The need to relieve myself has compelled me to visit the little boy’s room whilst at work within the past few weeks on a number of occasions. This isn’t usually a problem (except for the on-going maintainence at work which forces me to circum-navigate Bath to get there), but today as i walked into the gentlemens toilets i realised something was quite different about them. The smell was different.
That’s right, the smell. Normally, upon walking into the gents i would expect to be greeted by the very odours which would usually greet me. I’m not going to state what the obvious smells might be but occasionally you might come accross those cheap fragrences which pollute the nasal passage, or chlorine in the urinals, maybe a little soap or fresh toilet roll, and even a miniscule dilution of men’s fragrance. Today was different though, the gents toilets smelt like sweets. It really did smell as though a fully fledged sweety shop had been hidden amongst the access panels and storage cupboards!
This led me into thinking. However unpleasant a smell might be in certain situations, it can be strange when that smell is no longer there. Can the same be said for other things which we might expect? If the colours green and red were exchanged (green for stop, and red for go) it could seem a little weird. If glass windows were exchanged for blocks of concrete and the walls of a house were made of glass might seem strange too. What about walking into a pub and finding no bar, or a shop without a checkout?
I think that whilst living we come to expect certain things from our environment, and when they are not present, however refreshing the change might be, it can sometimes take us by surprise. People from all cultures have come to expect a certain way of doing things. Working within what is expected when designing can have it’s advantages but may limit further possibilities. The same could go for ignoring what may be a status quo, and the introduction of something completely unfamiliar could backfire completely.
Innovation and novelty tread on a very fine line when it comes to established products. One which comes to mind is the Dyson vacuum cleaner. James Dyson actually offered to sell the product to other vacuum cleaner manufacturers including Hoover before taking his own initiative and going it alone. The product did tread a fine line between innovation and novelty, but there could have been some other influencing factors.
Colours, Forms, Smells, Sights, Appearances, Sounds, and all of the other sense occupying ingredients of life are all fixed within their place in society. Sweet shops smell of sweets, grass is green, the sky is blue, toilets usually smell of a cross between toilet smells and cheap fragrance attempting to hide the smell. So when things are mixed around, it proves for some interesting concepts.
