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

More documents

Recommendations

Info

industrial design engineering, royal college of art david sweeney 2007 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)”. 4
industrial design engineering, royal college of art david sweeney 2007 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 5
Page 1 and 2: industrial design engineering, roya
Page 3: industrial design engineering, roya

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

Create successful ePaper yourself

Delete template?

Save as template?