. Much of the research 

includes work with human pheromones, she is 

working on sensors in garments that could be programmed 

to detect someone whose pheromone profile 

is of interest to you and send them a sample of your own 

pheromones. 

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Just recently, a Japanese team created a device capable 

of analysing an ambient smell, and replaying a 

representation of it. Simply point the gadget at 

freshly baked bread, for example, and it will analyse 

its odour and reproduce it for you using a host of 

non-toxic chemicals. It will use 15 chemical-sensing 

microchips, or electronic noses, to pick up a broad 

range of aromas. These are then used to create a 

digital recipe from a set of 96 chemicals that can be 

chosen according to the purpose of each individual 

gadget. When you want to replay a smell, drops from 

the relevant vials are mixed, heated and vaporised. 

Even with 96 primary odours, close reproductions 

have being proving difficult. And the device is presently 

desktop sized. 

Researchers at the University of Southern California in 

LA have patented a project that would allow US Army 

officers to use coded smells to give orders.These can 

be delivered silently, in the dark and when loud noise is 

drowning out speech. Furthermore, says the patent, 

the immediate reaction to a smell is emotional, rather 

than rational, so an odour trigger may encourage people 

to carry out orders without question. A collar would 

hang round a soldier’s neck. The collar has a dozen 

cartridges, each containing a wick soaked in smelly 

liquid, a valve and a small propeller fan. Remote radio 

signals open selected valves and kick fans into life. 

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The Smell Projector. 

Pulses puffs of scent towards 

the noses of relevant users. 

Could be used in a control 

room situation. 

Smell Emitting Clothing and Jewelry. 

The Aroma Keyring. A Bluetooth enabled 

key ring, can produce a novel fragrance on 

demand or when it enters an enabled zone. 

Can be compared to concept of 

dynamically changing perfume dispensing 

device. 

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Exploratory Concepts 

a selection of the many smell diffusers on the market 

At the early stages of the project, there were many different directions that this Odour Associative 

Learning Tool could of taken, from the simple scratch and sniff card that helps 

students focus on various topics during exams to the more complex solution that I have 

ultimately taken. 

These are presented in chronological order of exploration. 

The Odour Tagging Camera. 

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Initially I developed a proposal for a Smell-Induced Memory Device. 

The mechanism for this can be simply put: an odour is associated with the emotion that is 

present during the first exposure to the scent. When that smell is subsequently experienced, 

the emotion, and hence the connected memories, are involuntarily evoked. 

What if we could create a device that could capture the ambient odour, analyse it, store its 

character digitally, and generate the scent on demand by mixing together the necessary 

primary odours. 

In essence, we would have a memory recorder. 

There has been some attempt by others to achieve this but most involve the inherent inaccuracies 

mentioned above (theory summery). Their devices are usually very large too. 

My following solution requires a small device (with no limit to the miniaturisation of the device, 

see later) and no inaccuracy in the recreation of the odour. 

- This is a device that provides a novel smell ambiently or on demand, mixed from a 

selection of novel smells. 

- The exact formula is random but unique to a single event and is stored for future 

reference. 

-The device can be called upon to reproduce the same smell. 

Not an approximation, but the same smell. 

The problem has been reduced from device that requires a very accurate mass spectrometry 

component and at least a hundred primary odours that poorly recreate an odour, 

to a device where there is no need for odour analysis and only a handful of primary odours 

required to EXACTLY recreate an odour. 

Where do you start looking for novel smells? I have been in contact with Dr Rachel Herz a 

professor at Brown University as she has experience sourcing and creating novel odours 

for use in her Odour Associative Learning experiments. It’s a trial and error process but 

there are techniques for finding the most suitable smells. 

The following set of images is a selection of possible physical manifestations of the memory 

device. 

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I was aware that such devices tread dangerously upon the fine line between gimmicks and 

truly beneficial products. I attempted to integrate the basis of this concept into my final design 

without resorting to this contrived method of interaction. 

I then explored the employment of smell as a medium to display abstract information. It 

has been shown that smell can be used as a channel to transfer information. This information 

can be thought of something like an alarm clock reminder, where a time or an event 

triggers the release of a smell, as a reminder to take medication, of a birthday, a meeting, 

to inform about the status of an eBay item, etc. 

Smells ability to affect in the background makes it an ideal carrier for slow moving information. 

For example, imagine it was my business to match supply with demand, when there 

was an increase in sales, there would be an increase in one odour and a decrease in another, 

and if there were a decrease in sales, there would be a corresponding change in the 

mixture of the ambient scent. I would have a better instinct of the trends that affect my 

business, and would soon learn to trust that instinct. 

