 in the late 18th and 19th centuries, when starting from the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, and even such as the Great Stink of London in 1858, where things slowly started shifting towards other senses such as sight and hearing, where people slowly moved away from the sense of smell as a means of communication. It was seen more as a means of producing, fleeting pleasure rather than a means of transmission of knowledge. Most Western thinkers thought that the senses of sight and hearing were more important in knowledge transmission and so had to be accorded greater importance if you compare them with the sense of smell. In fact, Freud went further. He clearly said that adults who emphasize the olfactory are arrested in their psychological development, which is a very big statement, very damning statement if you think about it. But however, you could also think about it in this way. Freud had issues with his nose. But the same thing did not happen in India. Most Indian thinkers still associated smell with some knowledge which was unexplainable using other senses such as sight and hearing. There were many Indian poems and many works of literature in India where the sense of smell was elevated to the same level as the sense of sight or hearing. So we were interested in this particular observation we were fascinated by the thought that the sense of smell could provide information which is beyond the sense of sight or hearing. And when we were looking into ourselves, we found that we had sense which had very personal associations with ourselves. Most of us would realize that we love the scent of old books, the smell of fresh rain, the smell of coffee in the morning. These things really produce those kind of personal associations and emotional movements which we really use in our design. So those beautiful memories can be used to shape feelings. For example, I remember the first time when I ate rasmalai, it is my favorite sweet. So I remember the first time when I had rasmalai it was on a beach, on a very secluded beach. I remember the smell of saffron, of milk, of the sense of the fresh breeze from the sea. Those things stay with me. And even when I eat rasmalai now, I still go back to those memories and it enhances the feeling drastically. So on similar lines, smell actually is the most important part of flavor. When you eat something, most of the flavor that you get is because of something called retronazole, retronazole olfaction. Basically what happens is when you eat something that stays in your oral cavity and from that oral cavity, there is some smell emitted through which you can get some flavor. Most acquired tastes are because of retronazole smell. For example, say there are cheeses which are really smelly but when you actually eat them, those go into your oral cavity and the retronazole smell produces a kind of flavor that you would not have just by spelling the cheese itself. And smells really are dependent on culture. Several cultures have different, different cultures have different associations with smells. The same smell can have wildly different associations when based on the culture that they use. So we would be, we could leverage this particular aspect and build something which is culturally specific. And as I was mentioning in the Rasmula example, they really shape feelings. So when you smell something, you are transported to a different time and place which frankly it is very difficult for other senses to achieve. Those sort of moments can be exploited to build something which is very emotionally engaging to the users. So considering all of these properties, the next thing we were thinking of was how do we design with smell? I mean, all of this is good but how do we design with smell? What characteristics do we use and what particular aspects do we need to consider while designing with smell? We iterated with a lot of solutions. We came up with a lot of ideas. And based on our iterations, we came up with particular characteristics which we could use in designing with smell. Firstly, smell is caused by certain chemical associations in the brain. The brain, when these chemicals hit your nose, the brain receives this and through the olfactory neurons, it produces a response to those chemicals. So in order to build a proper scent experience, it is necessary for us to understand those chemicals properly. It is necessary to combine materials and ensure that that combination works properly. So what happens when you have a combination of chemicals, chemicals that you can smell? The brain processes different chemicals in different ways. So certain chemicals, certain scents tend to overpower other scents. This leads to a strong priming effect. That in order to counter that priming effect, we need to ensure that the progression of the smell happens in a mild and easy to experience way. It is always advisable to start with mild smells and go towards heavier or more pungent smells through your experience. On the same lines, space design becomes a key element. As you are designing your experiences, imagine you have a space with multiple experiences. So you have to go beyond your individual experience where you're considering the smell progression and setting the smell progression into the entire space. So experiences with mild smells should be in the beginning and experiences with stronger smells should be present later in the space. Even for an individual experience, you can easily overwhelm someone with a lot of smell. So it becomes important to control the amount of smell in the room. So some ways of doing