Your Nose Knows

Inspiration

Cities are full of sensors — traffic cameras, noise monitors, air quality stations — yet none of them capture what it actually feels like to move through urban space. Smell is the most emotionally potent of our senses, triggering memory, signaling danger, and marking place. We were inspired by the idea that the human nose is itself an underused civic instrument. If we could aggregate what people smell across a city, we'd have an entirely new layer of urban intelligence — one built from lived experience, not just infrastructure data.

What it does

Your Nose Knows is an olfactory sensing platform that lets residents log scent observations tied to location, intensity, and emotional memory. These entries aggregate into a living Urban Scent Map that visualizes smell as dynamic, weather-like patterns drifting across the city. The platform serves two functions: an environmental watchdog (detecting pollution clusters, infrastructure failures, and environmental inequity) and a cultural archive (documenting the smells that define neighborhood identity — street food, parks after rain, bakeries, seasonal traditions).

How we built it

We designed the full experience in Figma, building an interactive prototype with physics-based scent dispersion visualizations that model how smells drift and accumulate across space. The UI was built around a map-first interaction model where each scent entry ripples outward as a gradient, creating an evolving smellscape over time.

Challenges we ran into

Representing smell visually is inherently abstract. We spent significant time figuring out how to encode scent type, intensity, and emotional valence simultaneously without overwhelming the map. Translating the ephemeral and subjective nature of olfactory experience into a legible, data-driven interface was the core design tension we kept returning to throughout the build.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The scent dispersion visualization — modeling smell as atmospheric drift rather than static pins — felt like a genuine breakthrough for the concept. We're also proud of the civic postcard feature, where aggregated neighborhood scent reports can be exported and sent directly to city representatives, turning personal sensory data into collective advocacy.

What we learned

Designing for a non-visual sense forced us to be much more intentional about metaphor. We learned that smell data is inherently relational — a single observation means little, but patterns across dozens of reports reveal something real. We also learned that the emotional/memory layer isn't a nice-to-have; it's what makes people want to contribute data at all.

What's next for Your Nose Knows

We want to explore partnerships with city planning offices and environmental justice organizations to pilot the platform in neighborhoods with documented air quality concerns. On the product side, we're interested in adding temporal scent mapping (how a neighborhood smells at different times of day or across seasons) and integrating with existing open air quality datasets to cross-validate crowd-sourced observations.