 |
| Immerse yourself in a pot of hot enfleurage so we can bottle your essence forever, just like this murder victim from the movie Perfume. |
Trends come and go, we know that. The rate of change,
however, is a topic worthy of discussion. People used to say that fashion revolves
on a twenty year cycle – wait til the 90’s and bellbottoms are cool again. You
know what hasn’t been in fashion for a while though? Smell.
I’m looking at a great piece by Smell Futurist
Olivia Jezler about the coming wave
of
olfactory
experience headed our way. It
was written a year ago, but since we’re going to examine very long timescales
here, her piece is still relevant. This is a slow wave.
Looking Back – The
Loss of a Sense
Unlike bellbottoms and banjos, smell is not a cultural artifact;
it is a medium for transmission. And as such, it’s been around forever. Longer
even than the comb-over! And it used to be so important to us. It told us what
was ok to eat, who was ok to mate with, and when to take out the garbage. And
then, one day, tricolor vision and bipedal height advantage come along, and BAM
– no more smells.
Seeing in color makes eyes the most high-fidelity info
channel ever, and the height advantage from walking on two legs both expands
that field of polychromatic vision and takes our noses off the ground, making
them way less useful. Vision wins, and olfaction bites the dust. We spend the
next half a million years looking at flowers and listening to crinkly sounds
but not a single smell. Sure there’s food and taste, but we have very
completely convinced ourselves that most of what we taste is taste and not
smell, although it is in fact the other way around.
(Also dogs – I don’t hear many people saying this, but I
think human coevolution with dogs, who can smell really well, made us not have
to smell as well. Animal cognition expert
Alexandra Horowitz might
be able to weigh-in on this.)
There was a brief moment around the late 1700’s when
smells took the spotlight again, causing the
French Revolution and
subsequently pouring the foundation for our modern
public
hygiene infrastructure, not a big deal. And that’s it. No more smells,
anywhere.
Looking Forward –
The Experience Economy
And then, all of the sudden, we enter the new millennium
and it becomes apparent that smell has returned. One day we wake up and flowers
smell floral, and perfume bottles no longer spray odorless distilled water (but
fatal
nerve agents, not funny). Things will get way crazier, according to
Jezler’s insights.
“The Renaissance of Smell“
-Bernardo
Fleming, Head of the Olfactive Design Studio at International Flavors &
Fragrances
Jezler points out what has happened to cause this
disturbance in our datasphere – people are now willing to pay more for
experiences than for things. I call this dematerialization, but she goes on to
describe the cycle of consumerism upon us. She describes how brands today put
lots of money behind the creation of experiences that cannot be ‘consumed’
unless you’re there for real.
I think she would have to explain to me why it is that
brands want their consumers to go somewhere and do something together.
Something about memetic transmission and social networks I guess. Or how about
exclusivity? I’ll bet that’s it. You’re just jealous because you’re only
hearing about this now, after it’s already been transmitted by someone cooler
than you, and that makes you want it more.
An experience economy needs to use all the senses, and
this has put more attention on the low hanging fruit, the most unexplored on
the market – smell.
And although you can partially consume last night’s
pop-up event via this morning’s newsfeed, you can never get the whole thing,
because you will never smell it if you’re not there. And that’s because the
event last night was augmented by a group of olfactory magicians on the team.
From the smell on the seatbelts in the cab on the way over, to the scent on the
ticket they gave you at the door, that event was designed as a fully immersive
olfactory experience, whether you realized it or not.
Talk about
Joel
Beckerman and sonic branding –
it’s more powerful than
Pavlov.
(Just kidding it’s the same.) You hear a jingle over and over until it brands a band
of your auditory cortex. You’ve been primed.
Scent branding works too, although we pay attention to it less.
Whether we notice or not, the brands notice; take a look at
Play-Doh
exercising their intellectual property rights to be a specifically-scented
product. But I am digressing from the point. The Renaissance of Smell rides not
just the wave of the experience economy, but also of the palette-forward
generation behind the wheel.
“…Smell has been put back on the map through a myriad of
factors, and three reasons I believe in particular: Our desire for experience,
academic progress, and the rise of the gourmet palette.”
-Olivia
Jezler, Owner of The Future of Smell, Fragrance Innovation Consultant
Consumers of today know way more about their biscuits
than their grandparents did. Just look at what’s written above a café counter
today vs thirty years ago. (It used to just say “Coffee.”)
 |
| Just Coffee |
This sophistication extends far beyond coffee, and it
gives consumers the talent, the exposure and the lexicon to appreciate the
gustatory satisfaction of complex aroma.
Looking For
Reinforcements – Academia Adds Potency
I saved the “academics” part of Jezler’s premonition for
last. The experience economy, of which the gourmet movement is a part, is not
the only thing fanning a more fragrant datasphere towards our sensory
apparatus. Jezler uses the Academics tag to group together all the new
technologies and concepts that have augmented and extended our understanding of
this most primitive of senses, from
digital noses
to
hormonal
engineering.
Unfortunately, I’m a real pessimist about anything even
slightly resembling an electronic nose, or the digital transmission of odorous
molecules. However, when I hear somebody (the MIT Media Lab) say that
estrogen
is a “biotechnical civil disobedience, seeking to subvert dominant biopolitical
agents of hormonal management, knowledge production, and anthropogenic toxicity,”
I can’t help but get pretty excited. (They’re connecting the profusion of
environmental estrogen due to excess petrochemical use, or ‘xenoestrogen,’
to an increasing hormonal malleability, or
‘queering’ of our society, in case you’re wondering.)
There are plenty of legitimate attempts at bringing our
noses to the technocratic party, but I don’t see these going beyond fiction for
quite some time. In fact, I should say that it is the main reason why it is
such an intriguing subject for a fictional future.
But in the end, it doesn’t matter if it’s fact or fiction
(especially in today’s world where Big Data has made the truth way harder to
faithfully articulate). After all, science fiction gives us the imagination
that we need to create the future.
Despite the threat of our world becoming a cold,
body-less, virtual space that is a network of quantum repeaters in
low earth orbit, Jezler sees us re-engaging with all of our senses. Chances are
it will be a bit of both. In the meantime, it makes good business sense to
consider the low-hanging fruit of the experience economy. Whether you’re
designing the next delivery bot, or writing a proposal for research funding,
don’t forget that people care about their sense of smell. It’s what makes an
experience authentic, and authenticity will always be in style.
Image source: A still from the movie Perfume: The Story
of a Murderer
Image source: Old coffeshop menu
Notes:
SMELL: How our insatiable desire for experience is giving
rise to sensory perception and the renaissance of smell
Olivia Jezler - Medium, 2017
The Future of Smell
Odors and Urban Planning
Limbic Signal, 2017
Kate Maclean’s Sensory Maps
Hasbro trademarks Play-doh’s scent: Sweet, slightly musky
AP News, May 2018
Imagineering Institute’s Digital Smell Interface
MIT Media Lab’s Design Fiction Group on Open Source
Estrogen and Hormone Microperformance
