Background

My mother is one of the most significant figures in my life. On one occasion I accidentally noticed my mother's gray hair, making me suddenly feel her ageing and realize that she is not as young as she was when I was a child.
So I wanted to use this project to explore how my memories of my mother have changed in different stages of my childhood and now. My mother loved perfume, so I wanted to use it as a way to recreate my memories of her.

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Design Process

1. Smell map: Visual translation of memory and space
Inspired by the artist Kate McLean's "smell map", the past and present activity paths of the mother at home are analyzed, and the sources of smell in memory (such as living room, kitchen, etc.) are marked with dots of different colors. The smell map of "home" is constructed through the diffusion of dots, and the color intensity corresponds to the smell concentration and memory depth, so as to achieve the equal presentation of time and space in visual language.

2. Spatial reconstruction: architectural form interpretation of smell flow
Taking the conceptual map "Summer Living Room" as the outline prototype, the indoor space is transformed into a "smell landscape" by using flowing curves, mirror light and shadow, water ripples and other elements. Breaking the square structure, simulating the fluidity of perfume memory through streamlined surfaces, making the architectural model bend and deform with the smell map, presenting the overlap and spatial penetration of smells at different times, echoing the current reality of reduced interaction with the mother and dotted distribution of smells.

3. Clothing fusion: time-space interweaving design of mother's style
Extract the change of mother's dressing style from fashionable professional women (small suits) to home state (pajamas), analyze her early dressing characteristics and integrate them into the design, transform the clothing language of different stages into design elements, and imply the memory clues of time and space in the clothing structure or details, so as to realize the visual narrative of the mother's identity transformation and personal growth.

4. Sensory translation: color and material experiment of odor chemistry
Based on the sensory differences of the acidic agent (fixing solution) mixed with floral fragrance in the darkroom of childhood and the alkaline detergent smell in adulthood, the red (acidic) and green (alkaline) of pH test paper are used as the color tone to simulate the logic of perfume blending, and the red, yellow and blue ratios are adjusted based on the white floral fragrance to show the change of odor attributes on the timeline. Alcohol pigments, leather, cotton and linen and quilted fabrics are selected to visualize the chemical characteristics and memory texture of the smell through the texture and rendering levels of the materials.

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