Everyone's sensory world is different
This project examines people's senses in the portobello road market to understand how people's experiences in London can be understood through an anthropological lens that focuses on the senses.
As a first step, please follow the arrow to explore the Portobello Road Market
How to use map?
Sensory maps from 3 participants
In order to observe the sensory differences between people from different cultural backgrounds, three participants were recruited to visit the portobello road market, where they were asked to generate their sensory map based on their sensory walk.
👃：Sense of smell
👂：Hearing
👀：Vision
👄：Taste
👋：Tactile
“The bright flowers made me want to smell them and my ears were filled with the lovely laughter of children.”
Participant 1：
The visual and auditory senses were used the most.
The sensory maps drawn by the three respondents were completely different when the participants were asked to experience the same section of the market. The diagrams use emoji to represent the sensory maps they used during their experience of the market.
The first interviewee was a third-time visitor to the portobello market because she saw on Instagram that it had a lot of food. She saw a lot of food and books about food and ate ham, because she is a food lover. The image of children laughing and running to buy lollipops stays in her mind, and she used to collect candy in tin cans in her childhood, which brings back memories.
The second interviewee is from China and the market is close to her current home. She often comes here to buy vegetables, so she knows which store is the best place to go for a particular vegetable, and she likes the bright colors of the vegetables in the market, which means they are fresh. But she doesn't like the noise and the smell of fish in the market. It reminded her of the Chinese "YiWu City", which is famous for its market selling small goods, but it is full of bargaining noises, and whenever she associates the portobello market with China, she finds it noisy.
The third interviewee, a first-time visitor, was unfamiliar with the place and instead of looking closely at each stall, he chose to walk in the middle of the road to get a quick preview of the market first. For him, the large advertisements on the vehicles and the lively running dogs on the road attracted him. Because there was no corresponding existing memory in his mind of this unfamiliar market, large, brightly colored, fast-moving objects attracted his visual attention.
Different descriptions for the same item
Awakening customer's
memories of the senses aligned with their cognition
On sale mushroom
The farmer who comes to this market every Saturday：
“Our mushrooms are fresh and cheap, take this paper bag to pick up whatever you want!”
Collections from the 1950's
“These cups are collected from my travels around the world, each one has decades of history”
Organic beautiful
Mushroom
Merchant specializing in mushroom cultivation：
“These mushrooms are different from the ones in the supermarket, you can see they are so beautiful, each one is like a genie”
Ceramic Cup
“Very beautiful cup, can be used for tea”
There are many stalls selling mushrooms in the market, but the descriptions of similar mushrooms are different. The stall owners who come to this market every Saturday to sell their own fresh vegetables perceive and describe mushrooms as fresh, attracting customers' eyes with a sign that says "On sale" and repeating in words, "We have all kinds of vegetables here, take your pick, they're all cheap. "
However, another stall owner, who specializes in cultivating mushrooms, describes mushrooms as "elves" and uses a sign that says "organic" to attract customers' vision and uses language to describe the beauty of mushrooms to attract customers' hearing.
There are 4-6 stallholders selling similar ceramic mugs in the market, but everyone has different descriptions and decorations of the mugs. The first store owner decorated his stall in a warm and cute way, placing puppies and mannequin toys near the mugs to visually attract visitors with these cute little objects. The aural aspect also focused on the description of the cute cups.
Another stall selling ceramics hung a label on each mug with the year of the mug collection. The stall owner would talk to customers about the year of the mug collection and how to infer the factory and year of production by the different logos on the bottom of the mug. This stall owner combines the visual and auditory senses to attract customers.
Stall owners selling the same goods in the market have different ways of displaying the items, using the stall arrangement to attract customers visually, using spoken language to attract users audibly, and prompting customers to touch, smell, and taste the goods in different ways. But the same thing is that they want to use these display methods to attract customers to come and use their senses to understand the goods.
In my field observation, I found that items with stories, organic and healthy, and handmade are more appealing to customers, and stores use visual and auditory senses to show the advantages of items that fit these characteristics. The word "organic" reminds customers of the relationship with health, so they are more likely to get close enough to touch and smell. Products with a story will make customers stop and listen, using their own awareness to understand the process and gain perception.
The Environment stallholders used to stimulate the human body, leads to various sensation, people use their awareness and understanding to get perception.
Senses as Tools to attract people
Vision as tool
Attract customers visually with light, green leaves and wood
Awakening memories
Let customers have the association of romance, freshness and nature
Visual awakening of the sense of smell
The visual reminds customers of the smell of the flower in their memory
In order to understand which use of the senses in the marketplace was most appealing to customers, I recruited three volunteer stallholders to record the words they used to present their products to customers, and analyzed the number of times the words were repeated using WordCloud software.
