The Shape of Smell

The Shape of Smell is a card game about smell and memory, and the first thing built on a notation I am developing for flavor. I made it for my opening keynote at the Society of Sensory Professionals in Louisville: a room of about four hundred people who measure taste and smell for a living, most of whom did not know me.

Every person got two cards, made by hand. One side carries a scratch-and-sniff sticker and the name of the smell. The other carries the smell written down: a shape for how the thing came to be (square for raw, diamond for transformed, oval for fermenting), sections for the smell families that lead it, and the family names in my handwriting. Fifty smells, from Campfire and Cut grass to Bubblegum and Barbecue smoke. I printed the labels at home, stuck every card, and added every sticker.

The game is a bluff. You tell a stranger one true memory of the smell on your card and one invented one, without naming it. They guess the real memory and the smell, from your stories, the symbol, and a sniff if they ask. Four conversations, two of them with people you have just walked over to meet. For the rest of the week, a hunt: find the others who hold your smell, compose a new smell from strangers' cards, find your opposite, find two smells that share a shape, and find the glitches I left in, all sent in by phone to a live gallery.

In the first two days people sent in 41 finds. They found each other by smell, sorted cards by shape, and caught real mistakes: a sticker on the wrong card, a print that slipped, a symbol they read as an error. The finds I learned most from were the blends. People reasoned with the family words the way a sensory panel does — one pair “enhances the earthy and green note that they both share”, another makes “a more animalic profile” — and some turned a pair of smells straight into a product. Asked whether the game should be made for sale, nine of eleven people said yes, two maybe, none no.

Card stock, home-printed labels, scratch-and-sniff stickers, hand-drawn glyphs. Two cards per attendee; fifty smells; seventeen smell families.