Odeuropa x Museum Ulm x IFF | Launched April 2022 – Present
During my three years as the olfactory events manager for Odeuropa, I led the development of multiple projects. One of those was Follow Your Nose! A Guided Tour with Smells, an olfactory guided tour developed in collaboration with Museum Ulm (Germany) and perfumers at International Flavours & Fragrances (IFF). The project was launched in April 2022 and the project aimed to integrate historically inspired scents with visual artworks, creating a deeper, more emotionally resonant visitor experience.
Concept & Goals
The tour paired eight selected artworks from Museum Ulm’s permanent collection with eleven custom-developed scents, crafted to reflect the historical, cultural, and emotional contexts of each piece. The result was an innovative, research-informed experience that invited visitors not just to look at art—but to smell it too!
- Some of the historic scent themes included sacred rituals, decay, domestic life, and personal hygiene.
- Odeuropa and Museum Ulm joined forces to come up with 10 different artworks to interpret with scents. Some scents were actually deliberately unpleasant, communicating scents that represent concepts like Hell and rotten food.
You can read about two of the olfactory narratives featured in the tour here.
Impact
Over the course of 18 months, the “Follow Your Nose” tour hosted:
- 64 guided sessions,
- 1,022 total visitors, including 366 schoolchildren,
- Strong engagement across age groups, with particular educational value for younger audiences.
Scent Delivery & Innovations
We trained the tour guides to use three distinct methods of scent distribution techniques:
- Hand-sprayed fans for low-tech interaction that can reach a broad audience.
- “Whispi” dry air diffusion devices for quick, localized delivery that can be reused.
- Scented blotters for controlled and individual sampling.
Fun fact: Surprisingly, malodorous scents—often assumed to be off-putting—were well-received!
Legacy & Future Development
The Follow Your Nose tours became a flagship case study for Odeuropa’s broader goal of integrating scent into heritage experiences. It directly informed the creation of the Olfactory Storytelling Toolkit, which is an open-access resource designed to help museums, educators, and curators design scent-enhanced experiences grounded in historical research. To learn more about how these tours were produced, you can read the case study written by art historian Lizzie Marx.
What did we Learn?
- The tours demonstrated that olfactory storytelling enhances visitor empathy, memory, and engagement with historical content.
- The tours offered a perfect case study to document, research and test methods of olfactory storytelling in the museum.
- The tours proved that scent is powerful and wanted in museum galleries – even the unpleasant ones—as they provoke reflection and deepen understanding of the past.
- Would you like to design your own olfactory guided tour? Checkout Odeuropa’s Guidelines for Conducting Olfactory Guided Tours.
Due to Museum Ulm’s temporary closure for renovation (2023–2025), the exhibition has transitioned to Kunsthalle Weishaupt, where it continues to evolve in a new setting.
