Project

Dollars & Scents

Dollars & Scents explores ways to display abstract information using scent. A device is installed above the lower-lobby rotating door that periodically outputs scent depending on the state of the NASDAQ index. The smell of mint indicates that the market has gone up since the day's opening, and the smell of lemon indicates it has gone down. While these scents have convenient verbal mnemonics (you're either "making money" or have "picked lemons"), they are abstract smell icons, or "smicons," an olfactory equivelant of the "earcons" that have been developed in the field of auditory research.