Market prices, any system where the state needs to be kept at an equilibrium, cholesterol 

and insulin levels in our body, whether the number of hits to a website are up or down, approval 

ratings, managing slow-moving perishables, how many of your relations are in town 

this weekend. When to have a glass of water prehaps? 

In situations where we would like to remember an event in a more qualitative manner, how 

we felt at the time and other related emotions, etc. These events can be recalled in their 

correct emotional contexts and could trigger a flood of other related memories. This could 

be seen to be a more aesthetic aspect of the project. 

As we get older, our hedonic perceptions of smells approaches cultural norms, Butyric acid 

generally elicits irritation and disgust, lavender relaxes, peppermint focuses concentration, 

etc. These are very much culturally specific; wintergreen mint is loved in the United States 

(smells of confectionary) but generally disliked in Britain (used in medicines and topical 

creams since the war). A device could be produced to detect changes in moods and 

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activity in an environment and generate an odour to alter or to compliment that mood. A 

smart Ambi-Pur so to speak. 

The idea that a single smell can bring upon a pre-programmed perceptive state has 

brought me to the idea of a smell track list or compilation. Each track shifts the awareness 

of those who have previously learned its association, towards new objects, new procedures 

and new goals. This can be seen as a background supervisor that can conduct the 

tasks for those who are involved in jobs that demand high attention and who are constantly 

getting barraged with information. Pilots, surgeons, directors, chefs, editors etc. As 

each task is completed the ‘player’ moves onto the next track, in a soft blending rather 

than an abrupt change, when the direction of where focus attention is subconsciously understood. 

An augmented system could ambiently control the odour. 

This final idea, where an ambient system quietly chooses the most suitable odour for our 

environment by following a prescribed set of rules, seems the most viable. There seems to 

be a realistic evolution between the present day environment fragrancers and this concept. 

Inspiration, Research and Form Development 

As already has been stated, I took a lot of initial inspiration from audio equipment, specifically 

speakers. I catalogued the parallels between speakers and the smell product that I 

envisioned as follows: both deliver invisible, sensory information. Both can be viewed as 

dispersers, broadcasters. Both are ubiquitous. Both are ambient in their physical presence 

and both allow for a sculptural and dynamic form. I really latched onto this idea of dispersing 

and broadcasting from a distance, and sought out other items from technology and nature 

that do the same, projectors, spot-lights, mushrooms, flowers and seed-pods, sirens 

and fire flames. I created mood boards of some of these objects along with some moodboards 

of various environments: home, creative and office, etc. 

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speakers and projectors 

creative 

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home 

work 

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I researched further into the products available on the market today, into aromatherapy 

and the only related project that I could find in the IDE past project collection, Airoma by 

Pär Bergström . I can summarise my feelings on these products as follows: these products 

represent the untapped potential of smell to product design. Here, smell is seen as solely a 

director of moods and of well-being, as if each smell has its own properties to make us feel 

a certain way. What these products do not address is that the mood that each smell 

evokes is user dependent; it is based on experience and upon cultural norms. I chose at 

this stage that I wanted my product to be designed in order to add true meaning to smells, 

drawn from experience rather than from tradition. 

I traveled to Berlin to meet the smell artist, Sissel Tolaas. Sissel is one of the most fascinating 

people in the area of olfaction. Her Laboratory is partly funded by IFF (international 

Flavours and Fragrances) and she has over 7000 individual components of smell available 

to her here. Sissel (who has a background in chemistry, art, mathematics and linguistics) is 

working on a universal language with which she hopes will allow us to express ourselves 

about how smells make us feel. She has a drive to really challenge people on how smell 

affects us. For example, Sissel has access to a ‘Headspace’ machine, a portable mass 

spectrometer. She can use this to discover the components of any smell, from a person, a 

mineral or vegetable. She used this to extract the odour from the sweat of men that suffer 

from acute, chronic fear, recreated this odour and microencapsulated it within a white paint 

with which she painted the walls of a exhibition space (scratch-n-sniff), therefore capturing 

the smell of fear. We, as developed human beings, would automatically and subconsciously 

recognise this odour and this would trigger a physiological change in us. I must 

confess that I found the experience of these smells somewhat jarring indeed. This meeting 

was incredibly inspiring and gave some insight into what is possible with smell, and many 

product concepts blossomed from this point. The relationship between us continued after 

this and Sissel is collaborating with me in this project 

sissel tolaas in her lab 

From the various sources of inspiration that I had collated at this point, I started designing 

some sketch models of some forms that I felt represented the specification laid out above. 

