What if we had a camera that captured smell?
Thanks to modern technology, we now have plenty of ways to easily (and compulsively) document the sights and sounds of our everyday lives, whether for social networking or posterity. But a digital trove of photographs and audio recordings cant compete with the sensory jolt of a smell to trigger memories.
A certain cologne might remind you of a person who wore it, even if it can never resurrect the exact chemistry of their perfumed skin. The smell of roast chicken might remind you of Sunday dinners at your grandmothers house, but never of the exact fragrance of her kitchen.
What if we had a way to capture these fleeting olfactory memories before they disappear into thin air?
That is the question posed by designer Amy Radcliffe, whose award-winning graduate project at Londons Central Saint Martins last spring caused a bit of a stir. A prototype for what she calls an analogue odor camera, her elegant little contraption would use perfumery technology called Headspace Capture to harness the evocative and highly subjective power of scent. Instead of recording light information the way that a camera would to recreate an image, her proposed device would record the molecular information contained in an odor.
Our sense of smell is believed to have a direct link to our emotional memory, Radcliffe wrote. It is the sense that we react to most instinctually and also the furthest away from being stored or replicated digitally. From ambient smell-scapes to the utterly unique scent of an individual, our scent memory is a valuable resource yet to be systematically captured and archived.
Headspace capture technology is a method pioneered by Swiss chemist Roman Kaiser who for decades has used it to trap, analyze and reconstitute the scents of the natural world in order to make perfume.
Radcliffe has named her prototype the Madeleine in a nod to Prousts enduring baked-goods-as-time-capsule metaphor, and has made a whimsical video to illustrate a simplistic vision of how the technology works. An object is placed under a glass dome; its scent is extracted via a plastic tube and filtered into a resin trap that records the molecular data of the odor. It is then sent to a lab for analysis where it is recreated into a tiny vial full of liquid memories.
Although the technology has been around for decades in the perfume world, Radcliffes gently provocative exercise challenges todays industrial designers to create viable commercial products that will allow individuals to document, preserve and instantly access the elusive trail of scent that creates our memories.
Developing the kind of friendly analog machine and accessible laboratory back end that would be required to make Radcliffes vision viable is still in the dream stages, but her little student project has legs. It has made the design week circuit in Milan and London and was on display last month at the Victoria & Albert Museum.
If an analogue, amateur-friendly system of odor capture and synthesis could be developed, we could see a profound change in the way we regard the use and effect of smells in our daily lives, Radcliffe wrote. From manipulating our emotional well-being through prescribed nostalgia, to the functional use of conditioned scent memory, our olfactory sense could take on a much more conscious role in the way we consume and record the world.