In general designers are primarily focussed on vision. Sometimes touch is taken into account too. They usually are less interested in the other senses and probably not even aware of the fact that interaction of our senses determines our perception of things. Professor Charles Spence, experimental psychologist at Oxford University, demonstrated in his opening speech on Day 2 how this works. Two faces next to each other making different lip movements alter the sound we hear, although the sound itself doesn’t change.
What you see can change what you hear, what you hear can change what you taste, what you taste can change what you feel, et cetera. Spence had his speech filled with examples of how the knowledge of these interactions of the senses is beginning to be used in so-called synaesthetic marketing. The same glass of whisky tastes more grassy in a green room, sweeter in a red room with round shapes and tinkling music and woodier in a room with wooden walls and groovy jazz music. The point Spence made clear is that interaction of the sense does matter and should be taken into account by designers.
‘Use the science’
The day before, Spence’s colleague scientist, professor Paul Hekkert (TU Delft) already mentioned that designers should make use of all the knowledge scientists have gathered over the last 20 years on what works for people and what adds to their wellbeing. He gave some beautiful examples of design projects that created a maximum effect through minimum means (the MEMM-principle) in guiding people’s behaviour. Take for instance the Keymoment by Matthias Laschke that makes the bicycle keys fall on the floor when one grabs the car key from the other side.
People want guidance and direction is Hekkert’s conviction and designers can provide them with it. Designers can show us the way we should go to create a better future, reason why Hekkert sees today’s designers as the real politicians. In stead of giving people just what they want, what is pretty much what politicians are doing nowadays, designers can paint the picture of a better future and act upon it by designing products and services that change people’s behaviour.
Olfactory self-portrait
In doing so it seems advisable to pay more attention to smell as a factor to influence behaviour. Norwegian artist and olfactory specialist Sissel Tolaas last year smeared a wall in a Shanghai museum with her own smell. This olfactory self-portrait induced visitors to touch and kiss the wall and even start writing love letters to the artist. When the museum wanted to remove the artwork after the closure of the exhibition, a public uprising prevented the museum from finally doing so.
Scent is a powerful tool and most of Tolaas’ work is intended to make us aware of this. She has a way to collect and store smells from reality in her archive that now counts 7200 different smells. Tolaas seems specially interested in the odours that most people tend to abhor. But that is all in the nose of the one who smells. ‘Nothing stinks, only thinking makes it so,’ Tolaas said. ‘We are sanitizing, deodorizing our world in a way that is not healthy any more.’
Smell can affect the way we perceive things, as Charles Spence told, but it also affects how we remember things. Tolaas demonstrated this with another project of hers in which she made new smells without any known connotation to go along with different school subjects. A scent that is used while learning math can induce a better memory of the things learned when it is smelled again when a test is done.
Flavoured hullabaloo
A lot of the knowledge on multisensory experiences the other speakers talked about, Sam Bompas and Harry Parr found out experimentally over the past 17 years. The food experience designers, sometimes described as culinary deviants, are the specialists of flavoured hullabaloo. What started with jelly bravura evolved gradually into creating gin & tonic clouds, and whisky organs, culminating in total sensory assaults. The work of Bompas & Parr is all about food and fun and ‘giving people the most joyous experience of their lives’. Sam Bompas’s presentation at WDCD was no exception with surprising male nudity – enthusiasts of male nakedness were certainly spoiled this year at WDCD – and a spectacular burst of gherkin scent as a grand finale.
‘Food has a lot to offer,’ said Cynthia Shanmugalingam, founder of Britain’s first food incubator Kitchinette. ‘It animates our cities and we fall in love when eating it.’ Thanks to Stefan Sagmeister we now know that this love can’t last forever. In his three year research into happiness he found that it is perfectly normal for couples not to stay in love forever. ‘The chemistry makes it impossible, you would otherwise die,’ he explained. Happiness has a lot of sources, Sagmeister now knows, and the senses have a lot to do with it. As Sissel Tolaas phrased it: ‘Only in harmony with the senses we can be happy human beings and truly understand the world.’
Top image: Sam Bompas, half of food experience design duo Bompas & Parr (photo Leo Veger)