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A speculative design about "mobility"
UberSmells
Type
Speculative Design
Group Project
Time
10/2023
Location
Delft, Nederland
Overview
This project was done in the course of Deep Dive: Speculative Design. It grants mobility to smells and creates a smell-delivery-industry, which focuses on the theme of "the mobility of people and the pause of objects".
Advertisement of UberSmells
Introduction
The mobility of people, the pause of objects
We are constantly moving. Everyone is unavoidably pushed forward in the river of time. Objects, however, seem to be pressed on the pause button, forever left in the corner of our memories.
As mentioned in the advertisement, when we feel the pain of reality and the uncertainty of the future, we start to look back, chasing those untouchable objects to seek a romanticized past. Just as the saying goes, the best days are always the past days. Therefore, in our speculation, we decided to grant the same mobility to objects and see what would happen.
Smell&memory
After looking into papers, we choose the smell of objects as our medium to convey, since smell functions efficiently to store memories and trigger emotions. So, what if we make smells more mobile across the distance and thus make objects along with the memories they rebuild more mobile across time?
Artifacts
Our service first starts with an App called UberSmells, where AI chatting generates the smell list which will be produced to rebuild the scene by analyzing the memory described by customers. Once the order is confirmed, the smell hunter will start to capture all the smells on the list with the smell Polaroid.
The core product of our artifacts is a smell polaroid to capture smells. We designed it based on an existing product, the Polaroid camera, including the smell adjuster, the smell capturer, and the smell finder to let the audience feel related and thus resonate with the artifact.
Instead of the instant film, our product produces instant smell cards to record the smell. The Polaroid works as a metaphor that records and recalls the moments, while our product functions to record smells, recall memories, and rebuild the past.
Altogether, the smell fragments will build the memory by gathering all the instant smell cards, which brings the customer back to the past, realizing the “yesterday once more”.
Design Process
Journey of the smell of a Chocolate Croissant
First, we made a journey map of the mobility of smells in the city, where we took the smell of a chocolate croissant as an example and starting point (because we had just eaten one that day). We came up with several “what-ifs” and found the “what if there was a smell-takeaway service just like food-takeaway” most interesting to continue with.
Exploration of future scenarios
To build a scenario related to smells, different possible urban futures had been explored through a 2*2 matrix. The “delivery industry” and the “migrant population” have been utilized as two dimensions. Divers forms of storytelling have been adopted, such as dialogue, advertisement, police reports, and religious announcements. The advertisement was chosen as the narrative tool in the final design.
Intention Positioning
Then we got into the step of positioning our speculation in terms of intention. We explored four different dimensions and finally chose the “raising awareness & inspiring” direction, focusing on the topic of “the mobility of people and the pause of objects”, in which we found the time aspect most attractive to work on.
Design Goal
In conclusion, our design goal is to use speculative design as a way to trigger people’s thinking about the dilemma between the mobility of people and the pause of objects. In this work, we aim not to convey a strong value orientation but rather leave the freedom of thought to our audience.
We hope that our work could trigger your thinking about the topics below, and even more that we didn’t figure out by ourselves.
Narrative ideation
Our narrative is based on a service system formulating the service of Uber Eats to enhance the feeling of related and resonated. As the most significant part of the story-telling, we came up with the contents of instant smell cards together by talking about the unforgettable objects in our childhood memories and making them into names like perfume.
The whole narrative style partly follows the vibe of nostalgiacore, in terms of both visual and music. Nostalgiacore is an aesthetic involving nostalgia and archived history. Most senses of nostalgia focus on childhood/teenhood TV shows, snacks, trends, fashion, video games, Hangout places etc. We aim to create a feeling of both familiar and unfamiliar, comfortable and uneasy.
Lo-fi prototype
To make the concept into physical artifacts, the lo-fi prototype was created during the prototyping workshop with foam blocks, plastic components, and semi-spherical plastic cases, etc.
During the process, we accomplished the rapid iteration, which helped us realize the hi-fi prototype.
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