Our perception of product quality has a great deal to do with the senses. Not only do we not want our products to be ugly, but we would like them to feel good, sound good, taste good, and smell good. Sight is our dominant sense, and we have a fair vocabulary to describe our visual images. We also have a good ability to work with visual images —look at the controls and tools on Photoshop. But the information we get from our other senses is a bit more difficult to work with. As an example, consider smell, an extremely important sense, in that it quickly summons up positive and negative reactions and is a strong memory stimulus. If you smell a turkey being cooked, for instance, it might remind you of last thanksgiving. The first exciting car I ever owned was a 1956 Austin Healy, which I acquired when I was a young and unfettered Air Force Officer. I loved it greatly. It had leather seats, and among its small problems (Lucas electrical system) it leaked oil.
I usually have owned a British sports car since then. I presently have a 1970 E-Jag sitting in my garage (Lucas electrical system again). When I sit in it, I smell leaking oil and leather seats, and it takes me right back to my Austin Healey and Air Force days. Sometimes, if depressed, I go sit in my Jaguar. It will, incidentally, be running by summer, although I must admit I said that last winter.
But most of us are much less equipped to deal with smell in the design of products. In the case of food products, perfumes, and others where smell is a strong selling point, we are better. Not only have the components that provide odors been carefully analyzed, but such businesses have access to "experts" who have trained their sense of smell, and a vocabulary to describe various odors. If you have taken a wine course, you have taken the first step in such training. But the rest of us are short on both vocabulary and knowledge of the mechanics. Can you describe the smell of a pineapple in words? Do you know the chemicals you would mix together to attain that smell? How about the smell of oil and leather? People have worked on such problems. Used car dealers have spray cans of new car scent that they apply during detailing. Real estate agents know that baking cookies in the oven before showing the house helps sell it. But as far as I know, there are no squirt cans of cookie smell.
We are not even clear on the mechanics of smell. We know about lenses, retinas, the mechanics of the pupil and the iris. We know the location of the optic nerve and the area of the brain that turns impulses to images. But what happens in smell? If we smell dog poop, do dog poop molecules enter our nose? If so, what happens then? Are there specialized dog poop receptors, and if so, where does the signal go in the brain and what does the brain with it? And our reactions vary among individuals. I love to smell ground beef being cooked in the kitchen. It reminds me of hamburgers, which I love, and picnics. My wife doesn’t like to smell it. It reminds her of unhealthy food and greasy deposits on the wall.
But even through the process of our sense of smell may be somewhat mysteriousto us, we at least should be very careful that our products do not emit odors that are inconsistent with their nature, and offensive to us.
The students in the Stanford Good Products, Bad Products course read from Diane Ackerman’s book The Natural History of the Senses. The link to its Amazon page is in the recommended book list on the right of the page. It is a wonderfully written book that uses the English Language to describe the workings of, and effects of the senses. I recommend it to all. Writers must attempt to convey the results of sensory input to readers in words. The rest of us have not had much practice in that. We can measure the stimulus better than work with the response.
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