This article is written by Alain Ruche, a “contrarian policymaker”…

  • The problem: We use a narrow range of our senses in current policyMAKING.
  • Why it matters: This narrow scope limits our insights and the impact of what we do.
  • The solution: Multisensorial policymaking would open new insights and inspire action to face the challenges of our complex world

I use capital letters to insist on the inherently experimental character of policyMAKING as I see it: for me, theory comes from practice, not the other way around.

As a continuation of my work on an organic worldview of policymaking, I came to wonder which role our senses play in this context, and I opted for the pop-up technique as used by its master David Carter. Under the artistic direction of my friend Maria Julia, I recently took the opportunity to stay in Buenos Aires to visualise a multisensorial pattern of policymaking. So was born the piece of art you can see below, the main objective of which is triggering meaningful conversations through new insights to nurture action.

Image of Alain-s pop-up 1

Actually, this endeavour aims at contributing to building an alternative narrative for policyMAKING, as advocated by J. Hagel. Contrary to a story, which is self-contained (with an ending) and is about the storyteller, the narrative is about us. A multisensorial approach to policyMAKING frames an opportunity for the future, identifies trends, obstacles and challenges, and nurtures a call for action. This holistic approach implies crafting narratives at various levels – for individuals, institutions, places and movements for social change. By looking into the future, we can play a role in shaping our today’s emotions and actions. A multisensorial narrative also contributes to shaping and inducing serendipity, which goes well beyond something that just happens.

My departure point was how we use our “traditional” senses in our daily life. We take for granted this mode as a constant, in geography and in history. Digging into my professional experience in interculturality over 30 years, I put things into perspective how little and superficially we use our different senses – mostly focusing on sight. This bias was even deeper in our policymaking, which invited me to contribute to an alternative narrative. Out of serendipity, I came across the EU-funded programme ODEUROPA, which aims at exploring the potential olfactory descriptions, experiences and memories contained in cultural heritage, applying state-of-the-art Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques to text and image data sets that span four centuries of European history. Although museums are slowly discovering the power of multi-sensory presentations, we lack the scientific standards, tools and data to identify, consolidate, and promote the wide-ranging role of scents and smells in our cultural heritage. The data produced will support the implementation of policy recommendations to show that smells and smelling are important means for consolidating Europe’s tangible and intangible cultural heritage. ODEUROPA will apply state-of-the-art AI techniques to text and image datasets that span four centuries of European history. It will identify the vocabularies, spaces, events, practices and emotions associated with smells and smelling. It is also expected that the project will quantify the impact of multisensory visitor engagement. At the same time, our senses are gateways to the past. White the ODEUROPA project will revisit history, for example incorporating that the main smell in recently industrialised cities was manure’s smell, this made me wonder what the main smell will be in our cities in 10 years' time.

Another illustrative example of multisensorial policy is the three exclusive bars opened to duty-free in France’s airports where visitors can smell, touch and taste the ingredients that go into making the flavour of a brand of whisky. Bar stations level up the ordinary whisky-tasting experience with a charred bar that boasts the smell of smoke and vanilla, which are some of the same notes that can be found in the drink. The wood panels of the bar also help the brand tell the story of how the whisky gets its distinctive flavour from the use of double-charred barrels.

We should have the humility and the courage to unlearn some of the canons of our policymaking.

What is not there matters as much as what is there, as said in Zen philosophy, and I was naturally driven to create a space in the pop-up for senses which exist beyond our five senses, and even more to senses which will possibly emerge from our complex world. In particular, I incorporated a new space for the metaverse based on a co-authored article to be soon published by the Leonardo Journal. Quickly, questions arose in my mind which expressed the complex framework of the experiment.

First, nobody knows how to define senses with precision, which leaves making a simple list of them impossible. Second, the list of “intangible” senses has broadened, with a growing number of internal senses that are difficult to grasp. Third, the quantum approach of management brilliantly explained by D. Zohar has turned the classical Greek taxonomy of senses on its head, in particular the role of the observer in an experimentation. And fourth, the generalisation of the complexity to several new fields, acknowledging the key role of relationships, and emergence, rather than generalisation of best practices under the guidance of experts.

Scientists and philosophers have counted up to seven senses, including the sense of life and the sense of others, grouping them into three categories: senses of the environment, body senses and social senses. There is also extrasensory perception, and what is called the sixth senses (including intuition, empathy, telepathy, intuition and precognition).

Sometimes, astonishing situations arise, like when foxes dive head first into deep snow, using the hunting technique of ‘mousing’ to spot rodents under five metres of snow with extreme precision, especially when the prey is heading north, using the earth’s magnetic field.

The pop-up advocates for using the traditional senses: taste, vision, hearing, touch and smell. It also has a part where several nontraditional senses are represented, such as for the metaverse.

Here are some preliminary questions to trigger meaningful insights:

  1. What can we infer from a comparison between our own culture and a culture with a different understanding of senses?
  2. What can we learn from people with sensory impairment (like people who are blind, or Covid-19 patients with no sense of taste or smell)?
  3. What impact will the metaverse have on our senses in five years time? Will non-traditional senses become stronger? Will new senses appear?
  4. In a more distant future, will humans be able to “tune” their different senses, even their DNA?
  5. Will senses themselves become less linked to the physical body, leaving only hallucinations?
  6. In the case that an empathic and compassionate civilization emerges, will it have an impact on specific senses? In particular the evolution of touch?
  7. How will the frontier between direct and telepistemology evolve in the experimental field?
  8. Will social media induce the emergence of totally new senses, linked to a growing plasticity of the brain?
  9. What are the transgenerational aspects of senses, in particular regarding loneliness of older people?
  10. What will be the military/security aspects of the evolution of senses?
  11. How will our senses evolve with a deeper awareness of planetary transformation?
  12. What about the regulatory aspects of the evolution of senses?
  13. How will artists influence the evolution of the pattern of senses? Taking the example of the metaverse?
  14. Given the growing concern for planetary survival, will the human pattern of senses get (again?) closer to the animal pattern?
  15. How will the binomial perceptions/senses and emotions/feelings evolve?
  16. How could we design a quantum approach of multisensorial policymaking?
  17. Manure was the dominant smell in industrial cities in the past. What will be the dominant smell in cities in 2040?
  18. What is the relation between (so-called) facts, values and senses?
  19. How to assess the mix of data regarding the evolution of senses, particularly hard, warm, ethnographic, and moist data?
  20. What is the role of senses in building narratives for implicit causal explanations attached to observations, or simulating alternative representations for the outcome of future actions?

As a conclusion, apart from the fun I had, I take away from this experiment the following :

  • New insights in and of policymaking are needed to face today's challenges. 'What if’ questions are critical;

  • We should have the humility and the courage to unlearn some of the canons of our policymaking;

  • A multisensorial policyMAKING would have a significant impact on how we reach our purpose;

  • This new approach demands we apprehend new types of data;

  • Artistic techniques help in building new narratives for policyMAKING.

Image of Alain-s pop-up 2

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