Smell Map

OBJECTIVE: To map the dominant smells across the city. (Reference: Bob Krauss "A whiff of our town: It can be ugly." The Honolulu Advertiser, Sunday, 8 October 1995.)

INSTRUCTIONS: Your olfactory sense is both sensitive and personal, and the smells we encounter contribute to our experience of places. Here, you are asked to notice the smells as you travel around the city and to map them.

• Pick a page (from 1 to 16) in Bryan's Section Maps to use as your study area.
• Go to the study area and systematically note the dominant scent(s) in each map cell [A1 .. F4] to which you can gain access. You may choose to subdivide cells if you want a finer resolution.
• Note the locations of any "point sources" of these scents.
• Note the times of day as you progress.
• Prepare your report as below.

THE REPORT: The main part of this is your map. It should be at the scale of Bryan's maps, have a legend of smells and, needs to show the dominant scents over the study area and any "point sources" within it.

The map should be accompanied by a one page report with:
• your name, the class, and the observation assignment title in the upper right hand corner of the page.
• A title indicating where your scent survey was conducted.
• A paragraph describing the general location (urban, residential, valley, ridge, etc.) and the scent background.
• A paragraph characterizing and describing the scents and perhaps commenting on any difficulty in naming, identifying, recognizing, or localizing them. If you can, try to quantify the percentage of area in each scent category.
• A summary paragraph wrapping up what you found.