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this design draws on the projection analogy, the back is filled with the various primary smells 

I felt that the metaphor was a little too obvious in this design. 

this design was inspired from the mushroom and speaker ideas. the concept of dispersion is unequivocal 

here. this design seemed to invite people to touch it, I don’t know why, but there seemed to 

be an attraction to grasp the base. the angle is present so that the smell can be sent into a room, 

rather than just float above the device. 

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this design was inspired from the puffball mushroom and from the poppy seedpod. The idea is that 

there would have been many of these in a vertical container, each controlling a different aspect of the 

ambient smell. By raising or lowering each of them in relation to one another, there is some interaction 

by the user that empowers them with a sense of controlling their own environment. 

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this design is heavily based on the metaphor of audio equipment. I believed that there is some intrigue 

possible in being able to see each of the odour containers. The idea is that each smell is controlled 

remotely by web-based information and control is transmitted to this device wirelessly. 

some other designs demonstrating the concept of broadcasting. 

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At this stage I received feedback on each of these areas of exploration. There seemed to 

be a unanimous vote that the mushroom shaped form above stuck the biggest chord. I reiterated 

this sketch model process to come up with variations of this theme. 

the selection of fluted forms 

this design accentuates the dispersion horn, really characterising the feature. 

I felt that this size has made it quite ridiculous. a happier medium was sought. 

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the next one plays on the flower vase concept. this form is too safe I feel for such a different product. 

it has a simple twisting action in order to select further functions. the vials of essential oils can be 

viewed from the outside. 

this device has a flanged horn, like an umbrella. 

the main body is rounded at the bottom to allow the product to roll freely on a surface. 

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Technology 

During the course of this project, many different technologies were researched, some for 

dispersion techniques and other for smell sensing possibilities. 

Sensing 

From the outset, it seemed that there were many different potential applications for a device 

that could sense the constitution of an ambient odour. A portable device that could record 

smells to play back later could be considered a memory recorder and player. Some 

other examples include device that: 

…could smell when your food was cooked, 

…could sense if there were poisonous gases in the environment, 

…knows fake from genuine items, 

…could tell you if you had body odour or if there were a ‘bad’ smell in your apartment, 

…could indicate whether there were a compatible sexual partner in the vicinity, 

Etc. 

These would all be some very new and innovative products so research was carried out to 

discover if this was a feasible direction. The first possibility comes from that flexible material, 

Quantum Tunneling Composite (QTC). While interviewing the head of Peratech, the 

company that owns this material, he explained that it has been shown that QTC can sense 

certain smells. How does it do this? QTC is basically a polymer impregnated with super 

small particles of conductive material. When force is applied, the material turns from an 

insulator to a conductor, all the way from infinite resistance to only a few ohms in a nonlinear 

yet reproducible manner. The really interesting thing is that volatile organic compounds 

(VOCs or smells) make this material expand in their presence. Each different 

polymer reacts differently to each different VOC causing a measurable change in resistance. 

So, in theory, a bank of these (tiny) chips could sense any smell. 

Luca Turin, mentioned above, has just formulated the theory on how we actually sense 

smells. It is based on the fact that each VOC vibrates at a different set of frequencies, and 

the bank of resonating sensors in our nose can thus decode the smell. The company, Cyrano 

Technologies, has swiftly put this theory into an application. They use the fact that vibration 

causes piezoelectric chips to produce a voltage. Each chip produces a maximum 

voltage at its resonant frequency. They are integrating this within security checks in airports, 

to discover weapons, explosives and drugs. 

The sensing of smells is sure to be a very exiting time for product design, but I felt there 

were too many hurdles to overcome and take it out of the conceptual stage at the present. 

Peratech claim that they can create the specific QTC to sense a specific VOC but this research 

is in its infancy and development would take time. 

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Dispersion 

The technologies looked into as dispersion possibilities: 

• Heating oil and dispersing with a fan, 

• Airbrush, compressed air, 

• Mechanical Atomizer, with or without propellant, 

• Inkjet Technologies, 

• Scratch-n-Sniff, mechanical activation methods, 

• Piezoelectric pump, 

• Piezo vibrator. 

• The heating of oil was investigated first. I obtained an amount of ultra-clear gel, which 

can contain essential oil within it. What I did, was melt some of this gel with some oil, 

poured it into volumetric flasks and allowed it to set with a hollow through the middle of 

them. These were then attached to a wooden box. Each of the two compartments had a 

fan and a heating lamp in them. When one smell was required, the lamp and the fan 

were turned on in that compartment. This would force warm air to travel through that 

specific flask and cause a resulting change in the smell of the air. The problem with this 

method is that it is difficult to expel all of the heat in one go and so it is also difficult to 

control the total blend of aroma. Where accuracy in odour is required, this method is not 

an option. 

flasks containing aromatic gel, connected to a box with heat lamps and fans 

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the bottom of the flask showing the hollow the fully assembled apparatus 

• Airbrushing is interesting as a technique except that you require some compression of 

the oil mixture or need a powerful pump. Also this method may be dangerous as you are 

atomizing volatile gases at high pressure and therefore this becomes a possible 

flamethrower. 

