Concept exploration
SMELLKELIJK ™ Microbe Perfumery
What if you had a portable microbioreactor in your home no bigger than a two-litre air fryer that you could use to brew your own blends of aromatic essential oils by growing synthetically engineered microbes?
It could work like this:
(1) Customers can order online some OLFACTONE™ scent swatches for smells they’re curious about. OLFACTONE™ scent swatches are to terpenoid biosynthesis what Pantone colour swatches are to offset printing.
Alternatively, customers can sample the scents in SMELLKELIJK™ microbe perfumery brick-and-mortar stores where they can also buy the microbioreactor, accessories, and supplies. SMELLKELIJK™ microbe perfumery stores would be like Apple stores but for scents and smell tech.
(2) Customers can use the OLFACTONE™ scent-swatch numbers to order the corresponding cartridges that contain the microbes, enzymes and microbial food that could create the scents the customer wants to produce.
(3) As this is biology, the scents produced by the microbioreactor are expected not exactly to match the scent swatch. Customers are encouraged to modify, experiment, hack the recipe and create new scents. They can swap and exchange microbe perfumery hacks at the SMELLKELIJK ™ exchange. Customers can even sell their microbe perfumery hacks as non-fungible tokens (NFTs) in the exchange.
Name exploration
SMELLKELIJK™, the name, was inspired by my time completing a minor in interactive environments at TU Delft in the Netherlands. In the university cafeterias, I would grab food, put it on my tray and head to the cashier area to pay. The cashiers would always say in Dutch “eet smakelijk” after I successfully tapped to pay with my bank card. I believe “eet smakelijk” is the Dutch equivalent to the French “bon appetit” and “smakelijk” equivalent to the English word “tasty”.
SMELLKELIJK™ can be pronounced like “smell-click”. This pronunciation hints at the digital and internet-enabled aspect of the microbioreactor system. It can also be pronounced like “smell-kay-lick” which hints at the taste aspect of smell, with “lick” allowing for possible erotic aspects of the brand.
Visual identity design exploration
Microbioreactor product design exploration
I have been and continue to use the above 2-litre air fryer for my daily cooking. See the video below for an example use case. I find the colour, size, surface, form factor and user interface of this air fryer simply perfect for my particular needs.
It feels that this size and form factor could possibly work well for a personal microbioreactor. I found a paper describing a “portable and fully integrated personal biomanufacturing platform” using Pichia pastoris strains of yeast (Perez-Pinera et al. 2016). It this paper it shows a microbioreactor in the context of being inside an ambulance. See figure 1 below. It so happens that the dimensions in this ambulance constext is roughly the same as the airfryer I have picture above.
Thus I will start exploring the three-dimensional form design for the SMELLKELIJK™ taking into consideration the above factors.
Lived experience—blending and swapping scents
I have experienced the joy of coming to a yogini friend’s house for a Young Living essential oils party. She educated our small group of interested punters about what essential oils are and how we ourselves could make blends by combining pure extracts in an oil base. I was very happy with the “warm fuzzies” blend I made by mixing northern lights black spruce, lavender, vetiver, cedarwood, and frankincense.
Many who have smelled the “warm fuzzies” blend I made remarked that it was a very nicely sophisticated masculine fragrance. In fact, a couple of days ago a friend of mine who recently moved back to France asked me to list the constituents of “warm fuzzies” so she could recreate it herself.
This lived experience inspired the idea for encouraging the blending of scents, exchanging and swapping microbe perfumery recipes.
Sensory design
Sensory design advocates for inclusive, multisensory designs which activate smell, taste, touch, sound, and wisdom of the body not just the predominance of vision in the majority of contemporary design practices.
“The senses are unique to every person. Some people have smell receptors that make broccoli taste appallingly bitter; to others, cilantro tastes like soap. Some people have a diminished sense of smell. This condition, called anosmia, vastly diminishes the pleasure of eating and of otherwise exploring the world; it affects six million Americans. Christine Kelly, who became anosmic after a sinus infection, creates smell wheels that illustrate how her sense of smell has been distorted—smells that should pique the appetite or calm the nerves became noxious and muddy.”
(Lupton & Lipps 2018, p. 20).
“A scent player for Alzheimer’s patients stimulates the appetite by releasing the smell of grapefruit, curry, or chocolate cake at mealtimes.”
(p. 27).
