Scentsory design: the emotional living tissue

This paper explores Scentsory Design: responsive fabrics that go beyond passive microencapsulated techniques through the inclusion of microfluidic scent delivery systems that sense and respond to psychological and environmental changes, in order to enhance human wellbeing, avoid skin allergies and prevent insect-borne diseases. Fashion is about displaying personal identity information. Scentsory Design is about creating a scent bubble around the user, enhancing the visual message of fashion with medical, sensory and psychological wellbeing. By adding aroma to the fashion domain, it is possible to create smart fabrics with radical, active properties, which support current colour and shape-changing electrotextile research. In this paper, the development of a collection of responsive brooches is described that dispense fragrances, triggered by sensors that react to an individual’s body state and the environment. The paper concludes by proposing fabric as an emotional living tissue that resembles human skin and the nervous system, offering social and therapeutic value in a desirable context, i.e. clothes that reduce anxiety and depression, prevent mosquito bites and replace the use of alcohol as a binder.

Publisher's text about this volume:

This volume contains the edited papers and posters presented at the second annual conference of the AHRC Research Centre for Textile Conservation and Textile Studies at Winchester, UK in 2005.
Modern materials, whether as art or everyday objects, are the basis of the contemporary material world. Accordingly objects encountered within museums and collections increasingly represent a broad spectrum of materials whose preservation may be without precedent. This conference was the first meeting to consider modern materials in the textile field as a subject in its own right. Topics range from familiar textile types, such as costume, to more unusual applications in suitcases, wall hangings, furniture and theatre scenery. Some papers prompt the reader to reconsider what makes a textile modern.

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