• Ditto mechanical atomizer. 

• Inkjet technologies are very exciting. An Epson printer head works as tiny piezoelectric 

diaphragms vibrate, forcing ink out of tiny holes at very high accuracies. Care also must 

be taken here, as the flash point of the oils is so low and could ignite as before. This 

topic is dealt with again later. 

an epson print head with the tiny holes etched into the surface 

• Scratch and sniff technologies can be considered reasonably one-shot and are not really 

suitable for this product. 

• Piezoelectric pumps are very nifty devices. I sourced some particularly tiny versions from 

a company called Bartels Mikrotechnik in Germany. These are tiny diagram pumps, injection 

molded with tiny check valves integrated within them. A small piezoelectric chip 

vibrates at 90 Hz allowing very accurate flow from 50nl to 15μl per minute, ideal for this 

product. 

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the piezoelectric micropump that was integrated into the final working prototype 

• The piezoelectric sprayer is used in a laboratory environment to release insect pheromones 

into the air and has also been integrated into an ambient aroma product by Osmooze. 

The theory is simple. A small amount of oil is pumped into a syringe needle and 

a piezoelectric chip vibrates the tip of the needle at about 200kHz. This causes the oil to 

completely atomize immediately. Ignition is not a problem as the tip of the syringe can be 

remote from all electronics. 

Final Specification of the Quale 

a piezoelectric sprayer setup showing the 

capillary tube and the mechanically coupled piezo 

With all these technologies investigated, a full specification for this product can be drawn 

up, narrative of use and all. 

The device is an intelligent one, it quietly observes and dispenses. We live our lives stuck 

in routines. Is this a good thing? Routines help us remember what to do in times of stress. 

They can add a comforting structure to our days. But being stuck in routines can have a 

negative aspect too, sheltering us from new experiences and from the benefits of living a 

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life full of variety. So what about a device that helps us stay in a routine when we are 

stressed and helps us break out of it when we are relaxed? Routine is a loose word here, I 

mean it as a set of procedural tasks that we find ourselves doing day in, day out, like 

checking email, having lunch, cleaning up, etc. 

How does it do this? The device has a camera and a microphone to observe our physical 

behaviour and a Bluetooth transceiver to discover our web based activities. From these 

inputs, this device can calculate patterns in our daily behaviour that is compiled from deviations 

from our average behaviour. From this, an event-based snapshot of our day can 

be calculated. The device then uses this to create an olfactory track list, which parallels the 

list of events over time. Each of the tracks is denoted by a particular smell or blend of 

smells and is played each day at that time to focus the person’s attention on that event. As 

the lunch smell is turned on, the body pays little attention to the odour until that odour 

overpowers the previous late morning work smell, and a desire to take a break is reached. 

On the other hand, when we are not stressed or busy, the device deviates from the routine 

track list; it then plays different odours that were reserved for these relaxing periods. 

These odours become associated with these feelings of being on holiday, being free and 

enjoying life, and of exploration. Once they become associated with these feelings, they 

will evoke them in the future. Essentially, the device now inspires and provides ideas for a 

change from the norm. 

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How does it know when the user is stressed or relaxed? By observing our behaviour and 

its deviation from the norms of routine, the device can make some decisions based on this. 

However, the fact that people have found a pleasant tactile quality to the form that has 

been chosen for this device, I have decided to integrate a strain sensor (QTC) within the 

body of the product. The action of rough handling and squeezing is telling of stressful 

times but those of petting and of a soft touch speaks of a relaxed temperament. Other web 

based information such as timetable and email inbox capacity can be clues to these stress 

levels too. 

So, the product’s form articulates both its dispersion and tactile interactive aspects, but 

what about its sensing? I have integrated a camera at the top of the device and made no 

effort to disguise the fact that it is watching us. The grille with which the device emits the 

smell and listens to us through surrounds this eye. I have based this on the Fibonacci spiral 

array pattern found on sunflowers and other natural entities called parastichies, this I 

feel increases a subtle resemblance to flowers and organic forms but still being related to 

the idea of a speaker grille. The device can roll about on its base to both observe its environment 

but also to dispense the smell across the whole space. This is achieved by the 

rotation of an asymmetric weight within the device. I felt that this action also increases the 

feeling that the device is an intelligent one. 

