Kate McLean: Art and Research That Gather City Smells and Translate Them Into Words, Colors and Maps

“Strong smells and unpleasant smells are different.”
— Kate McLean

The sweet smell of waffles, old books wafting from a basement doorway, the scent of laundry drifting into the street. As we walk through a city, clues other than the buildings we see pass before our noses. Kate McLean is an artist, designer and researcher who gathers these invisible experiences, puts them into words and translates them into maps.

Her “smell maps” are not intended to sum up a city in a single scent. Who sensed what, when and where? Her work changes how we ordinarily read a city while preserving those differences. It begins with a smellwalk: a walk that directs attention toward smells.

Key Information
From Graphic Design to Recording Smells
1. Encountering a Hard-to-Record Sense in Edinburgh
2. Connections Between Place and Memory Gathered in the 2010 Paris Work
Gathering Experiences of Smell Through Smellwalks
1. Receiving Airborne Smells, Approaching Their Sources and Comparing Examples of the Same Kind
2. Recording the Name of a Smell Separately From Its Perceived Intensity
Amsterdam: Translating Words Into Colors and Outlines
Singapore and Kyiv: Restoring Time to Smell
1. Superimposing Morning and Evening Along the Same Route
2. Animating Seven People’s Experiences: The 2016 Kyiv Work
From Mapmaking to Research and Writing
Expanding Our Vocabulary of Scent in the City
References

Key Information

Name: Kate McLean
Practice: Creating smell maps, leading smellwalks, and designing and researching sensory information
Project name and official website: Sensory Maps
Degree: PhD from the Royal College of Art, UK. Her 2019 doctoral thesis is titled “Nose-first: practices of smellwalking and smellscape mapping.”

The 2026 Cityscape Global speaker profile lists her as the founder of Sensory Maps under the name Kate McLean-MacKenzie. Throughout this article, we use Kate McLean, the name widely used for her artworks and publications.

From Graphic Design to Recording Smells

Encountering a Hard-to-Record Sense in Edinburgh

McLean began working on smell maps while studying for a master’s degree in graphic design at Edinburgh College of Art. She set out to map a city’s tastes, textures, sights and smells separately. Smell proved particularly difficult to record, and that difficulty became the focus of her investigation.

Roads and buildings can be outlined and located. Smells, however, change from the moment we sense them, and their source is not necessarily visible. Memories and personal likes and dislikes also enter the picture. McLean’s work developed toward finding ways to communicate these fluctuations to other people without discarding them.

Connections Between Place and Memory Gathered in the 2010 Paris Work

Her early Paris work was created in 2010. McLean asked residents and former residents a question about the city where she had once lived for two years.

“What smell reminds you of Paris?”
— Kate McLean

The answers revealed relationships between individuals and the city that could not be explained through buildings or food alone. One woman, for example, chose perfume, explaining that when she left the city she would take Yves Saint Laurent’s “Paris” with her as a reminder of home. McLean exhibited bottles containing smells alongside a map, allowing visitors to leave their associations on sticky notes.

Not everyone remembers the same place when smelling the same thing. She went on to rework the brief descriptions gathered at the exhibition into a digital form. As well as locating smells, the map became a receptacle for memories that transported people from a smell to another place.

McLean is not interested in choosing a city’s representative smell by majority vote. Her words from 2013 convey that focus well.

“What really interests me is the stories and emotional connections people have when they describe smells.”
— Kate McLean

Gathering Experiences of Smell Through Smellwalks

Receiving Airborne Smells, Approaching Their Sources and Comparing Examples of the Same Kind

McLean’s publicly available “Smellfie Kit 2020” divides the act of smelling a city into three approaches. The first is Smell Catching: walking at a steady pace and receiving smells carried through the air to the nose. Next comes Smell Hunting: approaching and investigating places or objects likely to have a smell. In Smell Research, participants choose a single category, such as leaves or shop doorways, and compare four different examples.

There is a reason for this sequence. Smells that reach us simply as we walk and those we only discover by moving closer reveal different layers of a city. Even things given the same label, such as “leaves” or “doorways,” do not offer uniform experiences. Changing the way we observe allows us to reconsider categories we assumed we already understood.

Recording the Name of a Smell Separately From Its Perceived Intensity

The kit’s recording sheet asks participants to note the location, the smell’s name, its intensity and duration, whether they like or dislike it, whether it was expected, and their associations and thoughts. Intensity, duration and liking or disliking are each rated on a scale of 1–7. Participants record four experiences using each of the three approaches, for a total of 12, then select one smell to represent that day’s city walk.

The numbers here are values participants assign to organize their own perceptions. “Strong” does not mean the concentration of a substance in the air, nor does “long” measure a molecule’s lifetime. Giving perceived intensity and pleasantness or unpleasantness separate fields helps avoid the hasty assumption that we dislike something because it is powerful or like it because it is gentle.

This separation also offers insights into describing perfume. What did it resemble? How strong did it seem? What did it remind you of? These are different questions. When descriptions do not agree, there is no need to immediately designate one person’s wording as the correct answer. McLean’s recording sheet is designed to retain those differences.

