Sense of Smell goes a long way at Headspace panel

March 26, 2010
Parsons the New School for Design
New York, NY

In the age of technological revolution, less emphasis is placed on the importance of direct human senses. But Majora Carter, born and raised in the South Bronx, is on a mission to discover a specific smell that can change the way members of her community feel about their environment.

“Scent is very powerful in that it can lift or lower your spirits,” Carter said during the event “Headspace: On Scent as Design” at the New School on Friday afternoon.

In partnership with MoMA and International Flavors & Fragrances Inc. (IFF), Coty Inc. and Seed, designers, scientists and perfumists sought to discuss how “new science is exploring the ways in which scent stimulates cognition, memory, and the production of experience,” said Paola Antonelli. Antonelli is a senior curator in the Department of Architecture and Design at MoMA who helped create the program.

Majora Carter considers herself an “accidental” perfumer. She is an environmental justice advocate and a South Bronx activist, who has been a major proponent of change in poor, run-down areas of the ghetto where she originated. One of her many projects include the South Bronx Greenway, a successful framework that brought clean parks, walking paths and greenery to the South Bronx waterfront.


Carter

But Carter is taking her activism a step closer to direct sensory experiences. After realizing that disinvestment, poor building ventilation and build-up of trash in her old neighborhood had produced unhealthy and unpleasant odors, she wanted to discover a scent that could impact the community in a positive way.

“I wanted to make people feel hopeful, as though things can be better because their environment smells nice,” she stated during her lecture at the New School. “I wanted people to see green, white and blue colors when they smelled the air, instead of the usual grey and brown.”

Carter was inspired by memories of childhood – growing up in the Bronx was different than it is now, she said. “I used to be able to smell that sweet scent of rain after a storm; I can’t do that now. And before they tore down the Bread Factory, the air used to be scented with fresh bread.”

She wants to install those same sensations and smells she had as a child to the sidewalks and building air ducts of the Bronx community in a modern way.

With the help of two professional perfumists—Frenchman Pascal Gaurin and Yugoslavian Bruno Jovanovic—Carter hopes to create a smell that is a mixture of rain, trees, and grass—and ultimately achieve something that is as much a work of design as it is an environmental reform.

“If [Carter] can do it, I think [she’ll] be able to change the whole borough,” Jovanovic said during the panel.