Coffee is one of the beverages most commonly drunk in the office environment. Therefore, the scent of coffee is often related with taking a break to get something to drink. Moreover, office workers often sit too long in a closed meeting room, resulting in a rise in temperature, lack of fresh air, and a drop in concentration and productivity as a result of this. Re-cafeen is a set of 3 devices that each take a different approach in spreading the smell of coffee as an indication that the temperature in a meeting room is becoming too high. The 3 approaches (i) coffee oil, (ii) recycled coffee grounds, and (iii) coffee powder, use a variety of ways to spread the scent of coffee. When the temperature in a meeting room raises above a critical point, a heating element will turn on, heating the coffee and spreading the scent of coffee. The goal of the artifact is that individuals become aware of their surroundings and take a break from the unhealthy work environment.
Hans Brombacher, Vasil Nikolov, Steven Vos, and Steven Houben. 2023. Scent as a Sensory Modality for Data Physicalisation for Ofce Well-being. In Extended Abstracts of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA ’23), April 23–28, 2023, Hamburg, Germany. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 8 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3544549.3585866
