The Shape of Smell
Card game and smell notation · Society of Sensory Professionals, Louisville · October 2026
Role · Designer, artist
The Shape of Smell is a card game about smell and memory. It comes from a larger project: a notation for flavor, a way to write a smell down so that someone else can read it. I made the game for the opening keynote of the Society of Sensory Professionals annual gathering in Louisville, Kentucky, in October 2026.
Air is to us what water is to fish; smell is the interface through which we read it. Flavor holds worlds of information, and I keep expecting everyone to share my dream: that kids could learn to read it the way they learn letters, and that it could be easy.
The game is an example of how seeing and storytelling might make smell easier to learn. Each of the 800 handmade cards holds one of 50 scents in its own sleeve. Through the clear side you see a data drawing. This is the notation: shape, border, divisions and orientation each carry information about the smell. The black side hides a scent sticker, the smell’s name and the instructions. Pinch the sleeve and a waft escapes as a clue. The logo, a madeleine with a bite out of it, is a nod to Proust.
How to play: everyone gets two cards. First, try to work out your smell from the drawing, then look. Find a partner and, without naming the smell, tell them two memories of it, one true and one invented. From your stories, the drawing and a sniff when they ask “show me the smell,” your partner guesses the smell and the true memory. Then swap. That’s the simplest version.
The larger game is a hunt: find the others who have your smell, compose a new smell from several people’s cards, find your opposite, find an actual madeleine, find two different smells that share a shape, find a hidden glitch, visual or olfactory.
I made the first version of the game with what I had at hand: a home laser printer, a laptop on the floor and a cat who kept interrupting. Made fast and by hand, it had glitches in the printing, the handwriting, the symbols and the smells. Finding them became part of the game. That kept it fun, and about noticing and telling stories rather than being right.
Opening keynote, Society of Sensory Professionals Conference, Seelbach Hotel, Louisville, Kentucky, October 7, 2026.