episode 24 (interview with Dr. Tracey Lauriault)

This is the second of three specially curated episodes, produced in association with Urban Imaginaries project, a collaboration between Carleton University’s Industrial Design Program and Communication and Media Studies Program. The project will run through the spring and will consist of a series of in-person events held in association with Ottawa coffee house Arlington 5.

In this episode, I spoke with Dr. Tracey Lauriault of the Communication and Media Studies program at Carleton University. Dr. Lauriault is trained as a geographer, and among her many research interests is scent cartographies. So we took this opportunity to discuss the sense of smell and how we use it as a means of engaging with the world around us. What might we learn about the city on the basis of how it smells? And is smell a modality that could be useful in the context of urban design?