Our class POV:
Technology should improve our lives by making things easier for us.

My Proposed Device:
Some sort of scent-catalog

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Why a Scent-Catalog?

Have you ever smelled something familiar,
BUT COULDN’T FIGURE OUT what it was?

Maybe it made you feel something
– happiness, nostalgia, sadness… –
despite not remembering exactly what it was.

Or maybe you’ve forgotten what something smelled like
– a family dish, friends who’ve moved away, a place you visited… –
and miss it.

For some, maybe you even lost your sense of smell
– anosmia from COVID, nerve damage, or something else… –
and would like to re-experience it.

Not everything smells great, but still.
Wouldn’t it be great to somehow be able to smell all of these lost scents again and figure out what they are?

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How It Works

I’m imagining some sort of digital book with several wires connecting to our head. As we smell more things, more scents are recorded in it.

If we smelled something familiar and wanted to know what it was, we would just connect the wires to our head and the name of the smell would pop up on the digital book.

Even if we lost our sense of smell, by connecting the wires to our head and finding it in our digital book, it can somehow allow us to experience those recorded smells again.

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How This Satisfies Our Class POV:
A common theme from our Class POV was that technology should improve our lives by making things easier for us.

By having a scent-catalog, we can more easily be “sent back in time” to reconnect with the things we miss. We can also re-live memories of people, places, and things that we might’ve forgotten about. This can be therapeutic and improve our lives.

Would you want to be “sent back in time”?

Featured Image by Tadeusz Lakota on Unsplash
Two People Hugging photo by adrianna geo on Unsplash
People Eating photo by Zach Reiner on Unsplash
Family Cooking photo by Jimmy Dean on Unsplash
Traveling in a Car photo by averie woodard on Unsplash
Candle photo by Daniel Andrade on Unsplash