Ollyfactory

Hello Foundry 2012!

Tue, 07 Aug 2012 18:07:00 +0100

Foundry 2012 is off and running again! The brief this year is:

“Make a toy that has a reason to exist”

Follow their progress on their new blog:

foundry2012.mintdigital.com.

Introducing Olly

Tue, 01 Nov 2011 17:08:00 +0000

So Friday was our last day at Mint. Emotional yes, but also very exciting, because its time to introduce you to the result of our three months of hard work. Our exploration into smelling the internet has gone through many a peak and trough, but we’re sure we can safely say, we’re really proud of what we’ve produced.

So here he is: Olly - the web connected smelly robot!

Last night was Ollys launch event where drinks were generously distributed and we told the story of how we got to where we are now (covering coffee, booze, bears and building things). A good night was had by all, we had multiple Ollys around the studio reacting to various online activity (from twitter searches to every time Snoop Dogg gets a new follower on Instagram).

We are also proud to say that not only does Olly exist in physical form, he also has his own website over at ollyfactory.com where you can find out all you need to know about Olly, where you can buy/make him and how you can explore the customisable possibilities.

So that’s it I guess! It’s been a blast - massive thanks to The whole team at Mint Digital and in particular Utku and Tom. The hazy crossover world of internet/physical things is really exciting territory so it’s been a brilliant opportunity to take a plunge into it as part of a mixed discipline team with the continued support and guidance from Utku and Tom.

This may be the conclusion for the four of us as Foundry but here’s looking towards the future for Olly and the internet of scents! So on that note,

Smell ya later!

-Foundry

Rapid Prototyping

Wed, 26 Oct 2011 18:21:00 +0100

We haven’t said much here in a while but with Foundry 2011 drawing to a close I feel that there should be an update about what we’ve been up to over the past 2 weeks. First though, tomorrow we’re have a launch/farewell event/presentation discussing all things webby, thingy, smelly and Foundry and you are invited to come along! We will be showcasing the culmination of our 3 months with Mint Digital (but don’t want to give it all away just yet!).

For more information on the event, and to sign up, visit here: http://foundry2011.eventbrite.com/

Anyway, to fill in the chronological blanks, following on from Steve Jobs memorials and cardboard models we stepped into the digital and began 3D modelling prototypes. Using Google Sketchup, Ben and I knocked together a fair few digital model variations inspired by the forms and functions we had been playing with using card, glue and tape. After a bit of exploration, each of us had designed models which were aesthetically similar, however had different means of construction and interaction. We got both of these models manufactured at 2 different places using 2 different methods of 3D Rapid Prototyping. This gave us an initial run of 4 prototype models, 2 were produced using Laser Sintering while the other two consisted of a plaster/glue mixture. It quickly transpired that, though quite a bit cheaper, the plaster style models had a terrible finish, were incredibly brittle and justified the slightly more expensive (and more detailed) SLS method.

With the manufacture method chosen the four of us discussed things the two different designs so that Ben and I were able to go back to the modelling screens and produce a product that combined the best of both designs. There was still a bit of testing to go through, we wanted to try a friction locking, “lego block” approach however the output model showed us that the tolerances were tricky to get right and the material wore down easily under friction meaning that the model quickly became loose.

So our final model uses a slide locking mechanism with very tight tolerances which works very effectively. It really highlights the perfectionism that goes into the most underrated interactions we have with objects We could easily spend another month working on the locking mechanism alone but we just don’t have the time (and it starts to get pricey with all these 3D printed models!)

Along with the construction method, the models helped us to define how the user interacted with smell input (which became a drawer) and the what the most effective logo is (which went though a few iterations to discover something that printed onto the model with a high resolution).

So as I write this, our models have been refined, then refined again and are at the 3D printers getting rapidly produced in time for tomorrow. On top of this, Chris and Genis have been busy working on a website detailing all you need to know about the project. This has highlighted the interesting challenge of, how do you visually sell an aesthetically subdued object that has a primary function of outputting invisible scents. Seems a bit counter intuitive but the guys are doing a great job and if all goes well the site will be launched tomorrow - keep an eye out for that!

So it’s been awfully busy and despite the inevitable last minuiteness of things, all is looking to be grand tomorrow for our launch. Come along and say hi, it’s nicer to meet in the physical than the digital!

-Tim

The Quest to Make the Perfect Smells

Thu, 13 Oct 2011 10:25:00 +0100

Over the last month or so, we have been doing lots of experiments to work out exactly what the best medium is for dispersing smells on demand. At long last, it feels like we are very close to working it out, and have a working system that lets out smells whenever the internet tells it to. I thought it might be interesting to just outline and reflect on the strangely cyclical process we have gone through to get to where we are now.

