The IAO presents a repeating design challenge, open to all perfumers and creative practitioners with scent who want to flex their creative muscles in a friendly and constructive environment.
ABOUT
This program is led by Minetta Rogers.
Inspired by the “design charrettes” of art schools (or by ‘Iron Chef’ for TV lovers), the IAO Perfume Design Challenge is a hands-on timed challenge, intended to jumpstart a creative process and teach students quick design problem-solving with a limited olfactory palette. The program is intended to allow participants to learn how to respond to design briefs of all varieties, while experimenting with aromatic materials and creative briefs.
After blending, participants will present their fragrance and thought process in composing their scent to the group. The completed scents and design inspiration will be on display at the IAO for the weeks following each session.
By participating in the design challenge program, participants agree to share their work under a Creative Commons Public Domain Mark 1.0 license. This license means that the work will be identified as being free of known restrictions under copyright law, including all related and neighboring rights. People can copy, modify, distribute and perform the work, even for commercial purposes, all without asking permission. We will be tracking the formulas here (opens Google Spreadsheet).
Part of the ongoing Open Sourcing Smell Culture program.
UPCOMING SESSIONS
To be announced
2019 SESSIONS
Session: November 15
Theme: Hip Hop + Music Creation
This November, The Institute for Art and Olfaction’s Perfume Design Challenge explores music creation. Learn about secrets of the studio from hip hop musician VéFROMLA and create your own scent interpretation of one of his songs.
Session: August, 2019
Theme: Rock + Hedonism
This August, the IAO’s Perfume Design Challenge explores the scents of glam metal. Learn about the music scene on the LA Sunset Strip in the 1980s and create your own scent interpretation. Big hair, big egos, big smells.
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Session: July, 2019
Theme: Collage
PDC returns, inviting participants to explore possible relationships between scent-making and collage. The ways that the midcentury “American Dream” has been used in marketing will serve as an inspiration and touch-point. This PDC is in collaboration with visual artist Alexa Gilweit, and was followed up with a gallery show juxtaposing Gilweit’s collage work with the scents composed.
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Session: May, 2019
Theme: Camp, Kitsch and Other Questions of Taste
Explore the concepts of camp, kitsch and questions of taste in the perfume world while playing with some of the most simultaneously beloved and dismissed aromatic molecules in perfumery. This design challenge is – naturally – inspired by the Met Gala.
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Session: April, 2019
Theme: Scent and Poetry with Anne Boyer
Scent and poetry both can be abstract, provocative, challenging, vital. This April, Minetta Rogers invites you to respond to Anne Boyer’s poem of survival, “What Resembles the Grave But Isn’t.”
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Session: February 11, 2019
Theme: Film Noir
The IAO presents a repeating design challenge, open to all perfumers and creative practitioners with scent who want to flex their creative muscles in a friendly and constructive environment. This month – inspired by love gone very very wrong – we invite you to blend your own scents with a curated fragrance palette inspired by Film Noir.
2018 SESSIONS
Session: December 13, 2018
Theme: Blue
Blend your own scent interpretation of the color blue with a curated fragrance palette. During this session, you’ll learn about color theory, smell unusual aromatic materials, and share your formulas with the world through our Open Sourcing Smell Culture program. The design brief for the third Perfume Design Challenge comes from American writer and teacher Andrew Spear’s manuscript “On Seeing Blue.”
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Session: October 21, 2018
Theme: Possession at Loudun
On a fall morning in a small town in 17th century France, nuns found a bouquet of roses on their dormitory steps. What followed next? Demonic possession, mass exorcisms, witchcraft trials, death by pyre. The historic events of the possession at Loudun inspire the second Perfume Design Challenge.
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Session: September 17, 2018
Theme: P-22
Scottish fiction writer Helen McClory won the 2015’s Saltire First Book of the Year Award. Commissioned as part of a series about impossible perfumes by Minetta Rogers, her short written piece about mountain lion P-22 inspires the first Perfume Design Charette challenge. Formulas will be saved and shared as part of our Open Sourcing Smell Culture initiative.
THE PROGRAM
This program is intended to provide an opportunity for intermediate blenders to experiment and workshop ideas together while learning about aromatic materials as well as their design idiosyncracies. Design briefs / challenges may range from visual works of art, pieces of music, short fiction, poetry.
Design challenge ideas may be submitted to minetta@artandolfaction.com