Un-reality: First day

Today's the first day of the new project. The brief is really open and you can pretty much tailor it to your tastes. The idea is to create an alternate reality; blurring the line between worlds I think is another way to put it.

There was a brief mention about putting groups together for fresh combinations of people today. Luckily for me I hadn't planned out who I wanted to work with in advance like I usually do, so I really did get a group together where I haven't worked with any of them before. As mentioned in various previous blog posts I pick my groups based on my perception of what colour they are in terms of how people work in groups. The main ones are yellow, blue, and orange. Putting together a group is based on balancing these colours. Somehow we randomly got a good balance. Two yellows, two blues, and one orange. Fine combination for getting work done.

With this new group the atmosphere is light and fun. We got a bit brain dead at the end with concept making, but I'm happy with what we've got so far and we seem to be working together quite nicely.

At the moment we're really interested in working with and exploring the realm of smell. It's one of our senses that we don't really pay conscious attention to even though it affects us strongly on a subliminal level. So now we know what we want to do for this particular project we just need to figure out how we want to express/expose this aspect of reality we've chosen. This will be sorted out tomorrow when we make our concept more solid by pinpointing what we want to do with this reality of scent. At the moment we're not worrying about how we're going to make the actual thing yet though, I think that should be worked through next Tuesday or Wednesday.

Things that interest me about scent is its ability to stir up memories and make a person think of something without them knowing the real cause for it is the scent. (Dowder, 2011)

An example of this is how scent is used in marketing. By using how scent works with memory in the brain, marketers are able to manipulate it to produce a strong sense of product association. Basically, when people smell, the scent goes straight to the emotional and memory center of the brain. So the smell is connected strongly to the emotions it causes and according to their memories that have been associated with a particular scent. (Scent Marketing Institute, 2011)


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References


Dowder, S. (2011). Does what you smell determine what you buy? Retrieved September 28, 2011 from http://money.howstuffworks.com/scent-marketing.htm

Scent Marketing Institute. (2011). Scent Marketing Institute | smi. Retrieved September 28, 2011, from http://www.scentmarketing.org/