THE CHOREOGRAPHY OF PERCEPTION
Not everything moves.
Not everything breathes.
Not everything shapes the world around it.
But what does,
what defines how we perceive,
what moves through space and time,
becomes identity. Becomes rhythm. Becomes atmosphere.
CAROLIN VEDDER • MULTISENSORY DESIGN
I am Carolin Vedder. Motion designer with over 25 years of experience, olfactory artist for 12 years, student of neuroscience fundamentals at HarvardX and synesthete.*
I’ve created time-based designs for clients like MTV, Nickelodeon, ZDF, Mercedes, VW, Siemens, BMW and Audi. I have created sad and happy scents for sad and happy music (Simon Knight), I created the Bauhaus Missing Scents prototype and animated Dark Matter for CERN.
It turns out my brain wasn’t having a career crisis.
It was running a 25-year experiment in crossmodal expertise. What looked like scattered interests was actually a systematic investigation into how humans truly perceive design.
Why does design still stop at what we see? We don’t experience the world that way.
When you enter a space, you feel the air, hear the sound, notice the smell. You react to temperature before you see a logo. These signals decide if you want to stay, if you trust it, if it makes sense to you.
Perception is not a stack of isolated senses. It is an interplay of vision, motion, memory, rhythm, temperature, texture, space, intensity, density, scent. Focusing on visuals alone ignores the true drivers of experience.
Visual Design asks: How should it look?
Motion Design asks: How should it move?
Storytelling asks: What’s the narrative?
Multisensory Design asks: How should it be experienced?
Focusing on visuals alone is like composing a symphony using only violins. Technically possible, but fundamentally incomplete.
Multisensory design is the full orchestra. It requires knowing when to introduce each instrument, create harmonies, use silence and build tension through what we leave out.
"DO WE REALLY NEED MULTISENSORY? IT'S JUST A VIDEO!"
Through crossmodal mapping, we translate sensory qualities across channels.
Even within purely visual or motion content, we access pathways that process weight, texture, temperature, and rhythm. Not metaphorical. Grounded in the brain’s sensory mechanisms.
Perception is MultiSENSORY. Not Multi-Layered.
I developed a cross-sensory translation model to make this precise.
Instead of guessing “red feels warm,” we can translate sound into visual density, surface texture into motion, rhythm into spatial relationships. Design becomes a sensory language.
WHERE DOES IT MATTER?
Museums and cultural institutions guiding perception and memory through fully integrated spatial, sonic, thermal, motion and olfactory experiences.
Brands moving from digital or print into physical or ambient presence, requiring unified, controlled perception across flagship stores, experience centers and hybrid spaces
Creative leads and campaign directors tasked with delivering worlds, not just files, across film, exhibition, spatial and retail contexts, requiring sensory and temporal alignment.
Agencies and consultancies needing verifiable crossmodal strategies to replace moodboards with perceptual frameworks that actually control interpretation.
Corporate identity systems redefining brand presence beyond visuals, requiring a unified sensory architecture integrating motion, sound, space and material coding.
AR / XR / VR environments demanding unified sensory feedback (visual, sound, motion, haptic, scent) to maintain coherent, embodied perception.
Design labs and innovation studios prototyping multisensory systems that go beyond aesthetics and require perceptual coherence as a foundation.
If WE PERCEIVE multiSENSORY, design must be crossmodal.
I am here to show what multisensory design truly means and how crossmodal mapping can revolutionize even visual-only content by speaking the same language our nervous systems do.
I am here to challenge limited thinking.
To redefine what is possible.
Let’s talk about the future.
And how to build it.
*That led to the development of my crossmodal translation model and a published research framework on scent transmission (Zenodo, 2025).
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The perception of scent is the moment when past and future memories collide.
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