Our first smelly prototype was the Pringles tube with a fan in the top and air freshener in the bottom. It definitely worked to an extent, and the fan did distribute the smell - the main problem being that it smelt quite strongly whether it was switched on or not. And its hard to smell the internet when everything else smells too.

The next one was the hacked Glade air freshener we called the “Smell of Success”. This used the same aerosol canister as a normal Glade freshener would use, and consequently had the same problems - although it could produce a strong smell with very little liquid, it smelt absolutely awful and was very expensive to replace when it ran out. Furthermore, there is very little possibility, with aerosols, for people to make their own scents and customize their device’s output.

The next would-be smell-maker was the ultrasonic vaporiser/fogger, some experiments with which can be found here. This worked by vibrating water at such a frequency that it turned into mist. If you put essential oils in said water, the air would very quickly fill with their scent. Despite producing a very visually stunning effect, the downside of the thick fog was that it began to soak everything around it in smelly water. Which isn’t ideal. Particularly around computers and stuff.

We needed to find a way of spreading the more natural, pleasant smells of essential oils without coating everything nearby in the aforementioned puddles of stench. And to do this, we have somewhat returned to where we started. By creating a closed system between an essential oil container and a directional fan, we make it possible to distribute the oils’ smell on demand, without it leaking out all of the time. It works!

Sometimes a very simple solution like this goes through a very complicated process to eventually arrive at it. With the components and system now more or less in place, work continues on how we refine the visual form of the object into something that works, but also that gives the smell dispenser a unique and desirable identity.

I assure you, you’re going to want one.

- Chris

A tribute to Mr Steve.

Thu, 06 Oct 2011 18:05:00 +0100

We were in need of a few fans the other day for our smell dispenser prototypes. Colin kindly donated an old MacBook Pro to the cause and I meticulously tore it to pieces.

It was an incredibly humbling experience. Beyond the smooth sheen of its outer casing, lays one of the most beautifully set out assemblage of components I have ever seen. It’s hard to imagine the amount of detail, concentration and obsession that must go into the creation of one of these machines.

To be honest, I always thought Macs were a bit overpriced for what they were. Not anymore.

This morning, surrounded by the fruits of his labour, we heard the news that the man behind all of these incredible products had died. It seemed fitting to create a tribute to him using the spare components of the old Mac book pro. Every component has been broken down to its most basic form and reassembled into a portrait of Steve Jobs. This is how it turned out:

Rest in peace Mr. Steve and thank you very much.

Prototypes

Thu, 06 Oct 2011 12:32:34 +0100

If you’ve been following our flicker feed you’ll have noticed that over the last few days, we’ve been knocking together quite a plethora of prototypes. Its been fun! It’s allowed us to develop (and generally just play around with) the look, feel, interaction and of our smelly device as well as explore what it could be made from and how it could be made. Anyway here’s some snaps of our ‘finished’ models with a bit of a description about the intention of each iteration. Enjoy.

So following on from the cups-and-vaporisers approach, we went out and bought a few computer fans. Our visit to ScentAir identified that fans and scent cartridges was the most common method they used within their electric automatic model (albeit not with computer fans but a similar effect). Plus we had been faffing around with the vaporiser for too long. The above image was the first working model off the back of this - pringles tub with a few drops of essence inside with a fan taped to the top. Plugging into the computer via USB, the fan activated and released the smell within and contained it nicely while it was off, perfect, but not all that pretty!

Meanwhile, Ben was playing around with a different fan and constructed this helix approach to pump the air out as efficiently as possible (below).

Chris, using yet other fan, began playing around with a more towered approach. This development helped to look into how we can start layering the different aspect of the design - the electronics, the scent oil and the fan.

Getting an understanding what goes where was helpful in highlighting some design routes. The geometric restrictions of what we were using helped to open up some avenues that were not expected, like Tim’s design below where the device has a hinge for it to open and close allowing the user to change/replace the ‘smell cartridge’. The image below it is a further development which also incorporates housing and working connection for the arduino.

We began to see a problem emerging with our model thus far which was that none of them were really oriented towards your nose - kind of important to experiment with if you what immediate, alerting smells! This one from Genis leans back, at such an angle that it fires smells directly from your desk to where you are sitting. Below that is one from Tim which rotates to allow the user to specify where it is pointing.

