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

industrial design engineering, royal college of art david sweeney 2007
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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