in class/at home
I am REALLY sensitive to smell, and sometimes if a smell is too strong it makes me feel ill. Ocean smell in particular has always been very unpleasant for me. This is a map of where I felt most ill at the beach. I realized the algae smell made me more ill than the seawater, which was bad too but a lot milder.
Then we walked past this playground and I remembered this fire truck.
The first time I saw the pacific ocean was when my family visited this same beach on a trip to Vancouver over ten years ago. I went swimming in the ocean and choked on the seawater because I can’t swim, and threw up. Then I went looking for seashells and found a really big one. I picked it up to show my sister. It grew legs. It was not a seashell.
It was a crab.
I threw it into the water and started crying.
A few years before that my mom accidentally served me the head of the fish at dinner. I hadn’t yet made the connection that fish the animal and fish the food were the same thing. Its eye was staring at me. I cried. I don’t eat seafood anymore, anything fishy grosses me out.
The conclusion I’ve come to is that smell is something that can be very personal. I had a bit of a tough time with this portion of the site visit, and I was surprised to see that nobody else was grossed out. I hadn’t realized that ocean smell is something that a lot of people enjoy? My experience of this particular smell is shaped not only by my biological reaction to it, but also by some of my earliest memories, and everyone else in the world experiences the same smell differently for a variety of equally valid reasons. Definitely something to be mindful of when designing.