Yuqing Liu

My journey into the realm of olfactory interaction art is deeply personal and emotionally driven, inspired by my grandfather, who suffers from Alzheimer’s disease. As his memory began to fade, my grandfather’s perception of me remained fixed when I was a mere child of five or six, his cognitive functions and memories rooted decades back. Witnessing his steady decline, I realized that his memories were like sand slipping through my fingers, no matter how hard I tried to hold on. This inspired me to create a project for him, an attempt to preserve our shared memories, or at the very least, evoke some emotional response from him.

His sketchbooks from the time of his Alzheimer’s became my initial window into the human memory. Despite his condition, he tried to record fragments of his memories through his drawings. The sketchbooks were filled with hand-drawn maps of places he worked, stories from his youth, and the repeated writing of names of family and friends, including mine. These sketchbooks were a testament to his emotional state, reflecting his fear, his fight against forgetting, and his attempt to hold on to his life story. It moved me profoundly and fueled my determination to create.

But why choose scent as a medium for memory-triggering interaction design? My initial research focused on helping Alzheimer’s patients recall memories of their loved ones and past experiences through sensory stimulation. We live in a visually dominated world, overwhelmed with information that dulls our visual senses. I believed that by expanding our sensory perceptions, we could find a new way to understand and perceive the world. This led me to sensory memory, exploring which senses could directly trigger memories.

Scent stood out as one of the most direct sensory stimuli for triggering memories and emotions. Our olfactory senses have a unique and powerful connection to emotions, making experiences more memorable. From an interaction design perspective, scent offers a natural interactive material, its strong link to emotional memory providing further opportunities for designing memory retrieval and sensory interaction experiences. Additionally, scent is an intuitive sensory stimulus, accessible to most, including those who have lost their ability to care for themselves.

I believe scent is a vital sensory component for humans to perceive their environment, record emotions, and detect danger signals. As technology evolves and more fields explore interactions in virtual and mixed reality worlds, it is conceivable that humans might live between virtual and real worlds in the future. However, current sensory technology development in these realms is mostly limited to sight and sound, with little exploration of olfactory interactions in virtual spaces. I cannot imagine a future where humans, deprived of crucial senses in virtual worlds, face a crisis of degeneration. Therefore, I deem it essential to develop olfactory interactive experiences, and this belief shapes my artistic practice.

In essence, my work is a personal journey and a mission. It is rooted in love, loss, and the desperate desire to connect and preserve the intangible threads of memory that define us. Through the medium of scent, I strive to create experiences that are not only interactive but also profoundly emotional and resonant, tapping into the deepest recesses of memory and emotion.