The Scent of Collaboration: Exploring the Effect of Smell on Social Interactions

Conference paper

Siddharth Mehrotra, Anke Brocker, Marianna Obrist, Jan Borchers
CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems Extended Abstracts (CHI ’22 Extended Abstracts), ACM, New York, NY, USA, 2022

DOI: 10. 1145/3491101.3519632

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APA Click to copy
Mehrotra, S., Brocker, A., Obrist, M., & Borchers, J. (2022). The Scent of Collaboration: Exploring the Effect of Smell on Social Interactions. In CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems Extended Abstracts (CHI ’22 Extended Abstracts). ACM, New York, NY, USA. https://doi.org/10. 1145/3491101.3519632

Chicago/Turabian Click to copy
Mehrotra, Siddharth, Anke Brocker, Marianna Obrist, and Jan Borchers. “The Scent of Collaboration: Exploring the Effect of Smell on Social Interactions.” In CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems Extended Abstracts (CHI ’22 Extended Abstracts). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 2022.

MLA Click to copy
Mehrotra, Siddharth, et al. “The Scent of Collaboration: Exploring the Effect of Smell on Social Interactions.” CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems Extended Abstracts (CHI ’22 Extended Abstracts), ACM, New York, NY, USA, 2022, doi:10. 1145/3491101.3519632.

BibTeX Click to copy

@inproceedings{siddharth2022a,
  title = {The Scent of Collaboration: Exploring the Effect of Smell on Social Interactions},
  year = {2022},
  publisher = {ACM, New York, NY, USA},
  doi = {10. 1145/3491101.3519632},
  author = {Mehrotra, Siddharth and Brocker, Anke and Obrist, Marianna and Borchers, Jan},
  booktitle = {CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems Extended Abstracts (CHI ’22 Extended Abstracts)}
}

Social interactions are multisensory experiences. However, it is not well understood how technology-mediated smell can support social interactions, especially in collaborative tasks. To explore its effect on collaboration, we asked eleven pairs of users to work together on a writing task while wearing an interactive jewellery designed to emit scent in a controlled fashion. In a within-subjects experiment, participants were asked to collaboratively write a story about a standardized visual stimulus while exposed to with scent and without scent conditions. We analyzed video recordings and written stories using a combination of methods from HCI, psychology, sociology, and human communication research. We observed differences in both participants' communication and creation of insightful stories in the with scent condition. Furthermore, scent helped participants recover from communi-cation breakdown even though they were unaware of it. We discuss the possible implications of our findings and the potential of technology-mediated scent for collaborative activities.