Identity Stories
Brief
Chronicle of a life of everyday Indians and their journey - showing how their identities and culture emerge through inclusion rather than exclusion.
Design Process
In-depth interviews
Mapping olfactory interactions to individual locations and an overarching narrative
Audio Narrative exploring identity of contemporary indians that emerge with mobility and migration
Interaction Design
Lasercutting
Manufacturing Scent Dispenser, Microcontroller and Sensor Programming
Key Insights & Value
This interactive biographical installation explains the stories of its two protagonists through mapping their experience into scents. It talks about how new identities emerge with mobility and new distinct patterns that are created, It is a dialog of identities in today’s globalized world where we hold more than one, articulated in smell and voice of the protagonist. It further lets the audience experience a culture and its distinct smells and interact with it, making sense of that culture through real people’s stories.
Research
We took 2 stories representing different journeys of life spanning different cities and countries. The criteria for the selection of the subject was that they should have spent significant periods of time at different places. Research was done to understand how movement/ migration affected subject’s world view. Their backgrounds were as follows:
One was born in a small village and then had to live in various cities. She currently lives in Hyderabad
The other was born in a metro city, Kolkata, and spent significant amounts of time in different countries but calls Bengaluru, a city which is different from his birth city as his home.
Long interviews were conducted through many sessions before the stories were formed and identified. We also went to the (Supreethi, and Vivek) places mentioned by them to understand the environment and culture of those places and how their world-views were formed. We also collected several scent samples of their memory associations.
Both the protagonists, in their respective biographies, went deep in their stories and often came back after their sessions to add more. After some episodes were coded, they chose the episodes they felt strongly as their stories.
Design
Supreethi’s Story
Vivek Shah’s Story
Installation
