EXPLOIT ODOURS IN PRODUCT DESIGN FOR ELICITING POSITIVE EMOTIONAL EXPERIENCE
Creators: name: BORDEGONI, Monica
Publisher: name: Digital Olfaction Society
Year: 2016

description: Product design is a process that includes a sequence of activities from idea generation to products. Product design is multi-disciplinary and inter-disciplinary, where creativity, science and technology are combined to create new products that meet users’ needs and expectations. Product design addresses the set of properties of an artifact, including the form, i.e., the aesthetics of the artifact, and the function, i.e., its capabilities, and also addresses the holistic properties of the integrated form and function. Sensorial experiences can bring added value to products. For example, one can experience the finishing of a surface by looking at its visual texture and also touching its physical texture. One aim of product design is to ensure that the product is pleasant to senses.
Typically, the senses of sight, touch and hearing are considered key factors in product design. Industrial designers often explain what product creation is inspired by. And often the source of inspiration is something that we can figure out through our eyes or through our hands. Instead, odours tend to be neglected in product design, while they provide a lot of added value. Odour perception is a primal sense, and there is a large variety of odours that can stimulate olfactory senses and evoke experiences. Odours can be considered an aesthetic medium to design evocative experiences. Studies demonstrate that odour memory can last for the whole lifetime.  The fact that odours tend to be neglected in product design is mainly due to lack of knowledge in odour design and evaluation, in technologies for odour generation and detection and in how to apply odours in practice to product design. There are many questions that need to be addressed, including how can a product deliver an odour, how should this smell like, how can we test the effect of odours on users/customers, and many more. When designing multi-sensorial experiences for new products, odours shall not be simply added to the design, but must be holistically designed and integrated with the other sensory experiences. Product design has been facilitated by methods and tools that now allow designers to communicate, visualize, analyze and actually produce tangible ideas in a way that would have taken greater manpower and longer time in the past. Novel methods include Experience Prototyping and Emotional Engineering, and tools include Virtual Prototyping and Physical Computing. Experience prototyping is a practice using any kind of representation, in any medium, to understand, explore or communicate what it might be like to engage with the product, space or system one is designing.   Emotional Engineering is the technology to design systems that appeal to emotion and sensibility by translating human sensibility and multi-sensory effects, including images, sounds, haptic/tactile effects and smells, into physical design factors. Virtual Prototyping and Physical Computing are enabling technologies for the development of interactive prototypes and of testing set ups. The inclusion of the sense of smell in novel experience prototyping is done through Olfactory Displays, which can be customized and integrated with the other multisensory technology.
By using these methods and tools, our research group has developed various olfactory displays and multisensory applications, where users’ emotional reactions have been detected by means of self-reporting questionnaires and physiological data: in-vehicle olfaction based devices for alerting drivers, applications to smell e-books and take a virtual smell-tour of maps, virtual applications to assess the presence of odours associated with consumer products.
description: Journal of Digital Olfaction Society, Vol 4, No 1 (2016): Journal of Digital Olfaction Volume 4