That’s not to say it was all fans and function, Ben made this bellow style approach which was certainly the most effective smell puffer but we struggled to work out how it could operate electronically whilst also being silent

Where are we not then? We’ll there’s a few more prototype photos on the flicker page with some more weird, wonderful and primarily cardboard models for you to check out. On top of that we have been discussing some development ideas for what the smell cartridge actually is and what the most effective way it could plug into the device is and there are undoubtedly a few more card models to follow. Plus there a whole web connection to sort out… The cogs are still turning within the the Foundry!

Making stuff.

Thu, 29 Sep 2011 12:20:23 +0100

Recently we’ve been making a whole bunch of prototypes to refine our ideas on the smell of success. Ranging from the awesome to the awful, we’re gradually getting nearer to just the right combination of components, coding and smelly stuff that might make our Internet connected smell dispenser a little more real.

There is something slightly odd about trying to cobble together prototypes in the super slick Mint offices. It’s something about prototyping with stuff. Not with grids, pixels and lines of perfectly constructed code, but cardboard, Pringle tubes, perfume bottles, glue, tape, knives, exposed wires and general chaos. There is no Ctrl+Z in this world. Thus prototypes evolve and disappear very quickly. A quick mock up allows a rapid assessment of its function, before it gets mashed up into the next iteration in the hope of betterment. There is something about using your hands and brain throughout this process that is completely different to designing something on screen, and trying to decipher it’s weaknesses from merely looking at it. (Think Zen and the art of Motorcycle Maintenance)

I went to see Matt Jones of Berg speak at the Design council the other day and he mentioned this idea from Fat architects Fantastic journal that “He has to make what he is thinking in order to express it”. I guess this is exactly what I’m trying to say, just a lot more succinctly put.

So that’s it really, make stuff quick, see if it works, and listen to Matt Jones. And everything should be a walk in the park.

The other thing is that I really like this idea of an object being a transient prototype. Never finished, polished or defined. It would be awesome if mass consumer objects were like this. I suppose it’s kind of already happened with music and videos that get remixed, mashed up and re-distributed, and it’s becoming increasingly attractive to Generation C to do this with physical objects as well. I’d imagine the increasing accessibility to 3D printers and rapid prototyping facilities will only spur on this trend. Bruce Sterling has got an incredible short story about this possible future; you can listen to it here.

In the mean time, we’re going to keep on making stuff. As long as it’s not those bloody posters.

This Smellslike That

Mon, 26 Sep 2011 10:01:00 +0100

As the development of our internet-of-smells device gathers pace, I thought it might be a good time to explain where we are currently are with everything.

The Smell of Success prototype was a one function device - it connected to your computer via USB and sprayed out a smell every time one of your tweets was re-tweeted. More than anything, it was the software that was determining this function, not the hardware. And software can be changed much more easily than hardware. What we had built, essentially, was an internet connected smell device, which, depending on the coding, could produce smells in reaction to all manner of web interactions.

We started to think of how we could use a more developed version of the device as a platform for others to experiment with their own personal uses for smelling the internet. Using an interaction similar to that employed by the brilliant ifttt.com, we can employ a simple cause and effect approach to choosing what it does - for example, if I get a retweet on twitter, then my device will produce the smell of lemon.

From this came the name “smellslike”, which poses the device as a mediator between internet interactions and smells in the real world. A retweet smellslike lemon. An e-mail smellslike chocolate. Whatever you like. And, we hope, as people play with this more and more, some really interesting interpretations will start to emerge.

- Chris

A Smelly Trip to Slough

Fri, 23 Sep 2011 15:13:48 +0100

On Tuesday Ben and I took a day trip to Slough to visit the UK office of ScentAir, a global scent dispenser manufacturer with catalogue of well over 1500 unique fragrances. They specialise in working with brands and companies to explore how they can apply scent as a means to enhance the customer’s experience. As they explain:

Now marketeers are starting to realise the importance of appealing to all five senses and using brand fragrance, too. For while a picture can say a thousand words, or 140 characters can make a Tweet, a whiff of scent is proven to be far more powerful in terms of brand association and memory recall, and has a more direct link to our emotions.

Once a smell is embedded in a customer’s memory, visual clues are enough for the odour, and its associated memory and emotions, to be reactivated. Research shows that this recall is especially effective if there is a particular name accompanying the scent. Equally, first-time exposure to a particular smell is crucial in how that aroma will be recalled, and what it will be associated with.

We wanted to discuss our project with them to get an idea of any industry interest or insights they may have towards it. What was particularly interesting for us though was that as a company so focused on using scents to enhance brands, they had not really considered digital companies and web applications so were eager to hear more about our project. In return, we had a great discussion with Chris, who works for the marketing side of ScentAir, and he introduced us to the various dispensing models they had on offer helping us to identify a few clearer routes we could go down with our model.