this are using specific dispensers which limit the amount of scent experienced by a user. And you could also use certain exhaust systems wherein you can limit the amount of scent in the room. At the same time, you could also use certain background scents which enhance the mood. As I was talking about earlier, background scents really enhance the mood and if these scents do not really interact with the existing scents, it is really enhance the experience. So one way of looking at olfactory experiences is as an additional layer to visual and auditory experience. In this way, the olfactory knowledge produced information that you disseminate through the olfactory medium needs to be complementary to the visual and auditory medium. So while doing that, there are certain, you do not necessarily have to follow a lot of rules. What you can play with the smell, you can, in fact, you can produce, you can give a different smell which does not really correspond to the scent that you see or that you hear, but that kind of playing will actually, increase the interactivity of the experience and give some complexity to the experience itself and helps us build a better narrative. Of course, you need to consider certain allergies. Anything which has, which a smell is a chemical experience, so you need to consider certain allergies. Some people are nose-blind, so you also need to consider that. When you're designing for something, you need to consider these allergies and nose-blindness and you also need to consider that the experience is not just limited to the scents. A lot of times when people get into the area, they are also influenced by the visual and auditory atmosphere of the area, so you need to consider those scents as well, even when you're designing for a smell interaction. So as designers, we were always interested in building something which produces a positive social impact. We humans are natural storytellers. We have been telling stories to each other for tens of thousands of years. It is very easy to imagine a group of cavemen sitting around a campfire, telling stories to each other and passing down knowledge that way. And this has helped us build societies and build global cultures through all of these stories. One of the key characteristics that distinguishes Homo sapiens is that we are able to concoct stories and disseminate all of these stories and believe in them. This is something very unique to humans and it is said that this has helped us build the global culture and global civilizations that we've built. So while building these stories, the first and most important thing we need to do is we need to empathize with users. As in most design, empathy is the key. There is a very famous example in this book, Everybody Loves a Good Drawed. It's an excellent book. When the Orissa government went and tried to get Jersey cows into a village, although the district itself was producing already a surplus dairy district, they wanted to introduce more Jersey cows to firstly increase the employment of users of the villagers in those districts. But they had good intentions, but the only thing that they did not do was actually consult the villagers in the district. So they went ahead, took a top-down decision and then introduced these Jersey cows while castrating the bulls which were evolved to survive in their local environment. So what happened was although their intention of producing pure breed Jersey cows was good, within six months they were no longer any bulls which were already there. Those bulls slowly started dying and since they were castrated, they could not reproduce. At the same time, these Jersey bulls, they did not survive properly even as calves, they died, bunches of Jersey cows died. So the villagers themselves were hit with a one-two punch. They neither had their existing cows nor did they have these Jersey cows and they were forced into poverty, which is an extremely sad thing considering that their intentions were good. So that means that it is very, very crucial, especially when you're considering social scenarios to empathize with the users. We also have to think in terms of emotional thought. We humans are emotional beings. We base most of our decisions on emotional needs rather than rational thought. Most of this is not necessarily a bad thing in itself because these emotions help us build bonds with other people and build complex social structures. But the flip side of this is we, this way of thinking produces biases, which most of us do not even realize that we have. Though it is important to understand these biases while designing solutions for this. And it is useful to also use cultural motives while building a story which produces social impact. In this case, the Swachh Bharat Abyan used the goddess Lakshmi, which is a very popular cultural trope here where they emphasize the point that people who had, people who were clean had wealth, but people who were not clean tended to lose wealth and Lakshmi tended to just vanish from their homes. So based on all of these learnings, we designed a series of experiences which is called Slipping Out Differences. So I'll hand it over to Kadambari who will explain and further educate on what we did. Thank you, Sani. So Slipping Out Differences is a collection of interactive installations which uses sense and visualizations to drive a social narrative, a powerful social narrative. It has five stories to date, but I'm going to cover just three. It is themed around identity and differences and cultural differences, which actually leads to violence and sometimes xenophobia. So when