Claudia Adiwijaya is an Interdisciplinary who currently resides in Calgary, Canada. Her practices revolves around social change, critical and speculative design. Born and raised in Indonesia, there are lots of limitation to be critical about wellbeing and an appreciation for social change + creativity.
Recently, she just graduated from Emily Carr University, Vancouver with a Bachelor in Industrial Design and a minor in Social Practice and Community Engagement. After spending years in learning design from Germany, New York and Vancouver, she realizes that she likes to inspect the value of things, culture and ideology, taking a closer look at problem that are considered insignificant. Design needs to spark conversation, question and thoughts about bigger problem. She believes that things that are essentials can be invisible to the eye.
Her graduation project, Essentia seeks to spark a connection between design, sense of smell and technology. It is a project that celebrate and explore human olfactory sense. Smell was considered insignificant in our world today. Yet, we forget that our olfactory sense had been helping us to mate, eat and survive the evolution going back to the prehistoric times. As this world grow mainly on technology, we become numb with our survival primary instinct : our sense of smell. Therefore, Claudia tries to explore the materiality and the essence of smell in wellbeing and memories by bridging the gap between our olfactory sense and technology.
Claudia’s project is selected as the Best Executed Project 2019 in Industrial Design Major through Emily Carr Faculty Award among her peers and nominated through out different competition. Currently, she is exploring experience, system and exhibition design by working as Junior Environmental + Graphic Designer at Entro. She is working to enrich her design experience.
Project: Essentia
Essentia is a wearable art piece that explores the connection between aroma and our brains.
It aims to identify the potential effect aromas from everyday objects have on us, and how smell can offer more enriching possibilities for the human experience.
“Essentia strives to address the underlying and layered value of the human sense of smell. It encourages the public to trust their primitive “mute instinct” to navigate and improve their well-being -while exploring the power of aromas and memory,” says Adiwijaya.