Scentsory wave: [re]active clubwear for wider waves of feeling

This paper will explore how responsive fabrics and jewellery worn in a club and/or festival environment can harness the power of smell to expand the VJing/DJing dimension. This project is not about hygiene or cosmetics or the latest designer perfume. As one of the last sensory frontiers to be explored in wearable technology, the garments offer novel olfactory experiences as part of a new sensory appeal in fashion clothing that helps the user feel the sensory vibes of the music. Scentsory Design® is a multisensory project based at the Innovation Centre at Central Saint Martins that adds aroma to fashion design in a subtle way by creating radical, active, scentsory properties. Fashion, amongst other qualities, is about displaying personal identity information. Scentsory Design® is about creating an intimate scent bubble around the wearer, enhancing the visual message of fashion with sensory psychological and medical wellbeing. This paper will discuss the advantages of clothes as a communication tool, whereby messages are scent by a wireless web from the PJ(Perfume Jockey) to the user/dancer, who receives an atomised nano-mist of fragrances onto a localized area from an inbuilt scent palette, in club wear of a multi-sensory nature. The purpose is to complement current video graphics and multimedia entertainment solutions. The project Scentsory Wave chooses olfaction, vision and sound as the three sensory modalities to target in order to enhance the clubbing experience, by exploring clothing that goes beyond current microencapsulated (scratch and scent) techniques. The paper will also investigate the extent to which Scentsory Wave attempts to create Emotional Fashion garments integrated with wireless sensor networks that offer social and therapeutic value in a desirable fashion context, without annoying neighbouring users/dancers. The clothes are engineered for psychological end-benefits such as reducing fear and stress, whilst also accompanying other media to augment an experience i.e. trigger surprise, excitement, love (lust/sex), sadness, fear and other emotions. The garments function by incorporating body sensors and microfluidics (lab-on-a-chip) to initiate fragrance delivery. The sensors detect stress physiologically and sound environmentally and the microfluidics produce benefit chemicals in controlled ways responding to personal needs/desires. The fabrics imitate the human body as they have their own ''nervous system'', which allows the user to experience and control the different emotional states of a garment as an entertaining, holistic healing platform. Audio-visual sense technology has been widely available in clubs for a number of years. However, this project offers a new concept in perfumery by targeting nano-droplets of scent to the nose receptors in minute bursts, to give rapid cycling of odours. The scent is synchronised with sound and vision without causing odour fog and the necessity to install enormous air vents in the allocated space. The technology therefore allows new developments whereby not only can the scents to be released on demand, but also retrieved in seconds. The paper will describe recent research such as a collection of responsive jewellery called Scent Whisper that dispenses fragrances, triggered by sensors that react to an individual's body state (e.g. humidity, temperature, heart rate) and the environment (e.g. sound, high decibels via mircrophones). The next stage of the project creates an Emotional Fashion collection, and various examples are given that could be used in clubs or festival settings