Modularly Synesthesia Experience
Solo Exhibition
2020 Spring
Role:
Fragrance Designer, Programming, 3D modeling
Recognition:
Exhibition in X-Museum
Tools:
Raspberry Pi, Fragrance Toolkits, Rhino
What is the benefit of people mastering the Synesthesia?
Can artwork be translated through modular interaction?
When visiting art gallery, the most dominant sensation is visual. However, there are roughly 65% of the population who experience different types of visual impairment in the world. Seldom are galleries and exhibition accommodate with such accessibility.
The appreciation of the artist work advanced through multimodal through the detection from scent to the related shapes. The outcome from the ideation are in two forms: one is an art exhibition Synesthesia interaction tryout, another is the next step which is a landscape prototype in the Central Park in New York City.
In the Spring of 2020, I have taken a class called Beyond the Visual: Olfactive, Haptic & Somatic. The class visit the IFF International Flavors and Fragrance cooperation and in the end I wrote a paper on how people could acquire the fascinating synesthesia, which is a perceptual phenomenon and certain immersive art experiences could help to achieve the same effect of synesthesia.
Most current gallery exhibitions rely heavily on visual art forms, which is inaccessible for visually impaired especially who enjoy the art educations.
“Galleries and museums need to consider how they can diversify their audience needs and their talent pool within their organization.”@AndrewMiller, disability advocates
Current exhibition lack of exhibition choices unfriendly to visually impaired learners.
Disabled people cannot appreciate artworks like the abled.
10% of the world's population, almost 650 million people, live with a disability.
65% of the population experience a different type of visual impairment.
87% of arts venues and festivals in more than
40 countries don’t include disabled people in any part of the process.
Seven million children with visual impairment experience a severe visual loss that impacts their lives
Sensations besides sights are really sensitive
The visual impaired are varied in the levels, not all are blind
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lemon
pepper
coffee
mint
nuts
butter
rose
vanilla
lychee
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Sensations | Abled | Visual Impaired |
|---|---|---|
Auditory | active | hyper-active |
Haptics | active | hyper-active |
Olfactory | active | hyper-active |
Sights | active | x |
Solution:
aroma diffuser embedded electronics convert shapes to fragrances
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Design Process
Exhibition -User Testing
Almost all the audiences who came to the exhibition enjoyed the immersive experiences, and for the user testing part, I have sent out small cards for the audiences to fill out for feedback. The audiences no matter having visual impairment or not are camouflaged in the dark space. With all the positive feedback from the audiences for improvements.
How to extend the art experiences?
How to make sure to completely detect the shapes in the painting?
Get to Know Us
Future Step
From the first exhibition's user testing, revisions are extension of the experiences and processing of all the shapes from the painting. An enlarged aroma diffuser installation that contain more fragrance bottles are created. I decide to choose a place in the New York Central Park where a Special Student School is nearby. Students could also take a break from their school and visit the park. Other people who do not have visual impairment could also play and they will bring in a different perspectives.
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