Scent management: a signal of maturing emotional design at work

As organisations place greater emphasis on wellbeing, experience and emotional balance at work, scent is re-entering workplace conversations. Long associated with memory, mood and perception, smell is increasingly discussed as a potential layer within multisensory workplace design – particularly as offices become more technology-led and intentional about how they feel.

As experience-led strategies mature, organisations are beginning to explore how environments influence emotional states, not just productivity or efficiency. Scent sits at the edge of change – underexplored and still largely experimental.

Why scent is resurfacing now

Advances in smart building systems and environmental monitoring have encouraged a more holistic view of office design, one that considers atmosphere alongside space planning and technology infrastructure.

Scent appears particularly appealing because it operates below conscious attention. It is ambient rather than screen-based, often framed as natural rather than technical, and familiar from hospitality, retail and wellness settings. In the time where organisations are seeking subtle ways to support calm, focus and comfort, smell feels like a gentle intervention.

Yet this appeal rests on assumptions that do not always hold once scent moves from theory into shared, long-term environments.

What research tells us about scent and mood

Research continues to show that scent can influence mood, perception and certain aspects of cognitive performance. Pleasant aromas are often associated with improved emotional states, while specific scents have been linked to reduced anxiety, heightened alertness or memory support. Smell also plays a powerful role in memory formation, reinforcing emotional associations over time.

At the same time, these effects are highly contextual. Individual responses vary widely depending on personal history, cultural meaning and learned associations. Habituation further complicates outcomes. Repeated exposure tends to reduce impact, and what initially feels supportive can become neutral or distracting.

Scent does not operate in isolation. Its influence is shaped by the wider sensory environment – sound, light, temperature, spatial density and task demands all interact with how smell is perceived. In controlled settings, these variables can be managed. In shared workplaces, they are far harder to predict or standardise.

Early explorations across the scent spectrum

Recent explorations into scent and emotion reveal very different approaches to how smell might be understood or applied. Some focus on direct modulation, while others step back to address a more foundational challenge: how scent is sensed, interpreted and communicated at all.

Highly controlled experiments, including stress-responsive fragrance concepts developed in beauty and research contexts such as those explored by Shiseido, demonstrate what is technically possible when scent is personalised, time-bound and precisely calibrated. These projects treat scent as an intervention, designed to influence emotional state under carefully managed conditions.

A different perspective emerges from projects such as Oloris, a prototype developed by Pitch Studios and Gentle Systems. Rather than attempting to optimise mood, Oloris translates airborne chemical signals into colour, light and motion, giving scent a perceptual presence without fixing its meaning. Positioned between speculative design and near-term possibility, it treats smell as subjective, interpretable and inherently ambiguous.

Both approaches highlight why scent remains difficult to scale in workplace environments. One relies on levels of personalisation and control that offices rarely support. The other suggests that before scent can be managed or governed, it must first be made legible.

Why scent remains exploratory in workplaces

The gap between experimentation and widespread adoption reflects practical complexity rather than a lack of innovation. Workplaces are collective, continuous and emotionally layered environments, which raises the threshold for any intervention designed to influence mood.

Individual sensitivity, neurodiversity and personal agency become more pronounced when exposure is ongoing rather than optional. Integration also matters. Scent interacts with other environmental systems, and without careful coordination it can contribute to sensory overload rather than comfort.

As a result, scent is most often explored through pilots, limited trials or conceptual work rather than embedded infrastructure. This caution reflects a growing awareness that emotional technologies demand a higher level of care in environments people cannot easily opt out of.

Scent as a signal of maturing experience design

Rather than framing this as a limitation, scent can be read as a signal of how workplace experience design is evolving. As organisations move beyond adding experiential layers, attention is shifting towards how those layers are governed, combined and sustained over time.

Scent brings these questions into focus because of its deep links to memory, emotion and autonomy. It highlights the tension between intention and control, and between wellbeing support and sensory saturation.

Strategic opportunity

In the near term, the opportunity around scent at work is less about deployment and more about capability-building. Organisations can use it as a way to develop the skills and frameworks required for emotional design more broadly.

Small-scale experimentation provides a low-risk context for exploring how people respond to sensory change, how consent and control can be meaningfully designed into environments, and how different sensory layers interact over time. Scent then becomes more about organisational learning. It offers a way to test how far experience-led ambitions can be translated into practice without compromising trust, inclusion or autonomy. As workplaces continue to evolve, those that approach sensory design as a capability will be better positioned to shape environments that feel supportive, legible and genuinely human.