Amsterdam: Translating Words Into Colors and Outlines

April 2013: A City Walked by 44 People

“Smellmap Amsterdam” is a work whose creation can be traced in concrete detail. The research took place over four days in April 2013. Forty-four people undertook 10 smellwalks, recording more than 650 smell perceptions. McLean organized their written descriptions into 50 broad categories and incorporated both frequently mentioned and unexpected smells into the work. The artwork page gives its date as 2014, distinct from the year of the research.

The records from that spring included the warm, powdery sweetness of waffles, spices drifting from Asian and Surinamese restaurants and grocery stores, pickled herring, old books and laundry. Rather than predetermining the answer from the city’s familiar image, assembling what the walkers’ noses picked up reveals another city, where eating, commerce and home life overlap.

The smell of cannabis was also recorded but was not included in the final map. The official artwork description explains that it appeared only in a limited number of neighborhoods. This does not mean that the smell is absent from Amsterdam. A map has both a scope of observation and choices made by its creator.

Colors From the Cityscape, Outlines From the Spread of Smells

While McLean used participants’ own words for the descriptions on the map, she drew color inspiration from photographs of the city’s architectural details, materials, plants and sky. She did not assign colors on the assumption that there is a universal correspondence between smells and colors.

Concentric circles indicate the spread of smells by combining perceived intensity with the physical size of their sources. Their outlines are then reshaped with reference to the wind direction during the research. The canals remain as a pale background, providing clues to the locations within the city. Both color and outline are design decisions that translate perception into a readable form.

“It is a proposition, an indication of what you might smell in a certain place.”
— Kate McLean

This map is not a concentration map produced by continuously measuring chemicals throughout the city. Nor does it guarantee that the same smell will always be present within an outline. It is a way of using observational records to consider how smells might move, mingle and disappear.

Adding Smells That Can Actually Be Sniffed to a Paper Map

In the Amsterdam work, a collaboration with the fragrance company IFF paired the map’s visual representation with smells themselves. Eleven urban smells and one blend made from them were prepared, and visitors wrote down the associations they experienced on sticky notes. In this arrangement, readers of the city’s records also become recorders of the next experience.

Here, too, it is important to distinguish between preserving sampled city air as it is and creating scents for an exhibition. McLean communicated her ideas for the smells, and IFF created the fragrances. The map and scents were combined not to produce a perfect replica of the city on that day, but to question feelings and assumptions about place.

The work was exhibited at Mediamatic in Amsterdam in 2014 and at “The Senses: Design Beyond Vision” at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum in New York in 2018. Both are past exhibitions.

Singapore and Kyiv: Restoring Time to Smell

Superimposing Morning and Evening Along the Same Route

“Odours of the morning and the evening: Singapore” is a 2017 work based on research conducted in 2015. Participants walked the same route in the morning and evening to compare their experiences of smell. McLean hand-painted participants’ perceptions, created outlines and then superimposed the morning and evening data.

The comparison concerns more than differences in the locations where smells were encountered. It also represents how long each smell was perceived. By changing the time of day while keeping the route the same, the work shows that even a city that appears fixed on a single map has differences over time.

Animating Seven People’s Experiences: The 2016 Kyiv Work

“Temporalities of the Smellscape” in Kyiv is a digital animation work from 2016. One of its animations, “Taking a Line from its Walk,” represents the smell experiences of seven people on a shared walk through movement. Even on the same walk, the timing and duration of their experiences of smell do not fully coincide.

The fading symbols on the screen refer to smells volatilizing and people adapting to them. The artist explains that multiple temporal rhythms are involved in a city walk, including walking pace, heart rate and the rhythm of sniffing. Another animation superimposes individual smellwalk sequences, leaving the sources in place even after their smells have disappeared.

This needs to be read as a work from 2016. It is not a live report on the smells or daily life of Kyiv today. What it preserves is the perception of people who were present in that place at that time.

From Mapmaking to Research and Writing

In her 2019 doctoral thesis, McLean systematically examined the relationships between smell and space, place, time and people. Singapore and Kyiv form its two case studies. Considering ways of walking to gather smells alongside the symbols and procedures used to represent them became a design research project into communicating sensory information.

She has also worked in higher education, designing and launching a bachelor’s degree in graphic design at the University of Kent. She wrote that she would take a year away from September 2024 to focus on her first book, and the university’s 2025 degree-show catalogue also reports her book-related work as the former course leader. Her 2026 speaker profile states that she is writing an atlas of urban smells, due for publication in 2027.

Describing her present work solely through a former university title would overlook this change. McLean’s practice moves between walking with participants, exhibiting, examining methods through research and gathering the work into a book.

Expanding Our Vocabulary of Scent in the City

The appeal of reading McLean’s maps goes beyond a new visual pattern through which to view a city. Naming a smell, recording where and when it was perceived, and comparing it with another person’s description: the process itself becomes a way of thinking concretely about everyday smells.

When smelling perfume, too, we can put into words what it resembles and which experiences it recalls before deciding whether we like it. The records McLean makes in the city extend such observation beyond the perfume bottle. Read alongside Odeuropa’s research (in Japanese), which interprets historical smells through texts and paintings, they show that scent culture involves preserving not only smells themselves but also what people sensed and how they spoke about them.