Art Class Stinks : Exploring Olfactory Interaction Design and Its Potential to Enrich Learning in Art Education

The sense of smell is crucial to everyday activities that make life pleasurable, such as eating, and it is also key to detecting danger, such as fire or rotten food. In addition, it is strongly linked with memory retrieval, it can induce affective states, and may even enhance the sense of presence in immersive environments. Furthermore, it is argued that olfaction holds promise as an art material. Despite all that, olfaction is often neglected, underestimated, or considered a lesser human sense in Western societies. In addition, the sense of smell is often overlooked in the fields of art education and HCI. Therefore, the field of olfactory interaction design could benefit from further inquiry, especially in relation to its potential to enrich learning in art education, a topic that has not been widely explored. This thesis project aims to employ olfactory interaction design to enrich learning with smell in art education, all while helping art students become more aware of their sense of smell. The project is situated in the domains of embodied interaction and physical computing, and its final outcome is the prototype of an interactive system for learning with smell in art class while helping the users become more aware of their sense of smell. The prototype consists of two components: a mobile app and an olfactory display. It is targeted to art students, and more specifically, adults who attend art classes for leisure. This thesis project intends to contribute to the field of embodied interaction design, and more specifically, olfactory interaction design. In order to do that, a research-through-design approach is used in order to produce knowledge through an iterative process of design activities, and in order to develop a prototype that embodies this knowledge. Moreover, this project finds its theoretical grounding in the Constructivist theory of education, as well as in embodied interaction theory, phenomenology, and a contemporary view of the self as mind and body united into a whole.