Smellwalk through George Orwell’s 1984
This project focuses on our sense of smell in literature. Smell is such an evocative sense
that can trigger emotional memories, but it has been neglected and undervalued for a
long time. In the early Western world, smell has been decided to be the sense of madness
and savagery by philosophers and scientists. In a way, vision has become our predominant
sense to approach and acknowledge the reality, but little do we know the sense
of smell in a cultural way. In nowadays, the concept of sanitization and deodorization has
become the standard to design and manage urban cities. Globalization also replaces
local identity odors with global chains, for example, you can smell McDonald everywhere.
The olfactory experience in cities has been homogenized. We are losing the experience of
smell in the environments without being aware of it. Researchers in urban design field
tries to analyze the smell in the cities with smellscape studies. As graphic designers, what
can we do for this invisible sense?
Therefore, my project tries to raise the awareness of the sense of smell by
looking at the language we use to describe them. The methodology includes collecting
smell descriptors from no matter vernacular language or literature and analyzing them
with typology to understand the relationship between language, smell, and places. In the
end, I would like to communicate the ambiguity of the language we use to describe smell,
and the fact that smell is not just sensorial but cultural, to draw more attention on the
elusive sense.
The final artifact is a piece of smellmap with five meters in the length, constructed by the
smell descriptions in the novel 1984 (George Orwell, 1949). The multiple smellwalk routes
on the map are designed to guide the readers to read the smell in the story. The map is
more like a conceptual smellscape of literature to ask the audience to experiment the
smell in the literature. Taking the form of language, I expect this response could prompt
people to reflect on the language we use to describe smell and inquiry that how do we
perceive and experience smell with words, moreover, to consider the meaning
of the “smelly text”.
The map is designed to be almost like a page plan of the novel, showing only the texts regarding smell.
氣味地圖將小說一頁一頁的排開，用頁碼當作座標軸，只顯示出小說1984中藏有氣味文字的段落。
The guidebook provides different routes for smellwalk, leading the readers to explore the novel through another sensory.
地圖旁放置著Smellwalk手冊，分別以人物、食物與地方等氣味主題，帶領讀者用嗅覺的角度嗅聞小說。
Different kind of strings stands for a different kind of smell.
地圖的左下方座落著線條圖示。
The gradient effect highlights how the smell spread out in the texts.
氣味的濃淡由氣味文字逐漸向外推進擴散。