we're dealing with such a strong theme, what we first thought was that smells are actually a very powerful medium to tell stories. And secondly, smells are also intangible cultural heritage. So these two things we firmly believe when we started this project. Our first story, Jallinwala Bagh, was endeavor to think about what we are today and who we are today. So we are Indians and how did we get this identity? So Jallinwala Bagh Massacre happened exactly almost 100 years ago on April 13th, 1919. And what really happened at that point of time was that it was a festive occasion of baesakhi and people were peacefully demonstrating in this ground. In Jallinwala Bagh, there came General Dyer who closed all the entrances and exit of this bag and then fired indiscriminately on these innocent people. There were children and also women in this crowd. Before these innocent people could understand what was happening and could make sense of it, the troops fired rounds and rounds of firing and the whole ground was submerged with blood and it was thousand of people who loy dead there. So it was a horrific event that took place and it was turning point in history because of this we started questioning that what was the social injustice? If you look at it, it was a racial discrimination of a big proportion. It was white supremacist agenda and this horrific crime was done under that. So looking at Jallinwala Bagh, we were looking at how to design for such negative incidences where we are designing for negative emotions where we can think about mourning, how to provide a memorial of such loss of great proportion. So some of the studies that we did, our primary studies, we looked at one of those few successful memorials that we have, for example, Murder of Jewish Museum, WTC, Auschwitz. So these three we had visited ourselves personally and took notice of how they move you incredibly emotionally and makes you feel that the whole sense of loss. But for the primary research when we went to Jallinwala site as such, we saw that there was loss of intensity in terms of how you should feel when you visit such a place of horrific proportion where crime was committed. It just looked like a normal garden. As compared to these sites that I visited before, the memorial that were constructed. So WTC actually moves you a lot. And this is what we thought. So based on that, then we started designing our installations. So at this point of time, I would like all of you to open the boxes that are given to you. And on each of these slides, you will find that round circles which were there will be filled with colors that you can sniff at the time of me telling the story. I just want to give a small disclaimer here. So we are not trying to recreate whole of the experience because it had a physical presence. There was a space design and there was a sort of auditory medium which was also used in driving. Here we're just trying to show you how you use smell to drive a certain narrative. Just share that story with you. So this is how it looked like when we put the installation together. So now we were also looking at the visual cue as to how to design for Jallianwala Bagh. So for Jallianwala Bagh, our metaphor was going back to the history and digging our history to understand the horrific crime. So the whole bricks that you saw was also reminiscent of the same fact. There was also another layer to it. So for example, in Jallianwala Bagh, people jumped into the well to save their lives. Unfortunately, they couldn't, but they jumped into the well and that same imagery we wanted to produce here. So visuals are used as a way of guiding and determining that what we are going to do with it. And one after the other, then there were jars which had objects which drove the story and perfume which actually atars, in our case, we used Indian atars and we recreated. So these were used to drive the story forward. So as I said, that it was a festive occasion of Besakhi at that point of time. So we used this jar which had sweets and festive clothing. And when you open the lid and you sniff the jar, you could smell, you can sweet, smell was, you know, that's what you can smell. So you can take the black, yeah. Festivity. So it's all about sweets, right, India? Celebration and festivity. The second here, we actually played kids playing because we wanted to establish at this particular point that there were a lot of kids who were playing in the vicinity in the Jallianwala Bagh. Also, we wanted to remind you that it was yesterday. So a wooden smell is used to enhance the toy. So next was the speech. And here we didn't, yeah, speech. So that point of time a person was actually giving a speech saying that how it was a peaceful demonstration that we were doing, right, in Jallianwala Bagh. So this guy was giving a speech on there. And so here we had used sound of a person who was giving speech. At the same point of time, this was enhanced to give the experience of a mehdaan or a ground. So you can smell of a, you know, earth there, right? The next was shock after the firing. So as I said, the whole ground was submerged with the blood. So that's what we represented with the jar. People were actually dreaded to go ahead and sniff this jar because it is incredibly, you know, in a way, emotionally moving. Yes, right. So if you lift this and you hear, this is a very faint with the kind of quantity that was there in the jar. You could smell it much easier. So it was air full of gunpowder that we used to just drive this narrative. And the visual also affected you at this point of time. The last jar was