A designer who creates objects and spaces engages our sensations of touch, sight, and sometimes hearing. But what of our noses? Despite olfaction’s unmatched ability to evince memories and emotions—two essential objectives of design—smell is a relatively untapped medium in design practice. Combining scents with design was the challenge put to five designers, deemed “accidental perfumers,” by the organizers of HEADSPACE: On Scent as Design a symposium recently held in New York through the joint collaboration of Seed, Parsons the New School for Design, MoMA, International Flavors & Fragrances, and Coty. Selected for their diverse approaches to design, each “accidental perfumer” was paired with two professional perfumers from IFF and commissioned to explore how evanescent chemistries, when translated into smell, shape our experience of space and time. Though the participants chose to take their projects in radically different directions, they all came to the same conclusion: This is only the beginning. Many of the works you’ll see in this slideshow represent just the starting point for what promises to be a fruitful merger of olfaction and design.
