>> Next up we have the Art Center College of Design from the U.S. They're
going to present Radical Sensing Super Smelly Neuro Prosthetic. Hold onto your
seats now.
>>
Hi, I'm Selwa Sweidan [indiscernible]
>>
My name is Jay Hong.
>> And we're from Art Center College of Design's Graduate Media Design
Practices program. So, instead of seeing disability as something to fix our
professor's brief was to invert disability and design for a super power.
Radical sensing is rooted in the sense of smell. And radical sensing imagines a
future in which we've chosen to replace our noses with a super smelling neuro
prosthetic or a post-nose. It filters. It shares. And it remembers scent.
>> The super smelling neuro prosthetic amplifies, isolates and [indiscernible]
through hand gestures and customization to your post-nose.
>> For centuries scholars have placed smell at the bottom of a hierarchy of
senses. CondUlac, Darwin and Kant, they've all described the sense of smell as
the least useful of the senses.
>>
But we chose scent.
>> Yeah, we chose scent as a way to really design for the emotive, nonrational,
intuitive aspects of brain computing. And, really, thanks to brain-scanning
imaging technology, the hegemonic divide between what we know and what we don't
know and the rational and the rational collapse thanks to this. So here we see
a scan -- going back a little bit, a little forward -- here we are. Here we see
a scan of the olfactory pathways in the brain. And really the sense of smell is
actually the most complex of the senses because of how it functions and how it's
mapped through the brain. So we spoke to experts in computational neurology,
anaplastology, brain computer interface hardware development and also we
collaborated with an independent perfumer.
>> These are our three noses. We imagine fitting them to a person's face once
their noses are removed. So it is a radical idea. Why not a radical
prosthetic?
>> For example, this one is inspired by Techno. This is our Techno nose.
here we have our sleepy nose to protect you while you sleep, and this one
challenges the architecture of the nose.
And
>> So what does it mean for the replacement of the body part to become
aspirational?
>> So currently there is no neuro prosthetics for smell. So how do you design
for something that doesn't exist? This led us to the idea of working with
performers. By performers, we mean those with specialized training and movement
and dance.
>> Radical sensing is in dialogue to this performer and body researchers.
Second to the left is Lucy McRae, who works with boundaries of human body and
dynamism of technology.
>>
So there are clear advantages to working with performers.
>> Their special vocabulary allows for rich messaging and interpretation in a
very collaborative manner. It is a symbolic and metaphoric process. It turns
formal movement into narrative which then we work off.
>> So we created this methodology which we started calling performative
prototyping, and instead of being a narrowing process it's very divergent and
generative. And this allowed us to really work with concepts that don't exist.
>> Over time, we made working prototypes and these were used for our
performative prototyping iterations.
>> And these iterations led to these three areas. So GCMS is a technology used
by the perfume industry and scientists to analyze and -- to analyze and measure
scent. E-nose technology takes us to a portable scale. So if you imagine that
this could merge with a neuro prosthetics of the nose, this would be a huge
change in the way we could record and store scent. This is how memory works.
And based on this technology, we here are showing two performers recording and
sharing scent.
>> To begin we've conducted three studies with a diverse group of performers.
We were interested in the relationship between language to smell. So we asked
the performers to verbalize their reactions.
>> So that led us to think would a smell memory device facilitate a richer
discourse around smell, and would that lead to a smell literacy?
>> To move on to augmentative function, we tested stereo smell. We asked the
performers to do improvisations through long, extended straws, which then made
us think about control.
>> So initially our questions were what does it mean to augment smell to be
more precise or focused or enhanced? But later our questions became about what
does it mean to relinquish control of smell both willingly or unwillingly.
>> This led us to sharing.
leader and follower.
This test is about the sharing dynamic between
>> And we took this idea of sharing an intimacy to the extreme by giving the
performers a very restrictive prototype which they described as painful.
[laughter]
>> We repeated the tests with performers who knew each other very well. And
they were able -- it was less challenging for them and they were able to move
more quickly.
>> So since they were moving so much more confidently, it led us to consider
how does familiarity affect ability. And during our debrief, they mentioned
about synchronization of brief, which for them to move easily.
>> And then through this it allowed us to consider could the breath be used as
a queue in sharing of smell?
>> So to recap, we used the methodology of performative prototyping to reach
these two areas.
>> With memory, how does a smell memory device impact the language around
discourse and smell literacy? With control, what does it mean to design for an
ability to control or relinquish control of smell? And finally with sharing
what does sensorial consensus mean? Can we use the breath to facilitate
consensus?
>> We took a radical approach to look into the future to explore designing
possibility around super power and ability.
