Olfactogram

Collaboration with Edna Hirsbrunner and Mara Weber

Introduction

Olfactogram allows you to record, store, collect and share scents. The kit enables people who have been forced to leave their home to revel in their dearest olfactory memories whenever they feel like.

The custom built copper still. The custom built copper still allows for extraction of scented oils from organic matter.

Video

The custom built copper still. The custom built copper still allows for extraction of scented oils from organic matter.

Description

Olfactogram is a project that was created in the second semester of my studies in the module “Interaction Design Process”. The course description is as follows: “This course explores questions and methods that are at the core of interaction design practice. Video Scenarios are used as a prototyping technique. Students learn about interaction design methods and how to structure the design process for different projects or levels of development. They develop design concepts for a product, a service or an event. Following different design phases of observation, creation, and evaluation we will discuss and apply situated and people-centered methods with creative design practice (e.g. bodystorming, context analysis, video scenarios, prototypes).”

Our group of three dealt with the subject of sustainability, which we further developed during the course to the subject of home. We focused on the issue of the loss of home and were interested in how to make home transportable, especially with the ulterior motive of helping people who are being forced to leave their home.

Hydropower plants and their sustainability are a currently discussed issue in Switzerland. At the beginning of our process we focused on this topic. We did ethnographic video research at a couple of dams, talked to departments for wildlife and fishery, power plant companies, gastronomes and everyday people. After a field trip to a Grisons mountain village and meeting the last person still alive of a whole village that was flooded there, we switched the matter to the much warmer, emphatic issue of people being forced to leave their homes.

Olfactory memories are very strong and lasting. Therefore, we developed through our findings the Olfactogram kit to create memories that can be smelled.

Olfactogram Olfactogram