Ouroboros
What if cemeteries could be a place to ‘access’ people who passed away?
Since the beginning of time, we humans created many different ways to say goodbye to our loved ones, with different cultural models and beliefs. We already buried our loved ones with or within coffins, with fireplaces, coins in our eyes, and all kinds of sociocultural manifestations through the ages.
They are places and rituals to remember, to be close to your loved ones who passed away, but they’re still places that don’t make us experience, and vividly remind those memories from the past.
People can be gone physically, but our minds with the experiences we had, keep them alive in our memories, so why not use a powerful sense, which is intrinsically related to our limbic system which is related to our deepest memory making them even closer to us?
Technological anatomy
The structure of the environment is surrounded by uncountable chambers that act like scent emanators, which are distributed in a bioinspired structure found in flowers to make the immersive oval shape surround users and avoid external interferences. Inside each one, there’s a sphere embedded with genetically engineered freeze-dried cells that can be hydrated by an air condenser that connects the outside to the inside.
Then, a simple electronic set connected to the central computer on the top of the structure emits light inside the sphere to activate proteins and expel scents by activating the genetic circuit embedded in the cells. It's important to enhance that the circuit is based on the Eau D’Coli project made by an MIT iGEM team in 2006, which built a strain of E. coli to expel sweet smells depending on the growth phase of the cells.
Different people have different fragrances, and to reproduce them, the proteins embedded in the sphere are going to be related to the circle of fragrances made by the perfumist Michal Edwards. Each sphere will contain a specific protein, so the mix of aromas happens through the activation of multiple chambers inside the structure that corresponds to the smell which is characterized by the user who knows about who passed away.
Human interaction
To access the content inside the structure, the users must be closer, so they dedicate time to remember who already passed, as a new kind of ritual. When closer to the structure, users can directly access their list of people who are important to them and even access memories from different people who are not locked by their families to pay their respects and even meet their stories.
Adding the required information to register someone, can include any information people want to remember about their loved ones, including the history or anything that can be described in any human language. To add images, videos, and even audio, the computer inside the environment will have a dedicated space to store everything, which can be accessed by an app during the time you are there.
To add smells, users must use adjectives and references inside the app to reproduce people’s fragrances with the activation of different chambers. If the computational process goes wrong, people can manually switch in the app parameters based on the circle of fragrances to equalize the smell of the environment to the ones they passed away.
