Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London, is one of the most renowned and celebrated arts and design colleges in the world. Among its alumni are the Turner Prize winner Laure Prouvost, rock musician Jarvis Cocker, and many fashion designers, including Kim Jones, Stella McCartney, and Alexander McQueen.
Students of one of its courses, MA Narrative Environments, are focused on spatial stories that can be found across cultural, civic, technological, and digital spaces, and one new ‘vector’ they had not explored before was fragrance, which was why they were excited to join Firmenich in an exclusive collaboration to push the boundaries of their creativity in the scent space.
Working across spatial design, speculative design, social and systems design, the students sought to compose interactive stories to reimagine the future of fine fragrance, by developing an immersive installation that would be a sensory experience – both a vivid, creative platform and a performative event, which would explore the future of smell.
At the core of the collaboration is a mutual focus on innovation and creativity, as the challenge at the heart of the partnership between Central Saint Martins and Firmenich was to create an immersive realm that amalgamates sensation, perception, and interpretation of information. This reflects Firmenich’s vision for fine fragrance, creating a total environment no longer limited to the five senses of the human, but an all-encompassing environment in which natural and synthetic, remote, and intimate, power and submission, conscious and unconscious, mechanical and sensoriate are recomposed.
The students were asked to develop conceptual proposals for a future sensing experience that would be portable, immersive, and interactive. Concepts were based initially on eight key areas: culture and nature; machine and man; psychology and physiology; digital and analogue; convergence and divergence; science and sensation; intelligence and experience; invisible and visible.