The smell of plants, flowers, and soil captured the attention of various attendees who walked by the Smell Studio’s table at the Philadelphia Flower Show on March 3, from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. The flower show was at the Pennsylvania Convention Center and will continue until March 10.
The event, known as the nation’s largest and world’s longest-running horticulture show, attracts around 250,000 attendees from across the world. Rowan University got to table at this event thanks to the Smell Studio’s work. The Smell Studio, which is a team of students with backgrounds in graphic design, geography, environmental science, and fine art worked together to create a creative and visual graphic of the scents.
The project which is known as The Smell of Spring, is an art project dedicated to showing the smells of spring. This interactive project was displayed at the flower show, where multiple people stopped by and took a look at the informational graphic. The scents that the team used were from endangered plants native to the Delaware Valley region that have lost their habitat and also decreased due to global warming.
The Smell Studio also collaborated with the Monell Chemical Senses Center to strengthen the message of conservation and preservation of the scents of spring. The center focuses on research of taste and smell and how testing for the two can be adopted into routine healthcare.
Ahmed Barakati, the communications coordinator for the Monell Chemical Senses Center states how the center is trying to make cities understand why the push for smell and taste testing is important for everyone who visits the doctor.
“These are experiences that are not really highlighted often. It’s not because it’s not as common as for example blindness or deafness,” said Barakati. “But it’s very dangerous. You can never really smell when there is a fire or there’s a gas leak. It’s very isolating.”
He also highlights how there are lots of efforts in different research groups to push states like Florida and Ohio to have routine smell testing, but the problem lies in whether they have the tools to conduct these tests.
It first starts with appreciating the sense of smell one has and as spring looms closer, there are a lot of scents, one may not realize they are smelling. In order to bring awareness to these smells, students from the Smell Studio participated in the creation of the Smell of Spring Wheel. Jill Taylor, one of the students, introduced attendees to the wheel and allowed them to spin it.
“Whatever they land on, we give them a card that art majors worked on and design that has fun facts, or whatever they land on and then we let them smell it with some of the scents that the Monell center whipped up for us,” said Taylor.
The class that is run by Dr. Jennifer Kitson, an associate professor in the department of geography, planning & sustainability, worked with students from art to environmental science majors to bring awareness of these aromatic plants that are going extinct, by working with the Monell Center.
The popularity of this event is important because as more people stopped by their table, more people learned a little more about the importance of the sense of smell. This brings Rowan University students working in these departments, opportunities to connect with members of the Philadelphia community who possibly did not know that these plants were going extinct.
“We’re using creative methods for engaging a public audience and about their sense of smell. A lot of people don’t connect at a flower show like you know, they don’t want to stop and learn about science,” said Dr. Kitson. “They’re here to have a sensory experience and so we’re kind of like helping teach people about the science of smell, but we’re doing so through visual arts and olfactory.”
The table also featured art students who created flower stencils where attendees had to really connect with their sense of smell to write down what they believe the season of spring smells like after it would be posted on a board for all to see.
The Philadelphia Flower Show gave an opportunity for dozens of vendors to showcase their products, from plants, candles, raw honey, and clothes, to gardening tools. Selected artists also created floral displays that were displayed at the show which some attendees used as photo opportunities. Galleries of floral `store windows’ and small rooms with different plants created by schools across the area, were displayed and judged by the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society, which hosts the Philadelphia Flower Show.
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