Scents for Memories of Threshold Moments
A one-day symposium, Headspace, was held in New York to explore the broad design implications of scent. Seed magazine covers it with a great slide show, The Scent of Design. It is worth a look from a cognitive design standpoint. One item that caught my interest:
Yuka Hiyoshi and Ayse Birsel of Birsel+Seck worked with thier perfume team to explore the profound connections between memories and scents. They decided to craft odors based upon the concept of “threshold moments”—life experiences that are at once deeply personal and yet collectively shared by nearly all people. Hiyoshi and Birsel’s objects are designed to fit in the palm of your hand, playing on the powerful capacity of scent to capture a specific moment in time.
These threshold moment are birth babyhood, puberty, sex, partnership, empty nest and death. The objects are pebbles and prototypes are shown below.
