MULTISENSORY Experience • CuLtural Futures • Sensory Composition • Scent & Sensory Branding
Strategy • Concept • Design
Brand • Media • Culture • Space
Interview about Sensory Design and Composition and Design Futures with Carolin Vedder
PIXEL RETENTIVE PODCAST BY EPIC MADE - USA, 2026The Pixel Retentive podcast explores how artists and business owners discuss the art of business and the business of art at the intersection of creativity, business, marketing, and entrepreneurship.
Host Carl Cleanthes.
LINK TO CAROLINS EPISODE SOON!
Book Chapter - SENSORY STORYTELLING by Carolin Vedder
Storytelling, l’art de captiver par le design - Dunod, France 2026Storytelling, l’art de captiver par le design treats storytelling as part of design method: the stage where meaning, perception, user attention, emotional charge, and memory are designed.
With Leon Chew, Dweezil Zappa, Max Resnick, Verónica Maljuf, Brad Frost, Nicolas Journé, Gjoko Muratovski, Ellen Lupton, Dorothéa Pluta, Jordan Mechner, Studio CL Design, Aïko Sekimoto, Meredith Black, Naoto Fukasawa, Piero Lissoni, mv& estudio gráfico, Connor Moors, Tobias Trubenbacher, Vitra, Philipp-Matthäus Hahn Schule Nürtingen, Basel Tourismus, Carolin Vedder, Anna Maria Sand Jensen, Abdellatif Targahoui, Gfeller & Hellsgård, ZKM, Centre d’Art et des Médias Karlsruhe, Johan Grimonprez, Kunstschule Weißensee Berlin.
The parisian design website wearecom featured Carolin Vedder and the Sensory Storytelling chapter on their site:
Sensory Composition and Sensory Storytelling - MASTERCLASS by Carolin Vedder
Transforming Design Thinking: From Visual Only to Sensory Composition (CIMIx Vienna 2026)
We experience the world through a constant stream of sensory information - sight, sound, touch, smell, and the relentless forward movement of time. Yet, we still communicate primarily through visual or auditory means. This talk explores the essential shift from asking, "How does it look?" to asking, "How does it feel?" Drawing on neuroscience and futures foresight, Carolin Vedder will share the what, why, and how of Sensory Composition. Attendees will gain a clear introduction to a new approach to design thinking and receive a framework to map the next frontier of experience in their own industry.
Sensory Storytelling: Turning Brand Promises Into Repeatable Experiences
Sensory storytelling is the deliberate use of sensory cues, across sight, sound, touch, space, scent, and taste where relevant, to carry the same story the words claim to tell. Brands compete in environments where attention is scarce and interpretation spreads quickly. Sensory storytelling offers a disciplined way to carry a promise through the product, the interface, the space, and the communication, using cues that the audience processes faster and remembers longer.
Multisensory Design: The Choreography of Perception.
Design has been dominated by the visual. As our digital and physical worlds merge, the new competitive advantage is not found on a screen, but in the coordination of the full human sensorium. A look at how perception is designed.
The Art of Time. Why the World is Not Static.
How temporal structure shapes perception and how meaning emerges through rhythm, motion, timing, and duration. A view on perception as a time-based process.
The Sensory Code™. The Unwritten Language. Written in Code.
Music has MIDI. Color has HEX. But the multifaceted human sensory experience had no formal language. The Sensory Code™ proposes a structural language for multisensory states, based on defined perceptual axes and translation rules. The Sensory Code™ is the first formal file format for multisensory data. Like Pantone for color, but for all senses.
The Smell of Music and the Sound of Scent.
This art project tests emotional translation between scent and sound in two opposite directions. One pair began with scent: a happy scent was created first and a composer wrote music in response to it. The second pair ran in reverse: an existing piece of sad music came first and a scent was composed from its mood. Other artists contributed additional pairs, each built around a single emotion.
The Futures of Branding: The Perceptual Signature.
There is often a vast gap between what a brand intends to signal and what its audience actually perceives. A new framework for closing that gap, grounded in the science of how the brain builds trust.
Coming Soon.
The Bauhaus Missing Scents. A Sensory Sensation.
What does the yellow triangle smell like? What does it sound like? How does it move? Crossmodal translation of the Bauhaus form-color set. Blue circle, yellow triangle and red square are each mapped to a scent profile, a sound structure and a motion behaviour. A continuation of Johannes Itten’s Bauhaus color and form theory into sensory domains they could not explore. The color system expands into scent, sound and motion.
Digital Scent: The MP3 for Smell.
We have learned to transmit images and sound as pure information. Scent remains stubbornly physical, bound to the molecule. But what if it doesn't have to be? A proposal for a non-molecular scent transmission technology that treats smell not as chemistry, but as information.
Coming Soon.
The Narcissus Machine. AI and the Tragedy of Reflection.
Generative AI reflects our thought with such fluency that we mistake the simulacrum for an independent mind. The risk is that the echo becomes so strong it replaces the very voice that created it.
ABOUT
More about Carolin Vedder.
From motion design to The Sensory Code™. Art, design, and research at the intersection of perception, technology, and cultural futures.
MULTISENSORY Experience • CuLtural Futures • Sensory Composition • Scent & Sensory Branding
Strategy • Concept • Design
Brand • Media • Culture • Space
For questions, collaborations feel free to reach out:
Thank you!
experience strategy • creative direction • perceptual direction • sensory architecture • crossmodal mapping • multisensory composition • spatial narrative • motion sequencing • scent/sound/visual alignment • brand atmosphere • product and space perception • sensory storytelling • futures-informed concept systems • research-to-creative interpretation • brief development • stakeholder workshops •