Abstract
This study examines how present-day smell encounters stimulate participants to reflect on possible futures and those scents that are emergent or susceptible to becoming transformed or lost altogether. We describe our speculative design setup whereby participants assumed the persona of an olfactory researcher from the year 2100, armed with a smell passport and set of vials, and tasked with time-traveling back to 2025 to capture scent samples. Smellwalk observations span three themes: environmental awareness of scent, the functional role of future scents, and social and cultural dimensions of olfaction. We discuss those scents which participants found to be particularly salient or at risk of becoming extinct, along with those which were perceived as 'natural', culturally relevant, and worthy of preservation. This work positions the smellwalk as a novel sensory method for doing active futuring research, while contributing to an emerging set of approaches for facilitating smellscape experiences as knowledge contributions.
Keywords
Smellscapes, Smellwalks, Futuring, Multisensory methods, Speculative design
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.540
Citation
Neupauerová, Z., Ashby, S., and Sankaran, S. (2026) Exploring Future Smellscapes with Smellwalks, in Simeone, L., Gray, C. M., Verhoeven, A., de Götzen, A., Bakırlıoğlu, Y., Zohar, H., Stead, M., and Buwert, P. (eds.), DRS2026: Edinburgh, 8–12 June, Edinburgh, United Kingdom. https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.540
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Included in
Exploring Future Smellscapes with Smellwalks
This study examines how present-day smell encounters stimulate participants to reflect on possible futures and those scents that are emergent or susceptible to becoming transformed or lost altogether. We describe our speculative design setup whereby participants assumed the persona of an olfactory researcher from the year 2100, armed with a smell passport and set of vials, and tasked with time-traveling back to 2025 to capture scent samples. Smellwalk observations span three themes: environmental awareness of scent, the functional role of future scents, and social and cultural dimensions of olfaction. We discuss those scents which participants found to be particularly salient or at risk of becoming extinct, along with those which were perceived as 'natural', culturally relevant, and worthy of preservation. This work positions the smellwalk as a novel sensory method for doing active futuring research, while contributing to an emerging set of approaches for facilitating smellscape experiences as knowledge contributions.