The past summer, the writings by Guy Debord left a strong impression in my mind. When Debord said that everything that was directly lived has moved away into representation, he accurately predicted our present-day world. He talks about how our understanding of present-day world is heavily mediated by images. In the accelerated Information Age in which we live, we often watch instead of read. We obtain quick impressions instead of absorbing the content. The economists have even coined the term attention economy in reference to a way of thinking that monetizes our attention as a resource. I find a constant struggle as an image-maker to come up with fresh approaches to design that can hold people’s attention.

 

Debord’s writings gave me a wonderful way to look into this problem. His Psychogeographic approach emphasizes playfulness and “drifting” around the environment to jolt us into a new awareness of our landscape. In one of his projects, he used the map of Paris to navigate the streets of London to better understand his environment. Inspired by this idea, a designer named Kate Mclean did a project called smell maps of cities. She tapped into alternative sensory modes to bring a new and shared interpretation of a place.

 

Kenya Hara, a contemporary Japanese graphic designer, believes in a similar approach. He calls it “exformation”: a way to communicate by making things unknown. Through the use of defamiliarization, he puts a new lens on a subject in the search for a deeper understanding. For example, he explains the flow of a local river course in Japan through image simulations of roads called, “If the rivers were a road.” He uses a familiar object function of roads as a measuring stick by which we can understand the various stages of the river basin. He plays not only with visual stimuli but also with the tactile and aural sensations.

 

These readings inspired me to pursue a project in which multiple sensory stimuli can be parts of the design experience. My aim was to explore how multi-sensory stimuli help people to discuss and understand abstract ideas. My study focused on how objects can prompt our imaginations through their visual, tactile and symbolic properties. I wanted people to interact with tangible objects, and I wanted to make concepts accessible through the use of metaphors.

 

I started my research by reading Michael Haverkamp’s book on multisensory design. His background in industrial design and sound engineering provided insight into the minute details of automobile branding, which makes us believe that one car sounds more expensive than the other. His ideas were tied back into the Gestalt principles of perceptual image and figure/ground. I found his ideas to be directly applicable in my practice.

 

He talks about how colors play with our perception of flavors. We know that our senses of smell and taste affect our gustatory experiences. We don’t often appreciate how much our sense of sight is involved in our perception of flavor. Our experience of taste involves sensory input from our tongues, palates, noses, and eyes. Colors influence our expectations. It is no surprise that Munsell, a company in the color-matching business, sells color standards for French fries, tomatoes, pumpkins, olives, molasses, honey, and cherries.

 

In his book An Anthropologist on Mars, Oliver Sacks tells the story of “Mr. I,” a painter who, after a car crash, lost the ability to distinguish colors. While he knew the color of things from memory, he no longer saw them. “Tomato juice is black,” he wrote. Over time the painter could not eat tomato because his mental image of a tomato was as black as its appearance. In he began to eat only black and white food items—black olives, milk, yogurt—because these at least looked as they should. This story illustrates the flip side of the visual influence over taste.

 

This story prompted my interest in the relationship between vision and taste. Taste as a sensory channel is temporal, fragmentary, episodic. It happens in a sequence over time. We get a whiff of the food, then we see it. We may hear some steaming sounds, and then we bite into it. Five senses are involved in generating our perception of taste. I was excited to employ taste as a way of communication.

 

Food is a vast topic, and I am no chef or food critic. Just as an enthusiast, I read Harold McGee’s book The Science and Lore of Cooking. It had some fascinating dissection of various flavors in the food universe and its history. The chapter on tea and spices was particularly captivating. It spoke about how the bitterness and acidity of herbs and spices are their defense mechanism against animals. But we as humans have learned to enjoy this toxicity, through manipulating its proportions and chemical composition.

 

I was also captivated by the history of spices. A calming, mild-flavored beverage, tea has a turbulent history. Tea has remained the same, but its surrounding field has been in a constant state of flux. These small leaves had large effects on globalism, urbanization and migration. These stories gave me a beautiful way to connect my thesis back to psychogeography through the lens of tea and flavors.

 

This prompted me in the direction of map-making and object-making. I decided to make Psychogeographic maps that illustrate the movement of people and flavors around the world. Along with the maps, I also wanted to give tactile and gustatory stimulus. Hence, I decided to make vessels that will store the tea blends and flavors.

 

Vessel-making process took me back to the ideas of Kenya Hara about communicating with materiality. In order to connect the vessel and maps, I treated them as object and field. Stan Allen, a recognized architect, wrote that all grids are fields, but not all fields are grids. One of the potentials of the field is to redefine the relation between figure and ground. He goes on to say that if we think of the object not as a demarcated object read against a stable field, but as an effect emerging from the field itself–as moments of intensity, as peaks or valley within a continuous field–than it might be possible to imagine object and field as more closely allied.

 

I applied these concepts to my vessels. I started with simple cylindrical shapes that represented vessel in its simplest form and imagined how the emerging field conditions might affect the object. For globalism, I created tilted, dynamic shapes that suggest outward movement. The effect of urbanism was captured in the centrifugal growth of the cylindrical shape into an organic shape. Migration was represented through connected cups via jute threads. The whole exercise of authoring the object gave me new insights into how much information we can conveyed through tactility.

 

I extended the idea of materiality in my exhibition design too. I wanted the visitor to not only touch and smell the tea, but also sense the changing field conditions. The idea of globalism, urbanism and migration suggest movements invariably. Instead of having still maps, I decided to make them animated to highlight this movement. It also connected back to taste which is sequential by nature. The animations worked with colors and sound to communicate the movement as well as represent the Tea flavors visually. Layering and ephemerality were the key techniques I applied to suggest the sensory nature of the subject. The sound added gravity to the movements and helped in enhancing the visual metaphor.

 

Instead of using traditional TV screens or flat projections, I decided to add physicality to the maps by making them dimensional. I created landforms out of foam using the CNC Milling machine and beveled them by hand to create a custom surface for projections. The physical landforms on the wall suggested an open field where the conditions keep changing over time. The projections brought part of the maps alive and gave people an entry point into the different stories and flavors.

 

Over the last one year, I had been working on these sensory kit of parts that came together at the exhibition. The experiments of utilizing different sensory stimulus to communicate did manage to capture people’s attention for longer. I would not know if they assimilated the information better. But it did help me identify a new way to approach design as an image-maker.

 

Je sais, je sais que je sais jamais: “I know, I know that I never know.”– by Chef Philippe.

Multisensory design is an infinitely rich subject, and there’s always something about

it to understand better, something new to discover, a fresh source of interest and ideas.