It got really exciting though when Chris showed us samples of some of the fragrances they have – there were utterly loads of them and this only scratched the surface. Those we got a sniff of included the pleasant white tea and thyme, double chocolate cookie and Mcdonald’s apple pie; the uncanny oily machinery, wood-stove and baby powder; and the slightly less pleasant faeces, sewage and damp. All the smells they produce are synthetic though and (we were assured) had been rigourously tested to comply with various health and safety regulations meaning that, though some smelt like shit, we could be safe in the knowledge it was harmless shit stinky chemicals!

For a while we had been toying with the idea of distilling our own essences but due to our lack of available equipment it would be a big investment to get this set up so we had to know for sure that it was the way we wanted to go. Our visit to ScentAir highlighted an interesting avenue which may involve our future collaboration with them in using the scents they have on offer but we’ll have to exchange a few more emails to see how that turns out. Regarding the diversity of output smell then, we may well be quite nicely on track, however there’s still work to do on refining the actual dispenser itself and exploring how it can connect to the web.

-Tim

Novelty Spimes

Thu, 15 Sep 2011 14:20:58 +0100

As the smell of success wafts fragrantly through the Mint offices, we have been discussing the pros and cons of the novelty gadget - small, cheap products that usually have one or two humorous functions to keep you amused for hours.

Novelty products appeal because they’re fun - they have a simple, accessible interaction that instantly captures your imagination or makes you laugh. Of course, the flip side of this is that they can get old quickly - there’s only so many times you can use that whoopee cushion in the office before you A) tire of it or B) get the sack. And products that follow this super-fast pattern of consumption are wasteful - of materials, time, and money.

However, I don’t see them disappearing any time soon, and their capacity to make people smile and play around should not be sniffed at. In fact, at the moment, small cheap gadgets are providing wonderful starting points for people to experiment with electronics and digital interactions. Just a quick browse through object-hacking sites like Instructables will confirm this. A major consideration of ours recently has been how we can make these novelty gadgets less wasteful and more productive, and more in line with the experimental spirit that they can inspire in people.

The “novelty spime” is emerging as an intriguing way of doing it. I won’t go too much here on what a spime is here, for lack of space (try Bruce Sterling’s “Shaping Things” or, more immediately, the wikipedia page). The most memorable quote regarding spimes, for me, is this - that they are “material instantiations of an immaterial system.” Spimes exist in the real world only when they need to, and once the novelty of existence wears off, they can just as easily be taken apart and returned to a more immaterial state.

The possibility of building an object-platform that allows people to build the thing themselves, modify it, and use it in as many ways as their imagination allows, is a really exciting one. When the novelty does wear off, its just as easy to break it down to its constituent parts and either redistribute it or make something else. It gives space for play and experimentation, but also imagines a multitude of long-term future use scenarios - crucially, few of which are wasteful.

Designing the novelty spime is mostly new territory for us, and brings with it an abundance of new considerations - how you design something to be downloadable from the internet, taken apart, re-coded, re-used and re-distributed takes in a lot of unique and complex interactions. But I, for one, am very excited about going through the process of working it all out. Watch this space!

- Chris

Distilling Success.

Thu, 08 Sep 2011 18:10:00 +0100

Experimentis with a vapouriser. from The Foundry on Vimeo.

We did some experimenting with our new toy yesterday, the vapouriser. It vibrates a small ceramic disc at ultrasonic frequencies to produces a fine gaseous mist of whatever liquid it happens to be in. In this case, the liquid content of the Mint fridge at the time:

Beer

OJ (with bits)

Tea

Coke Zero

Bath Oil (don’t ask)

Gin

A true agency selection.

It seemed the more viscous liquids produced better mists. Coke Zero and tea both created large volumes of delectable mists that quickly disappeared into the ether if not shot to the back of the throat with a rolled up post it note (we were lacking in straws).

OJ, unluckily didn’t work and we thought this maybe down to the thicker, bittier nature of the liquid. The real disappointment was the beer, we were all very excited about the prospect of a beer mist, and even after getting the beer flat enough for the mist to escape the surface tension, it still didn’t quite cut it.

Both bath Oil and Gin however, produced a beautiful, thick and aromatic mist. The gin would have benefited greatly from a slice of lime and some vapourised tonic but I guess that’s one for the next Mint office party.

The feedback received from prolonged office use of ‘The Smell of Success’ was that it acted as a visual and auditory notifier, rather than an olfactory one. In essence, you see and hear that you’ve received a re-tweet before you have smelt it. We wanted to get rid of this for V2.0.

