Dr Kate McLean
She / hers
My work lies at the intersection of human-perceived smellscapes, cartography and the communication of ‘eye-invisible’ sensed data. I use a range of media including digital design, watercolour, animation, scent diffusion and sculpture to generate smell maps to encourage and stimulate people to consider smell. I map city smellscapes, lead smell walks and am currently working on the first 'Atlas of Scents, Smells & Stinks', commissioned by Orion Press, featuring smellmaps from Estonia to the Antarctic, Ecuador to Switzerland.
Sessions in which Dr Kate McLean attends
Wednesday 7 May, 2025
Room EV-11.705, Milieux Resource Room Bea Dieker (Frankfurt, Germany)Appealing or Disgusting? Atmospheres: The Most Powerful Game ChangersWhat makes an apartment, a city, an employer, or a means of transportation appealing or unappealing? Are the factors aesthetic, or are they social? Material or immaterial? And isn’t all of this highly subjective? When people wait together for the bus in the rain, we see how weather, architecture, and personal interact...
2026 will mark the 20th anniversary of the launch of The Senses and Society and coining of the term ‘sensory studies.’ Senses and Society was founded by Michael Bull and David Howes (who have alternated in the role of Managing Editor every 3-4 years) and Doug Kahn and Paul Gilroy. The term sensory studies was selected (over e.g. ‘sensography’) and used in the title of the inaugural article, ‘Introducing Sensory Studies,’ in order to serve as an umbrella term for the multiple sub...
Thursday 8 May, 2025
Tamás Solymosi √ & Daishi Wakizono (Heritage Studies, University of Tsukuba, Japan)Sensory Cartographies: Multisensory Mapping as a Tool for Understanding Urban SpacesThis paper introduces a methodological approach to interpreting urban distinctiveness through multi-sensory experiences, addressing the challenges in an era of increasing placelessness and global homogenisation. Our study investigates how distinct sensory experiences give rise to place-specific networks...
Organizer: Carsten Stabenow ∆This proposal is a data sensing and sonification approach focused on monitoring and comparing water qualities with a modular and lightweight field-kit. A sensor-data-input/CV-output module on Arduino base can monitor basic water quality parameters – pH-value, Total Dissolved Solids (TDS), Dissolved oxygen (DO), Oxidation-Reduction Potential (ORP) and temperature. The CV outputs can be patched to a VCLFO/VCO circuit and filter banks to generate an audio and ...
Emma Bruce ∆ (Sociology and Anthropology, Concordia University, Canada)"Mother palate (palette)" - Tasting Cultural IdentitiesI wish to propose my academic agenda as a burgeoning undergraduate student of culinary cultural studies. In establishing the multifaceted applications of sensory studies of food and eating as it is a prevalent area of research across all disciplines of the Arts and Sciences, I hope to contract attention to the insight individual sensory food percep...
Organizer: Akihisa Iwaki ∆ (Kindai University, Japan)Scented Acrylic Colors (https://camp-fire.jp/projects/777431/view) is a scented acrylic paint released at the end of 2024.This innovative product is a collaboration between @aroma’s "100% pure natural essential oils" and Holbein’s high-quality acrylic paints, Acrylic Color (Heavy Body). The project began with a meeting between Masaki Taniguchi (affectionately known as Maa-chan), a visually impaired painter, and scenting design...
Polina Dimova (Associate Professor of Russian at the University of Denver, Denver, Colorado, USA) ∆This keynote address investigates the aesthetic, cultural, and scientific discourses of synaesthesia that inspired the flourishing exchanges among the modern arts. It offers twenty theses on synaesthesia to trace the controversies surrounding the phenomenon: from the cooperation of the nineteenth-century arts and sciences in attempting to define synaesthesia to the present rift between th...
Scott McMaster (Art, Design, and Media, Sunway University, Malaysia)Sensory Field Research in Art & DesignThis presentation explores how sensory field research enhances design thinking and perception of urban spaces, drawing from fieldwork conducted in Hong Kong's Mong Kok and Busan’s Seomyeon. Initially conceived as a pedagogical tool in a visual arts research methods course, a sensory scavenger hunt in Mong Kok prompted graduate students to engage with their environ...
Innovobot Labs is an innovation Design House, dedicated to tackling real-world problems through the development and application of cutting-edge technologies. Innovobot’s mission is to foster innovation across industries for the benefit of society. This event is of particular relevance to those interested in the development of haptic technologies. Places are limited. Pre-registration is required.Here is the link to register fo...
Friday 9 May, 2025
Organizers: Nina Morris ∆ (School of GeoSciences, University of Edinburgh, Scotland) and Kate McLean-MacKenzie ∆ (University of Kent, UK)Plenary Participant Discussion: ‘Smell of Morning’What does the early morning smell like outdoors in the city? Is Montreal different from other locations around the world? Why does this time of day smell the way it does? How does it make us feel? In this plenary session, we will use a range of methods to interrogate and discuss ‘the smell o...
Organizer: Jayanthan Sriram ∆ (Centre for Sensory Studies, Concordia University, Canada)How do you experience light and sound in accordance to smell? If you think this question is asked backwards, with smell having to follow your sense of sound and light, you are in for a treat. Born out of a collaboration with the ITHQ (Institut de tourisme et d'hôtellerie du Québec) and ExperiSens, Modal Olfactory Atmosphere finds its second iteration as an interactive and collaborative workshop. W...
Sundar Sarukkai∆ (Public Intellectual, Founder of Barefoot Philosophers, India)The mystery of the senses is as much in the 'objects' of sensation as in their mechanism. A theory of the senses influences a theory of objects. The sense organs do not perceive the objects per se but only qualities. If this is the case, how can we understand the long held suspicion towards collective and social ontology? In this talk, I will explore some ideas on the ontology of the social and relate it to ...
Organizers: Tim Horvath ∆ with Matthew Kirtkpatrick ∆ (Warren Wilson MFA Program in Writing/Phillips Exeter English Department, Stratham, USA)In this creative writing workshop, the leaders–writers whose recent projects push the boundaries of how language can be used to describe and evoke the non–visual (sound, scent, and texture)--will share writing activities designed to guide participants into fresh linguistic and conceptual zones. After reading from their own work, workshop leaders ...
Constance Classen ∆ (Centre for Sensory Studies, Concordia University, Canada)Green Museums: Narratives of Nature in English MuseumsIn recent years, growing attention has been paid to the interconnections between environmental issues and museums in England. Initially, much of this attention came from groups protesting the links between certain museums and the fossil fuel industry, most notably, the British Museum’s sponsorship by British Petroleum. The ‘Green Museums’ mov...
Saturday 10 May, 2025
Saadia Mirza∆ (Social Sciences Fellow, University of Chicago, USA)The Liminality of Sensing Environmental perception entails techniques of hearing, seeing and sensing unresolved natural processes in infinite variations of time and space. These techniques also reveal aesthetic and political imperatives that shape the discovery, imagination, and exploration of the natural world. How does someone listen to an 11,000-year old glacier? Or visualize the morphology of a...
Véronique Servais & Magali Ollagnier-Beldame (Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Liege, Belgium)Sensory Conversation with a Forest. Experiencing the Forest as Umwelt.The paper will present the results of a research that aims to document how ordinary people engage in the process of sensory meaning making with a forest environment. The encounter with the forest from which the data were collected took place during a 2 hours’ workshop under the guidance of a drama te...