Emotion, Location and the Senses: A Virtual Dérive Smell Map of Paris.

Immerse yourself in a tour of a city in which you meander based on odour using associative memories to guide you to other memorable locations, to hidden emotions.

Designed with the intent of investigating connections between scents and a city this study uses design to show how emotion, location and memory can be linked at semiotic and personal levels. It explores those links in the form of an art installation, a smell-induced “virtual dérive” smellmap experience through an urban landscape. The audience response was one of quiet reflection, their sniffing was a three-stage process, their written contributions led to an understanding of how certain smells induce types of behaviours and reactions – the smell of coffee induced people to write a story, the scent of wooden floors brought to mind a different era.

Smellmapping poses its own problems; smells are ephemeral thus forcing us to consider the nature of temporality in such creations. Consideration also needs to be taken of how to lead the audience through the landscape. The urban landscape belongs to the humans who populate it; future smell maps need to belong to the permanent and transient populations who inhabit that space.