The mist evaporates extremely quickly in a vapouriser, but emits the molecules that trigger smell into the air very rapidly. It is also completely silent. Thus, hopefully we will be able to produce more subtle, ephemeral notifications without it being a visual or audible distraction.

We’ll let you know it goes. If you don’t smell it first.

The Smell of Success Instructable

Thu, 08 Sep 2011 10:06:00 +0100

We’ve had a few requests from people asking to have a look at the code for Smell of Success or just generally being nosey about how we made it so we thought it would make sense to create an instructable!

So if you want to make your own and have a good old smelly narcissistic basking then this is the link for you:

http://www.instructables.com/id/Smell-of-Success/

But please share with us your finished creation - we’d love to see how you expand on our starting point! Fire an email over to foundry@mintdigital.com and show us what you have made.

-Tim

4 Guys, 3 Smelly Cups

Tue, 06 Sep 2011 11:03:00 +0100

Last week I was mostly in Denmark exhibiting at a new technology event called NEXT. This was for my personal work so I was a little out of the loop with The Smell of Success progress but it was great to get back on Friday and see what the other guys had been up to in my absence. There had been a lot of talk of pushing what Smell of Success could be - exploring how the inclusion of odours can enrich interactive systems and what specific effects they can have on us. This was all sounding pretty exciting so I wanted to get involved with some further idea development.

Previously, we’ve been playing around with a few different techniques for idea generation surrounding the basis of having a starting point on a sheet of paper - either a concept, insight or question - and then passing this around between the four of us to each further develop, refine or expand upon the starting point. This has had mixed success but I thought I would try out a new idea generation technique I had picked up from a workshop I attended in Denmark where I was in a group alongside Ted Howes - Former Global Lead on Sustainability at IDEO - the kind of person you want to pinch idea generation techniques from! There where a few formal rules to the process but I forgot to note them down so in summary it was, get some post-its, start churning out ideas, be quantitative, share your ideas and insights (but do this quickly) and then collate the ideas into coherent groups. This seemed to work really well as it allowed us to collectively work on various tangents of which one in particular started to sound really interesting, that of synaesthesia. We started asking questions like, can you smell colours, what do smells sound like, are bad smells heavier than pleasant ones.

I thought it would be fun to do an experiment surrounding this so I put together three mystery smells made from stuff in the Mint Digital kitchen. Starting with 3 cups each containing rooibos tea, a smell which I figured would not be too familiar, I then added to one cup a spoonful of strawberry jam; the next cup, a dollop of HP sauce; and the final cup, a mix of orange juice and washing up liquid (warning was provided that they should be smelt and not tasted). The guys where unaware what was in each cup so I asked them to consider the mysterious, and unique smell through a series of questions:

what is the colour of the smell?
what is the shape of the smell?
what kind of personality does the smell evoke?
what memory does this conjure up?
what are the ingredients of the smell?

Strawberry Jam and Rooibos Tea

Though not a wholly indistinguishable smell, the spice of the rooibos effectively disguised the fruity, sweet, identifiable strawberry. Ben and Genis both related to it a reddish colour, explaining assumptions that there was berryish smell to it. Chris however chose a light green as, for him, the smell recalled notions of summer time, flowers and iced lollies. This was an early insight into how smells are easily interpreted in different ways, perhaps even more so when the smell is unfamiliar.

The shape Ben chose was numerous circles grouped together which was really interesting as he assumed that there was some raspberry ingredient in the mix however did not consciously make the connection between the shape he created in his minds eye and the fact this shape very closely resembled a raspberry. This may help to explain how easy it is for a smell to trigger a memory or thought – perhaps faster than you can consciously comprehend. This notion of memory triggering was furthered by Genis who explained that the smell reminded him of a sweet from his childhood, memories of primary school and a particular person, a bit of a bully, who he had not seen for 15 years. An interestingly specific memory - Genis went onto explain that though he did not recognise the exact smell of strawberry, they were something he ate a lot of when he was young so that may be why his memory harked back to Primary School.

HP Sauce and Rooibos Tea

Imagining that this is not to most pleasant of flavours (did not try it) the smell of this had a real spice to it through combining both the musky spice of the rooibos with the fruity spice of HP sauce. The colours chosen for this smell were auburn, burgundy and maroon. It’s interesting that these colours are all very deep, rich colours, not dissimilar to the dark brown of HP sauce. Not sure what the conclusion is from this but either HP sauce uses colouring because we commonly relate the smell/taste to a particular shade of brown or perhaps it’s vice versa, our notions of the colour are derived from previous experiences of the smell/taste – that is what brown sauce should smell like.