Further possible design explorations
Microbe genomics
Exploratory science is showing us that there are more living microbes in marine sediments than there are stars in the universe and more on land subsurfaces. Many of these microbes have not been cultured and are vastly understudied. However, there is a way to get core samples from subsurfaces and study the activity of these microbial ecosystems in their natural environment. This is done by analysing gene transcriptions to the RNA of a microbe to see what proteins the expressed genes produce (Lloyd 2021).
Perhaps similar to how grape varietals are branded by the region where they’re grown or were first domesticated (Champagne, Bordeaux, Malbec), there could be similar SMELLKELIJK™ varietals based on where the area where microbe subsurface core samples for gene to RNA transcriptions were obtained as discussed above. For example Svalvard Woeisales.
Erotic sensory explorations
In the movie based on the best-selling novel “Perfume the story of a murderer”, the 18th-century French anti-hero protagonist was born with a phenomenal sense of smell which led to an obsession to create the ultimate perfume comprising women’s bodily scents by all and any means necessary, ethical or unethical.
Netflix Germany has made a TV mini-series which I am about to watch adapts the Perfume story into a contemporary setting. Further design explorations could spring from the media review of these stories.
Incidentally in both trailers above, there are scenes where a muslin-like material is wrapped around the human body to obtain its scent prints so to speak. Perhaps a sensory bio wrap can be designed where sandwiched between the outer layers of the wrap are synthetic gene networks that can smell (Farzadfard & Lu 2017).
The Perfume story also highlights the other aspect of the olfactory system. The foregoing discussion of SMELLKELIJK™ focussed on the production of scents but there is also the corresponding sensing aspect.
For example, there is Konikore (Koniku 2021) a biosensor embedded inside an electronic device that could be used to detect a growing number, currently at 4069, of compounds in the air. Applications of this sensor tech include airport security, medical diagnoses, and perhaps even future cyborgs (Price 2021). Refer to the video below.
Perhaps further design explorations on the SMELLKELIJK™ system could include a personal mask device with a biosensor that enhances the smell range of the wearer to be able to smell beyond the range of most humans.
Akin to visual augmented reality, the human nose coupled with the mask biosensor could lead to olfactory augmented reality (OAR).
Beyond this, a pairing between OAR and SMELLKELIJK™ scents can lead to erotic specificity where terpenoid blenders can woo terpenoid smellers for erotic and sexual pleasure. It may even include smell privacy where only the person wearing the mask dialled at a particular setting can smell the SMELLKELIJK™ scent sprayed in the air.
References
Arendt, P., Pollier, J., Callewaert, N. & Goosens, A. 2016, ‘Synthetic biology for the production of natural and new-to-nature terpenoids in photosynthetic organisms’, The Plant Journal, vol. 87, no. 1, viewed 1 October 2021, <https://doi.org/10.1111/tpj.13138>.
Farzadfard, F. & Lu, T. 2017, ‘Synthetic gene networks that smell’, Nature Chemical Biology, vol. 13, pp. 245-246.
Koniku, It’s here Konikore a living, breathing machine, viewed 1 October 2021, <
https://koniku.com/
>.
Lloyd, K. 2021, What microbes live below our feet?, video recording, YouTube, 25 May, viewed 29 September 2021,
Lupton, E. & Lipp, A. (eds) 2018, The senses: design beyond vision, 1st edn, Princeton Architectural Press, Hudson, NY.
Malnar J. & Vodvarka F. 2004, ‘Ranges of the Senses’, Sensory Design, University of Minnesota Press, viewed 30 September 2021, <https://www.cooperhewitt.org/2018/04/03/why-sensory-design/>.
Perez-Pinera, P., Ningren, H., Cleto, S., Cao, J., Purcell, O., Shah, K., Lee, K., Ram, R. & Lu, T. 2016, ‘Synthetic biology and microbioreactor platforms for programmable production of biologics at the point-of-care’, Nature Communications, vol. 7, art. no. 12211, viewed 1 October 2021, <https://doi.org/10.1038/ncomms12211>.
Price, L. 2021, ‘The smell of tomorrow’, Can design save us? audio podcast, 27 July, viewed 2 October 2021, <https://theindexproject.org/award/winnersandfinalists/podcast-the-smell-of-tomorrow>.
Zhang, C. & Hong, K. 2020, ‘Production of terpenoids by synthetic biology approaches’, Frontiers in Bioengineering and Biotechnology, vol. 8, no. 347, viewed 1 October 2021, <https://doi.org/10.3389/fbioe.2020.00347>.