Jenny Tillotson PhD RCA FloN is an artist and designer. She is a Research Fellow at Central St Martins (UAL) and Fellow of Nanotechnology with a BA in Fashion Communication and PhD in Textiles from the Royal College of Art.
Jenny challenged many of our preconceptions about the roles of clothing and fragrance and presented the revolutionary ideas of her company, Scentsory Design. Jenny creates “responsive clothing” that goes one step beyond current microencapsulated techniques. The “Smart Second Skin” is a conceptual dress which illustrates Jenny’s research using the microfluidics technology she has developed. Scent and liquid colour are pulsed through fibres, creating a micro-fluidic fabric. A membrane of micro-tubes is fused together with microelectronics and yarns embedded in clothing elements. The “wellbeing” scent delivery system adds function to fashion and textile design. Tubes criss-cross and mix in-built fragrance capsules from multi-lumen threads, providing scents that can be healing, protective, or seductive.
A primary motivation of Scentsory Design was to link fashion, fragrance and textiles through cutting edge technology. Sensors can measure emotion, and when built into clothing, a dress can release scent depending on how the wearer is feeling. But the amounts released are tiny and only perceivable by the wearer. The scent can therefore perform a therapeutic function, or it could if desired have an insecticide action, and it can add personal value to fashion.
The “Smart Second Skin”creates a personal “scent bubble”: it “senses the emotion” of the user and reacts to the situation through smell; it maintains a separate olfactory identity, and it enhances the visual message of fashion with medical, sensory, and psychological “wellbeing”. By measuring facial muscle movements, brain wave intensity, temperature, heart rate and blood pressure scent can be emitted that can influence behaviour, learning and mood. Wellbeing can be delivered in a new way, as a protective, e.g. insect repellent, analgesic, healing (e.g. lavender), seductive, e.g.pheromones, and informative, e.g. signal to take action, like to buy shoes!
Another area that Scentsory Design is exploring is digital technology. Current “digital fragrance technology” on the market (i.e. scent delivery for computer games, websites for online scents, CD player, virtual reality, and environmental fragrancing in kiosks and marketing) is currently too large to embed in fashion items / textiles. Scentsory Design “digital fragrance technology”, which works on the nano-scale, will be able to accompany other media to augment an experience, e.g. by triggering fear, excitement, and other emotions.
The idea is to use a liquid delivery system to dispense nano droplets of scent, controlled by a microchip and activated as a spray by a remote sensor. Jenny Tillotson is collaborating on this technology with the Institute of Analytical Sciences in Dortmund. The technology is based on the squirting chamber of bombardier beetles: a high-pressure jet of boiling liquid is pulsed from their tails. In the same way nano size droplets must be pulsed and targeted to the user’s receptors. In this way, use is focussed on intimate and personal use and not on high-volume, invasive use.
Other applications could be: “Scent-on-a-chip”, e.g. a capsule of fragrance that is digitally controlled as part of a handbag or shoulder bag; “Scent by a Wireless Web”: a brooch or telephone (personalised scent ring tones) where there are 2 users and 1 reacts to the other, e.g. a spider and beetle; Scent chimes: tell the time by different scents; electronic chips in wallpaper (“Wellpaper”) can respond to users’ emotional or physical needs or provide a perfume-free zone against aggressive molecules and odour annoyance; scented doorbells offer security for the sensory impaired; pheromonal passport control where an electronic nose uses scent recognition: this area is being explored with the armed forces.
What are the benefits of Jenny’s futuristic ideas? Today, sprays
scent the skin to contribute to wellbeing and enhance personality and identity.
Tomorrow, Jenny’s “Smart Second Skin” and other concepts will be
kinder to skin, can pulse scent away from the body, while having an impact
on mental health by reducing depression and stress. Jenny is aiming
for 2012 as a realistic target for production.
Ruth Mastenbroek
The "Smart Second Skin" website: http://www.smartsecondskin.com/main/home.htm
This report is the writer's interpretation of the event. It is not intended as a verbatim account and should not be read as such.