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a whorl pattern of parastichies 

I have decided to make the device powered through mains rather than battery operated 

due to the fact that it isn’t necessary for the product to be very mobile and having to plug it 

in to recharge every day or so takes away from its autonomy. 

There is a replaceable cartridge of smells in the device that holds 32 fragrances. These all 

pipe into a piezoelectric device like an inkjet head. This effectively pumps an accurate 

supply of each of the odours onto a piezoelectric plate that vibrates at about 2MHz, atomizing 

them immediately. A small fan blows the smell gently out the horn at the top. 

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The replaceable cartridge of smells is described like so. The smells necessarily need to be 

somewhat novel and therefore the smells are to be designed by a perfumer. So how do 

people choose the right set of smells for them? Taking inspiration from Sissel Tolaas, an 

elegant solution emerged. Sissel has done exhibitions in cities like Liverpool where she 

captured a cornucopia of different smells from many different corners of the city, and recreated 

the olfactory landscape within a single room. Many different smells, all related 

through the thread of the city that they were captured in. People might not know what is 

the most suitable set of smells for them through smell alone but they do know how they 

feel about places they have been or heard about. This is demonstrated elsewhere in the 

Loci Method of memory recollection. If you have a particular interest in Paris in the spring 

or with Kolkata’s bazaars, you can choose that set for a particular season. Each smell 

within the set will have been chosen for its uniqueness and for its unusual quality. This allows 

people the ability to control the flavour of the smells in their environment while still allowing 

the product to operate efficiently. 

A Note on Scale 

This product pumps and atomizes the oils through piezoelectric means. If this device also 

sensed smells as well as creating them, there would possibly be further use for piezoelectrics, 

as metioned previously. Piezoelectric components happen to be the workhorses of 

Microelectromechanical systems (MEMS). They can be deposited at very small sizes. This 

is conceptually very exciting; when used in conjunction with microfluidic components such 

as microvalves and etched glass channels and resovoirs (Bartels, et al.), there is no end to 

the possibilities. Imagine having a MEMS nose ring that chemically stimulates you at various 

times of the day or keeps you up to date with your daily load of information. An olfactory 

phone which solely transmits your emotions maybe? This would all be possible due to 

the minute quantities of odorant actually required for perception. 

an etched glass plate showing the microfluidic channels and resovoirs 

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the layout of internal components. 

the two parts of the body can be screwed open to change the cartridge of smells 

Bill of materials for Quale 

• 1 CCD and wide angle lens. 

• 1 piezoelectric microphone. 

• 2 QTC chips (strain guage). 

• 1 combined microcontroller and Bluetooth module. 

• 1 voltage regulator. 

• 1 polypropylene container for the oils, coated with a very thin layer of PTFE to provide 

chemical resistance to the VOCs. 

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• 1 miniature stepper motor and a small steel weight (for mobility). 

• 1 piezoelectric pump bank (printhead). 

• 1 high frequency piezoelectric atomizing chip. 

• 1 charge pump for voltage step-up and oscillator for piezoelectric devices. 

• 1 miniature fan. 

• 2 rotationally molded, polypropylene (slightly squeezable) body components covered 

with a velvet touch paint. 

In regards to the pricing of the device, I wanted to draw a parallel between this product 

and medium to low end audio equipment. This is not competing with the Glade Plugins of 

this world, it operates within a new paradigm of environmental control. The product should 

be available for purchase at about 70 pounds with the cost of the cartridges depending on 

the quality of the oils used and on who the smell designer was that created them. 

As microfluidic tooling costs decrease, these products could literally be made for a very 

low price and could become ever more ubiquitous. 

The exhibition of Quale 

Finally I will explain the working prototype that will be displayed at the Royal College of Art 

graduation show in the summer of 2007. The device contains a selection of 16 essential 

oils within a container. Each oil has its own micropump to deliver minute yet accurate 

quantities of the oil through a syringe needle to a piezoelectric chip that can vibrate at 

1.6MHz. This atomizes the different smells into the air, where it is blown out by a fan 

through the centre of the oil container and out of the device through the diffusion horn. All 

the wires will be spiraled out of view so that this can be observed propery. 

The whole setup will be controlled by an out-of-sight computer running specially written 

software and taking its input from a video camera and microphone. The algorithm will be 

specially altered so that the concept of observation can be understood in the brief time that 

people spend at the stand. 

the working prototype, showing pumps, connector module, syringe needles and piezo chip. 

the control wires are fed out of sight. 

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industrial design engineering, royal college of art david sweeney ...

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