Jas Brooks, Pedro Lopes. Smell & Paste.

A question from the lab

Smell & Paste came out of the Human Computer Integration Lab at the University of Chicago, the lab led by Pedro Lopes. Jas Brooks, then a doctoral researcher there, had made a number of projects treating smell as an interface between people and machines. The two presented the project at CHI 2023, the main conference in human computer interaction, as a full paper.

The starting point was a set of interviews. The team asked eight experts who work with smell how they test ideas before building them. The answers revealed a gap: there was almost no established process for quickly sketching how smells unfold over time.

In other fields, sketching is routine. Interface designers draw wireframes on paper. Filmmakers make storyboards. Sound designers record rough takes. With smell, testing an idea meant diffusers, circuits, chemicals and someone who knew how to handle them. Every trial cost time and money, so people tried less.

Stickers, paper tape, a cassette

The answer from Brooks and Lopes is deliberately simple. The main material is the scratch and sniff sticker, an off the shelf label whose surface carries smell sealed in microscopic capsules. Scratch it, the capsules break, the smell escapes.

Designers paste these stickers along a strip of paper tape in the order they want. Then they load the tape into a cassette. The cassette can be 3D printed or folded from cardboard. As the tape advances, each sticker passes a scratching point in turn. The smells arrive in the sequence they were laid down.

No electricity. No programming. No handling of chemicals. A sequence can be built in minutes, reordered by peeling and repasting, then handed to someone else to try. The team published the cassette files on GitHub so anyone can make a kit.

The cassette form is no accident. Tape carries time: it runs from one end to the other, and what is placed first arrives first. In a small handheld object, smell is set on a visible timeline.

Users stretch it themselves

The team evaluated the toolkit in two studies. People of any technical background could use it. More interesting, both novices and experts adapted and extended it, making it their own.

That is the sign of a good tool. A pencil does not dictate what gets drawn. It only has to be cheap and easy enough that people dare to draw badly. Smell & Paste brings that ease into a field that has been heavy: trying things with smell without fear of waste.

In 2024 the project received the Sadakichi Award from Art and Olfaction, a prize for experimental work with scent. A scientific paper stood beside art installations. That says something about how people working with smell now see one another: the line between research and art is thinning.

Why a draft is worth remembering

Most remembered works about smell are large: a room full of smoke, a scented maze, a fragrant museum. Smell & Paste is far smaller. It fits in a palm.

Yet it touches a root question: how do you think in smell? People think in images by drawing and in sound by humming. With smell, thinking usually waits until real material is at hand. A roll of stickered tape lets thinking start earlier, rougher, more often.

There is a modest beauty in that. No new smell, no sophisticated machine. Only a way of arranging old smells in a new order, to hear what they say when they stand side by side. For more on smells arranged in sequence through space, see Maki Ueda's Olfactory Labyrinth.