What’s your favorite smell? Scent is tied to memory and emotion, and it’s impossible to remove a person’s favorite smell from their experiences. In order to build a data set that could represent Salt Lake City’s personal memories and personalities, I spent a day standing on the city’s busiest intersection wearing a sign encouraging passersby to be interviewed. The resulting interviews are full of feelings. To analyze the data I collected each scent in physical form and sorted the samples to find connections. The project output included a collection of audio interviews, a collection of physical representations of favorite smells, and video produced to represent a few of the interviews.

This project was completed in two weeks during the Spring 2021 MDD Research Studio at the University of Utah.