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

industrial design engineering, royal college of art david sweeney 2007
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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