The Expressive Power of Gestures: Capturing Scent in a Spatial Shape

Abstract

Our engagement with consumer products diminishes gradually over the last decades, which causes considerable usability problems. To dissolve these problems, the designer’s emphasis should shift from creating beautiful products in appearance to beautiful interactions with products. Consequently, the designer needs new tools like gestural sketching. To develop a gestural design tool, we tested the suitability of gestures to capture expressive ideas and the capability of outsiders to recognise this expression. Scents were used to make this expression measurable. Twenty-two creators made four dynamic sculptures expressing these scents. Half of those sculptures were made through gesturing and half through traditional sketching. Subjects were asked to match the scents and the sculptures. Results show that there is no significant difference between sketching and gesturing. Dependent on the scent, an interpreter was able to capture the expression when looking at the gestures. These findings support the potential of a gestural design tool.