THE WISE NOSE
The wise nose is a research project originally called “wijsneus”, which is the Dutch word for “mister-know-it-all”. But when you translate it literally, it means “wise nose”.
Wijsneus is a stress detection tool I used to study negative stress in a workplace environment using a subconscious measurement technique. By simply using your sense of smell it can tell you if you experience
YOUR NOSE CAN TELL YOU IF YOU EXPERIENCE STRESS IN THIS EXACT MOMENT
negative stress in this exact moment.
I personally tested this method in different scenarios; In a corporate workplace and in the University on regular days and on presentation days.
What makes this method so special is that it works subconsciously, without the person, who is being tested, actually knowing what it is about.
The wise nose project is based on a case study that was part of my last year of studying at Academie Artemis. I started this project by researching negative emotions in the working environment. I wanted to understand why employees experience more and more stress on a daily basis and what impact this had on their health and lifestyle. I soon realized that of course there was no quick solution to this problem. That is why I wanted to extend my research even further by making it my graduation project (take a look at my other project called “The Headmaster").
According to official statistics from CBS and TNO, stress is the occupational disease number one in the Netherlands: The average days of absenteeism due to work-related stress are 30 days per employee (TNO, 2014). In 2018, 17.3% of employees suffered from burnout complaints. In 2016 this was only 14.6% (NEA, 2016/18).
This initial value made me want to discover the reason and if one could stop this negative trend. In order to do so, I started as a research intern at the bank ING in the Netherlands.
This research, therefore, does not stand on its own but is done in collaboration with a company. The research leads to a personal vision and a creative proposal for the sector and the company.
During my research at ING I came across the phenomenon that people found it hard to talk about stress openly, but a lot of them also found it difficult to pinpoint when exactly they felt stressed.
Since I was also doing research online, I came across a small study investigating the impact of stress and fear on the perception of certain smells. The theory behind it is that the brain processes odors together with your inner mood. This ensures that you often connect an emotional memory to a certain scent. These two brain functions that work simultaneously start crossing each other's paths when our fear level rises. As a result, we start to perceive odors very differently. The higher our anxiety level rises, the less pleasant we will find a scent.
Experiment number one (using the different odors in the picture above) showed that certain more neutral odors become a lot less pleasant after a fake fear-related stress-induction. The second and third experiments (see posters below) showed that this certain odor appears to become even more unpleasant in real stress-situations such as a presentation or even in the actual work environment. At the same time, it also revealed that people who are more troubled by negative stress clearly show signs when being irritated by the smell and want to shake it off.
To ensure that employees did not know what the experiment was about, I created these scented restroom posters. Employees were told that the restrooms would become a makeover, including a new scent that they could choose themselves. Via the QR-code they could rate the scent anonymously.