Opportunities for odor: experiences with smell and implications for technology

TY - GEN

T1 - Opportunities for odor

T2 - SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems 2014

AU - Obrist, Marianna

AU - Tuch, Alexandre N.

AU - Hornbæk, Kasper

PY - 2014

Y1 - 2014

N2 - Technologies for capturing and generating smell are emerging, and our ability to engineer such technologies and use them in HCI is rapidly developing. Our understanding of how these technologies match the experiences with smell that people have or want to have is surprisingly limited. We therefore investigated the experience of smell and the emotions that accompany it. We collected stories from 439 participants who described personally memorable smell experiences in an online questionnaire. Based on the stories we developed 10 categories of smell experience. We explored the implications of the categories for smellenhanced technology design by (a) probing participants to envision technologies that match their smell story and (b) having HCI researchers brainstorm technologies using the categories as design stimuli. We discuss how our findings can benefit research on personal memories, momentary and first time experiences, and wellbeing.

AB - Technologies for capturing and generating smell are emerging, and our ability to engineer such technologies and use them in HCI is rapidly developing. Our understanding of how these technologies match the experiences with smell that people have or want to have is surprisingly limited. We therefore investigated the experience of smell and the emotions that accompany it. We collected stories from 439 participants who described personally memorable smell experiences in an online questionnaire. Based on the stories we developed 10 categories of smell experience. We explored the implications of the categories for smellenhanced technology design by (a) probing participants to envision technologies that match their smell story and (b) having HCI researchers brainstorm technologies using the categories as design stimuli. We discuss how our findings can benefit research on personal memories, momentary and first time experiences, and wellbeing.

KW - crowdsourcing, design brainstorming, designing for smell., narratives, odor, olfaction, smell, smell experiences, smell stories, smell-enhanced technology, user experience

U2 - 10.1145/2556288.2557008

DO - 10.1145/2556288.2557008

M3 - Article in proceedings

SN - 978-1-4503-2473-1

SP - 2843

EP - 2852

BT - Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

PB - Association for Computing Machinery

Y2 - 26 April 2014 through 1 May 2014

ER -