New event to celebrate the relationship of scent and design

Published: 5-Mar-2010 Featured companies: IFF

Parsons The New School, The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), International Flavors & Fragrances (IFF), Coty and Seed Media Group have collaborated to organise a symposium aimed at exploring fragrance as a new territory for design. Headspace: A Symposium on Scent as Design will bring together leading designers, scholars, scientists, artists and perfumers to mark the establishment of a new Master of Fine Arts (MFA) in Transdisciplinary Design at Parsons.


Parsons The New School, The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), International Flavors & Fragrances (IFF), Coty and Seed Media Group have collaborated to organise a symposium aimed at exploring fragrance as a new territory for design. Headspace: A Symposium on Scent as Design will bring together leading designers, scholars, scientists, artists and perfumers to mark the establishment of a new Master of Fine Arts (MFA) in Transdisciplinary Design at Parsons.

“Scent is an exciting realm for design exploration at a time when technology seems to be leading us further away from direct sensory experiences,” explains senior curator in the department of architecture and design at MoMA Paola Antonelli. “However, new science is exploring the ways in which scent stimulates cognition, memory and the production of experience. This symposium will generate a dialogue on what this means for designers and architects.”

Panelists will include IFF’s Carlos Benaim, researcher Anna Barbera, conceptual scent artist Sissel Tolaas, product designer Ayse Birsel, architecture and design critic Sylvia Lavin, neurobiologist Leslie Vosshall, architect Toshiko Mori, designer and researcher Susanna Soares and Jean-Louis Frechin, a designer exploring hyper-sensorality. In addition, IFF perfumers will partner with “accidental perfumers” from the worlds of art, design, academia and science to create several unique scent applications for everyday life, the design process of which will be documented in a film by film by Jane Nisselson of Virtual Beauty. The results of a student sensory project called Critical Experiments in the Smell of Space and Time will also be unveiled at the symposium.

Headspace will take place at Parsons The New School for Design in New York on 26 March 2010.

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