I’ll probably never shake the smell of sewers.

For the launch of the movie IT 2, Kinepolis cinemas in Belgium organised an IT2 experience tour of the Antwerp sewers. Think big sewers with clowns, balloons and creepy noises. Obviously, I couldn’t resist 🙂

While the experience itself was interesting, the more interesting part was the extreme impact of smell. We were in a relatively clean part of the sewers, and still the odour was beyond anything I can describe.

Think about the smell you get in the house when something is afoul with the sewage system in your street. Then multiply this by twenty or thirty. In fact, the smell was so strong that it distracted me from the rest of the experience.

But what was most remarkable, was that when we were watching the movie in the theatre, the smell returned. Not because the theatre airconditioning had broken down, but because my brain reproduced it the moment the actors started walking in the sewers of their village. Sewers, which looked remarkably like the ones I had visited before.

Even if I look at pictures of similar sewers today, the smell still lingers in my mind.

EXPERIENCE DESIGN LESSON LEARNED

Smells can trigger thoughts, emotions and experiences from the past. But it also works the other way around. If you expose people to a strong odour for a period of time and then reproduce the visual environment, the memory of that smell can return.

© 2019, Alain Thys — All rights reserved