The sauce highlighted a cultural divide in our group too. Genis was completely unfamiliar to the smell, it was not part of his Catalonian background and therefore quite literally foreign to him. He said that the smell had an ugly personality. Ben almost guessed the ingredient right as he said it reminded him of a friends father who used to smother everything he ate in HP sauce though Chris had no idea what the ingredients were and claimed it reminded him of Christmas time and wintery spices. Perhaps this could be a festive rebrand route for the sauce… In contrast to Genis though, Chris said the smell also had a spicy and masculine personality and possibly also wore a smoky jacket – very sophisticated! Interesting how different backgrounds can affect interpretations of smells though, can you create a completely unique smell that can be universally recognised? We got talking about how coca-cola is such a massive global brand but could people distinguish the smell without the logo?

Fresh Orange Juice, Washing Up Liquid and Rooibos Tea

A surprisingly not-disgusting smell (though one which was again not tasted) this had zesty notes which complimented the rooibos spice and the fresh (apple?) odour of the washing up liquid. It was also slightly bubbly when stirred and had a bit of a horrible murky brown colour. Chris said the the smell had a bit of a “fake natural” personality which perhaps was due to the real smell of orange mixed with the artificial smell of the washing up liquid. Both he and Ben related the smell to hygiene, cleanliness and medication however, conversely, it reminded Genis of adventure and going trekking with the shape being that of a kind of palm tree.

I think this smell threw the guys off a bit as it was pretty weird but again, the diverse responses were interesting. We discussed if interpretations of smells could be used more widely as personal identification – such as a password reminder being a specific smell which only you would understand based on how you respond to it.

Conclusion

I am not too certain what to make of this experiment. The concept was devised in about 20 seconds, lasted around 20 mins and has taken far longer to write up so perhaps a bit of pre-consideration of the outcome would have helped but here is what I think we have gained a better understanding of:

Your sense of smell of a very unique quality and open to very specific interpretation for each particular person. Perhaps it is that odour information has not gone through the same semantic enlightenment as visual information (whereby a smell could be designed in a specific way to trigger universal interpretation). If it is relevant I would like to call this research scentmantics because I love bad wordplay.
Our diverse interpretations of smell should also be something to embrace. Smells, unlike much other sensory stimuli will often trigger a memory of how you know the smell before you interpret what the smell actually is. This link between smell and memory is really cool territory however will require some hefty reading to make proper sense of beyond pseudo science speculation.
Quick and impulsive ideas are great and can lead you down unexpectedly intriguing paths so embrace them and go with the flow!

And that’s me done now! This was an unexpectedly long post so well done for making it this far, go have a cup of tea but give it a sniff before you drink it.

-Tim

The Smell of Success Video Demo

Mon, 05 Sep 2011 13:04:00 +0100

Following our live steam from last Thursday we though we would put together a quick video to show the Smell of Success in action in case you missed it. We made a polished fancy one but it was pretty boring so here’s a more rough and ready version. And just to mention, massive thanks to Shaun McWhinne for being a total champ, helping us getting our code put together and getting the twitter connection up and running on Processing.

Note: we are yet to test The Smell of Success emitting the aroma of leather bound book and rich mahogany - it’s currently fresh linen.

BONUS clip here for pyroheads - if you didn’t spot the puff of perfume in the above video you will in this one!

-Tim

Emotions Stink.

Mon, 05 Sep 2011 10:33:00 +0100

Zoflora is “A powerful disinfectant with twice the germ-killing power of carbolic acid, but with beautiful fragrance oils extracted from flowers”.

Radical.

It has all the characteristics of a product that I should pledge my undying brand allegiance to – heritage, functionality, consistency, reasonable price, and British.

And yet, I despise the stuff, it makes me do sick burps.

I feel kind of guilty about this. It’s really not Zoflora’s fault I have such a burning desire to set their bottling plant on fire… It’s the fault of those pesky emotions again, strutting around my frontal lobes like they own the place.

This is because when my first dog died, my mum cleaned her body (the dog’s, not my mum’s) with Zoflora to keep germs and bacteria away.

Completely unbeknown to me, the nerve endings in my nose were secretly and ‘illogically’ collaborating with my brain to create negative emotions towards the Zoflora fragrance, based on the negative emotional experience I was having at the time.

Sensuously negative experiences create olfactory ghouls for later on in life. Every time I get a whiff of Zoflora now, I’m immediately reminded of my dog’s death. I am a brand manager’s worst nightmare.