>> In the process, we came up with a methodology that we're calling
performative prototyping which led us in a different direction than if we had
taken a more conventional approach. Radical sensing looks at neuroscience,
physical computing and performance research to really explore the potentials of
designing around a radical augmentation of smell and also a radical prosthetic.
Radical sensing imagines a future in which we've chosen to replace our noses
with a super smelling neuro prosthetic or a post-nose. Thank you.
[Applause]
>>
Thank you, Arts Center.
Who would like to go first?
>>
I'm -- where do you start.
[laughter]
>> It's a wonderful project and I commend you on sort of taking the approach of
looking at augmentation of powers, super powers, and sort of exploring this from
a very different sort of starting point. The performative prototyping, I think,
is absolutely genius, and I think the video communication storytelling that you
do in this presentation is, like, amazing. I mean, you're just doing all sorts
of storytelling going on about what you've explored and how you explored it.
And I'm left very much with the impression that perhaps not as radically as you
suggest in this incredibly bizarre moment where we see this void in the nose
cavity. But just the idea that there could be devices that enhance or give us
super powers of smell or recall or as you said record and share. There's
something definitely super exciting there, and I'm compelled to imagine a future
in where we have the heightened sense of smell and be able to share those
incredible moments. But anyway, just very bold, very creative. Great job.
>> I definitely -- certainly the subject matter is fascinating, right,
especially when you're exploring memory as it pertains to smell. This is
something that I've always been very curious about. I find my sense of smell
fluctuates. Different times in my life it's more vibrant. Other times it's
less, different months. The result here could be really, really fascinating.
This seems like one of those projects that really contributes to a base of
knowledge that we're going to need to get there. I really just like the
presentation, I think, and the project and the work, and to sort of be you for a
second. Because there's a lot of art in this. There's a lot of exploration in
this, there's a lot of creativity in it, and it's a lot of out-of-the-box
thinking and so that's very exciting. What resulted in its practical
applications here? I don't know, but the step, I think, is really exciting to
see. So great presentation. Thank you.
>> Yep, echos. I love the way you kind of went out, way out, but kind of that
forced you to really think about some of the things and actually what would that
be like. And I think that's something that for some of the other projects I
think that would have been really helpful. What would it be like to wear this?
What would it be like to use it, to be that, to have that as part of my daily
life? If I capture a smell and I give it to somebody else, what's that going to
be like? Those are really interesting questions to think about and the way you
did it was incredibly evocative. I think that was great. So very kind of
different, a different way of doing that. And so I really enjoyed that. And in
taking just a complete departure of what did it mean to sort of reverse that
feel about contextual disability -- well, could you, being differently abled, as
it was called for a long time, actually, yeah, be differently abled. I would,
like, supernose. It's kind of a really different way to think about it. So I
thought it was a great project. Really liked it.
>> Thank you very much.
[Applause]
>>
Any questions from the audience?
Stella.
>> Thank you very much for your presentation. And so here I own up. I am
someone with this invisible disability of having mostly no sense of smell. And
what I love about your project is that it actually shows things that I do. For
example, when I go for a walk together with my husband, he tells me, now it
smells of grass, and I go, is that really? And then I'm going, okay, maybe I
can smell just a little bit of it. So I try to go [sniffing]. So actually what
this is is one of the behaviors that you showed in your movies. And so what I
think is really nice about it is it's beyond the product, because actually it
enables me to recognize that this is something that we're doing and I can talk
about it. So it's actually a direct mediator of experiences without the product
in the sense that I'm using a product, but actually it enables people to share
experiences. So I love that.
>> Thank you so much for sharing your experience.
more. [laughter]
>>
Any more questions?
I'd love to talk to you
Clay Shirky?
>> The performative prototyping idea seems to even transcend your project as a
general technique. As you guys were doing that, did you think, oh, I know what
else this would be useful for. Like, when would you use that again for what
other kinds of projects?
>> Thank you. And that's a really good question. I think we've been
meditating on it or trying to understand. But I guess it started when we took a
dance choreographic practice I have and applied it to some design research. I
found it to be a very satisfying experience. But I think, at least from my
perspective, at this moment, I see it as really applying to brief creation and
maybe insight finding when the space is very broad. I think kind of how we
talked about it, when you're really open and you need to be led down a different
path. But besides that, it's just really fun. [laughter]
>>
Thank you.
>>
Questions?
Yeah.
Unless somebody has a question.
>> Okay. So back to Claire's point, I mean, there are some earlier work around
sort of informants and some early papers around that, but I think that's always
been using the kind of performance to tell the idea much more than that, yeah,
that sort of prototyping and using those performance and dances to kind of,
because as you say, so good with thinking their bodies -- yeah, very much so
that was a great idea.
>>
Thank you.
>>
Any other questions or comments?
Okay.
Thank you so much Art Center.
[Applause]