the jar of the death. When you open the lid, there was sound of the baby crying. And there were torn clothes and blood which would be there in this jar. Now it's a very pungent smell that will hit you. So with the proportion of the jar and this, it reinforces the emotion and you recoil back. Literally people recoil back. And when they go through this, the conjunction of the visuals and the auditory and smell then gives you teary eyed. So if you were in the space and you went around, you would feel that emotion. This was one of the most emotional installation that we had, smell association. Next was, and the next two stories, I will just fleetingly touch based because of the time I chose here. So next was our attempt to document the autobiography of the commons. We also wanted to talk about what is our identity today as modern Indians. So we were born in some other city, then we go for studying in some other city, then we live in some other city. So if you are to ask yourself that, so who you are or where are you from? It's a very dicey question to answer. So what should you answer? The one they were you born in or the one you spent most time in or you're currently living in. So it's basically a dilemma. But the actual thing if you talk about actually our cultural identity, it is shared by all the cities that we've lived in. We've actually imbibed most of the cultural qualities of these cities. So if we make all of these cities our home, that who is it who calls us other? And then try to go ahead and beat people or create violence and xenophobia. So that's the whole social commentary that we wanted to build about with this autobiography of the commons. So the method that we used was the primary research. So people, if you ask directly that what smell association do you have, it'll be very difficult. You have to actually go many sessions with them to understand the deep-rooted association. When we identified the smell that they associated with, we went ahead and then we validated with them. Based on that, then we made the sense. The whole narrative because it is autobiographical in nature has to be very intimate, right? So the form and factor has to also produce the same effect. So this is how it looked like. You have to actually go into these objects and at that point of time it would detect and start speaking. The protagonist whose story we were trying to tell, it was recorded in their own voices and there was a special device that we made which would open up and give out a small smell. So you could take it from this small close quarter. So here I would like to just go ahead and be there in Hyderabad itself. So talk about Supreeti, that's our protagonist and her association with Hyderabad. So here she talks about how living in Hyderabad has confused her immensely in terms of her food choices. So whenever she goes to a restaurant, she scans the whole of the menu and finally she says, bhaiya bharyani hai kya? So in grief when she's low, then also she orders bharyani. If she's gonna have party, then also she orders bharyani. So bharyani has defined in a way for her living in Hyderabad. So that's her smell association. Pink is the color. I'm not sure what it is showing right now here. Yeah. I also have the same thing even when I'm in San Francisco I had the same feeling. So while we're talking about this, I'll talk about the next installation that we made and that's the last one that I want to cover today out of the five. So last one is about the identity of the people in the conflict zones, in the war zones and how they express themselves. So at this point of time what we were trying to use is we were trying to use poetry and smell together to create emotion. Now poetry is already a medium which expresses a lot which just direct words cannot. So that was our premise. The whole story talked about this Abdul Atarwala who's an apprentice and who expresses his thoughts and feelings, his emotions in the atars. So that was the premise. For this, our primary research actually was to go to these places and then talk to them, understand their stories, look at their emotions and then come up and write poems. Go back to them and then validate if those were the actual emotions that we could represent and then make sense out of it. So giving the context because this poem is taken just out of that installation. So it is about the tear gas when you throw it out and it enters even when you want to close the windows for students who are studying. So it talks about that. I'll give you some time to just read it. So this is what we were trying to do. This was the installation. We actually had a screen which was playing a music which also added to the whole experience. It was a song. So who we are. So we are a collection of artists and designers who think that smell are incredible, medium to tell stories. It started with me because I have a heightened sense of smell and you can ask my team, they'll tell you. Even my parents called me sniffer squad member because I could just smell and say that, okay, this subzie is gonna go still. So with that heightened power of smell that I have, I then started to look at the smell association and we went further. And most of our team members also believed that that was the case that smell is a powerful medium. And that's how we went ahead. But we were not alone to think that this is a great idea because it was funded by Prince Cross Fund and British Council and wholeheartedly supported by Value Labs. Finally, I'd like to thank you for listening so patiently. And I hope you enjoyed the talk as much as we did. Thank you.