On a happier note, sensuously positive emotional experiences can create olfactory angels on your shoulder. I have a particular fondness for the smell of damp for example, because of many happy memories of falling asleep on a damp garden swing in the summer heat.

It seems lots of people far more qualified than I have been researching this stuff too. This lady has got some fascinating things to say about the subject, and she’s got something to do with Oxford which means it must be interesting, right?

A fascinating experiment she mentions is the ‘Winterfresh’ experiment. Basically, American people in the 60’s thought the ‘Winterfresh’ scent was totally awesome, but the English people involved in the experiment thought it were simply horrid. Why was this? Well, turns out that America used the scent to flavor candies, whereas the English used it to flavor wartime medicinal drugs…

So when scientists asked what they thought of the smell, Americans immediately associated it with the happy go lucky days of their pre-obese youth, whereas the English, in a suitably pessimistic stance, likened it to war, death, and painful doctors appointments. Lovely.

This strikes me as a rich and valuable area to be playing around with. However, It’s hard to produce something with smell and the internet that doesn’t seem novel and bordering on ridiculous (Consider the passing fads of older forms of media, scratch and sniff in print, smell-o-vision in television etc). I think this is why it seems attractive. Although smell is an extremely powerful, emotional and evocative sense, it’s still extremely chaotic, random and subjective.

Audio and visual culture tends to have a meticulously constructed language. A set of codes and conventions that enable clear communication to a mass of people. This doesn’t exist for smell, so the connotations and semantics of it as a more formalised tool for communication are still up in the air (Excuse the pun).

With the ‘smell of success’ we started to ascociate the feeling of personal satisfaction (getting a re-tweet) with Glade’s fresh linen fragrance. Imagine this on a larger scale, where certain scents can provide ubiquitously understood ambient information – what does a wifi bubble smell like? How can smells purposefully aid your memory, warn you of danger and influence your mood?

Hello Internet of smells.

Streaming Smells

Thu, 01 Sep 2011 14:59:00 +0100

Live video for mobile from Ustream

Presenting our latest prototype - The Smell of Success!

To briefly sum it up, the Smell of Success is a hacked Glade air freshener which is hooked up to Twitter via Arduino. Whenever someone re-tweets the latest tweet from the @mintfoundry account, it sprays a single shot of scent into the room.

We will be streaming it in action from 3.30-5.00pm (BST) - just retweet our last tweet to see it puff out a small wisp of smelly goodness a few moments later.

We’re sorry you won’t be able to smell it where you are.

Rest assured, we will.

"The scent-organ was playing a delightfully refreshing Herbal Capriccio - rippling arpeggios of thyme..."

Thu, 01 Sep 2011 10:19:15 +0100

“The scent-organ was playing a delightfully refreshing Herbal Capriccio - rippling arpeggios of thyme and lavender, of rosemary, basil, myrtle, tarragon; a series of daring modulations through the spice keys into ambergris; and a slow return through sandalwood, camphor, cedar, and newmown hay (with occasional suble touches of discord - a whiff of kidney pudding, the faintest suspicion of pig’s dung) back to the simple aromatics with which the piece began. The final blast of thyme died away; there was a round of applause.”

- Aldous Huxley’s “Scent Organ” in Brave New World

The Smell of Success

Tue, 30 Aug 2011 12:52:43 +0100

As you may have read last week, recently we have been considering the possibilities of connecting smell to the internet. Alongside conceptual exploration of the potential of smell, how it affects us, and how we can use it online, we have been building a simple prototype that will emit a scent in response to an online activity.

Titled ‘The Smell of Success’, the prototype is a hacked Glade air freshener that sprays out its “vanillaroma” whenever one of your tweets is re-tweeted. It came from us playing around with the idea of rewarding digital success with physical rewards - giving you a little pat on the back or treat whenever someone responds favourably to something you do on the web.

So it works like this. The Glade is hooked up (via arduino and processing) to our Twitter account. We put out a tweet of some sort. The device can then recognise whenever someone re-tweets it, and every time that happens, it will let out a little puff of scented air. So you should most certainly re-tweet @mintfoundry whenever you can, and stink out the Mint Digital offices for us.

As Ben pointed out in his wonderful “Digital Snurdling” post, the ephemeral nature of a passing smell has great similarity with the way a tweet works - it exists momentarily before wafting away and being forgotten. Of course, those who have enough Twitter clout to be re-tweeted all the time would have their little machine constantly pumping out the smell of success (which, admittedly, probably isnt vanillaroma).