The more frequently the words were repeated, the larger they appeared in the graph.
As the graph indicates, the words "handmade" and "made by hand" appear most often. This is because these words stimulate the customer's sense of hearing and the customer's perception that handmade items are more valuable.
As you can see from the diagram, the vendor allows the customer to "try", "touch" and "hear" to gain more perception of the item, which gives the customer the opportunity to develop an interest in The customer has a chance to identify with the item and wants to buy it.
Also, this includes many customers asking if they can "try" because these senses allow them to get more information.
Which sense is the most useful in market?
How senses interact with each other?
- Based on human's cognition
Vendors in markets use their senses as a tool to attract users to come and explore the products. They engage as many senses as possible to give customers more information about the products. However, in the open public space of the market, smell and taste do not work easily. After the visual and auditory senses have attracted customers, they will approach the stall to further explore the products using touch, smell and taste.
A field observation of a stall selling scented soap is cited here as an example of how the senses are used and how each sense functions based on people's perceptions.
Vision: The stall owner used a sign that said "handmade" to attract customers' visual attention, saying, "When customers see or hear that the aromatherapy is handmade, they will know that it is natural, high-quality aromatherapy, which is different from other factory production lines. Aromatherapy is not the same." At the same time, their booth will be dressed up according to the seasons, for example, at Christmas time, the booth will be hung with colored lights, and in autumn will be hung with red and brown maple leaves decoration. Vision works here because customers use their own awareness to get information and are attracted to the goods based on their own perceptions of goods' value.
The vendor introduced me to an interesting use of visuals: he used the design of bees lying on the candle to indicate that the candle smelled good and was so attractive to bees like natural honey. But some customers who don't look closely will think that the fragrance is bad and grows bugs.
This use of visuals shows more about the relationship between visuals and people's perceptions. People who know that fresh nectar attracts bees will think that this candle contains many natural ingredients. But those who do not have this perception, or those who do not carefully identify what the bugs on it are, will think that this candle has expired.
Hearing: The vendor recorded the sound of water in bathroom when shooting the aromatherapy video, because the sound of water in bathroom will remind people of the comfort of taking showers.
Smell: The stall owner used an aromatherapy machine to diffuse the scent of the products to attract customers. However, in this outdoor market, the aromatherapy machine could not work and pedestrians coming and going could not smell it.
Smell: It takes sight, sound and touch to get a customer interested in smelling aromatherapy. When a customer sees the "handmade" sign, hears the words "handmade" from the vendor, picks up the aromatherapy and smells the beautiful scent, the desire to buy will arise.
Under the influence of Covid-19, the market requires people who come to the market to wear masks and keep a social distance. This has caused people's sense of smell to be affected by the masks, and keeping social distance means less tactile use.
2021.03.14
Breaking Point：
Covid-19 changes Senses
This is a video taken by a grilled chicken stall owner when the market was restricted by the need to wear a mask.
Although there were several pedestrians on the road with masks, there were considerably fewer customers for these food stalls, which require the senses of taste and smell, and this had many negative effects on their business.
Here's a video this vendor shot in 2022, when markets no longer forced people to keep social distance and wear masks. Their business is booming again.
Under the influence of Covid, the visual and auditory senses are amplified in this market. One vendor who sells clocks transformed from glass bottles told me that people often choose not to touch her glass clocks because they look fragile.
But under Covid's influence, the tactile disadvantage of glass became less pronounced as people chose not to touch the product in other stores. The visual advantage of my glass clocks became more obvious, and I was able to highlight the fact that the hands don't make a "click" noise.
Covid has given many vendors the option to sell their products online as well
This stall owner who sells glass clocks also sells her glass clocks on Instagram, which is a great online channel for her because here, people don't have to worry about breaking the glass bottles anymore. "I can take beautiful photos about the craftsmanship I use to make the cups." The digital platform has amplified the visual function.
Senses
in
digital
Age
Instagram
｜
Digital ethnography
Accessing information with cell phones rather than with the senses：
A camera vendor told me that many customers would take pictures of the camera after seeing it and go online to search for more information about the camera rather than trying to operate it themselves.
The digital age is fast in disseminating information, and the senses have become fast in capturing this information：
Markets widely promote information about healthy, organic and recyclable resources, and stall owners focus on promoting such information in words and language in order to comply with this consumer trend, and people catch such information quickly with their visual and auditory senses.
People's senses in the digital age are influenced by instant delivery：
Online shopping and delivery have made people more and more accustomed to efficient shopping, unlike markets that require people to experience slowly with their senses.
Digital ethnography via Instagram
Vision
Hearing
Senses of smell and taste
Record music with digital devices or spread music with live streaming
CD vendors don't insert music on social media because people will then download digital music directly instead of buying CDs
Touch