This coming week, we will be working towards how we can make this prototype something more developed - exploring the possibilities of connecting it to different people and networks, and also working on its physical and aesthetic properties. In its current guise, it does of course have the potential to seem gimmicky; its our aim to resolve this and make use of the capacity of smell to genuinely enrich digital experiences.

Stay tuned and keep up the re-tweeting. Smell you later.

- Chris

Passing Comments on Digital Snurdling

Thu, 25 Aug 2011 16:53:00 +0100

Sometimes when I walk by someone on the street, I hear a little snippet of their conversation. It’s a little vox-popping insight into that persons very persona. It can be anything from the classic “I’m stuck in traffic” (when stood outside the pub) or the the slightly more ambiguous “He put it where?!”.

I don’t mean to do this; I’m not some creepy eavesdropper of Londoners most intimate secrets. I can’t turn my ears off, although sometimes I wish I could as it makes me feel a bit naughty and audibly voyeuristic.

I feel a bit like this about Twitter. It’s like digital eavesdropping but the person knows you are listening and secretly enjoys it. Pervs.

I think I’ve turned into a bit of a ratio perv of late. I find myself more intrigued by a persons twitter ratio (the gap between followers and following) than what that person is actually saying. It’s a bit like watching a particularly beautiful lady walk down the train platform and counting how many chaps pretend not to look at her until she’s walked past. She could be the most interesting person in the world but they will never know.

I’ve also got a similar habit with smells. If someone (male or female) walks past me on the street and they smell incredible, I’l usually turn around to the person I’m with and exclaim, much to their dismay, “Did you smell that girl/guy? they smelt AWESOME!”. This often ends up in my acquaintance’s swift departure. I assume no one wants to hang out with that guy that goes around sniffing people.

If you think about it though, surely this is what the beautiful smelling person wants? Why else would you spend an obscene amount of money on smelling great if you didn’t want someone to appreciate it? It’s not my fault I breathed near them.

The reason I chat so much breeze about this is because we’ve recently been discussing connecting smell to the internet. It’s an intriguing area because the web is such a predominantly visual / auditory focused arena. We spend a great deal of time interacting with people on the web, yet it lacks the wealth of sensory stimuli that physical human - human contact provides in meatspace.

However, in many ways, I think the 140 character twitter message bears a close resemblance to the ephemeral passing waft of a particularly fragrant individual. They both invoke certain emotions, have a certain charm or distaste and both disappear into the ether as quickly as they arrived.

This reminds me of something my old man once told me about the act of ‘snurdling’. Snurdling is the process of keeping a keen eye out for any young damsel who has recently de-mounted her bicycles seating area. Shortly after said bicycle is bereft of its owner, the snurdler in question shuffles over to the seat and gives it a quick sniff for any traces of human bodily odour.

Strange I know, but the prospect of a world where fleeting digital interactions leave behind a notable olfactory trace, sounds like a much more interesting and subtle means of notification than the various audio and visual cues I currently receive to tell me I have just interacted with another human being.

Bring on the digital snurdlers.

- Ben

Discovering Arduino

Thu, 25 Aug 2011 11:06:34 +0100

This week, after two weeks of brainstorming and idea generation, we have started to look for more concrete ways to connect the Internet to a particular object. It’s such a fascinating process how digital data can, for instance, move a physical object or activate a particular mechanism. All this requires joining two different worlds such as computer programming and electronics, a gap that can be unified thanks to one little device called Arduino.

In essence, Arduino is a board with a microcontroller that can receive different kinds of inputs from a wide range of sensors, and then generate an output, such as controlling lights, motors and basically whatever you can possibly think can be plugged in. This allows us to send Internet data into an object and control it according to that data.

Those of us less experienced with physical computing have taken some time to learn not only how the board works but also the necessary coding which runs it. It’s in this context of first contact with this platform where we have created some small machinery (from a blinking led to a monkey toy which throws bananas on switching on a button). Maybe these little experiments won’t be related to our final product but definitely they make a difference in our understanding of Arduino and the different uses and possibilities that the technology offers.

Photograph: London Hackspace

Our research this week has been mainly in this practical vein, although we have also found time to do some field research. We visited the workshop at Hackspace in Shoreditch (lately we always seem to go to the same area no matter the reason) - a truly unique place where you can find 3D printers, a workshop area with lots of tools among which stands out a laser cutter, retro videogames… simply a geek paradise. The main part of it though is the community of developers and designers that are using this space to exchange knowledge and help each other.

We are pretty excited about how our project is starting to take shape and quite sure that Arduino is going to play an important role on it — and, as the coding gets more and more confusing, most probably the smart folks at Hackspace as well.

- Genis