SENSING WORKSHOPS with 4th graders
Exploring Touch and Smell – with curious minds and open senses
What does a fir cone or a seashell feel like with closed eyes? What does a lemon scent remind you of? Can fish smell like coffee? In two hands-on SENSING WORKSHOPS, pupils explore pine cones their sensory perception through touch and smell – and get a glimpse into everyday life at the University of Applied Arts.
Led by Jeanette Mueller, Paul Divjak, and Anna Irgang and/or Lola Pfeifer, the workshops take place in a lecture room of the university and invite children to describe what they feel and smell in their own words – with surprising, funny, and poetic results.
TOUCH
With closed eyes, the children explore objects made of natural and synthetic materials – coral, plastic parts, seeds. They describe what they feel: rough, soft, crumbly, flexible, spiky, “like something from a sere garden” or “like a toothbrush I imagined differently.”
Each description reveals a personal language of touch. Most children favor natural materials, though a few prefer man-made ones. The exercises spark creativity, laughter – and lots of new vocabulary.
SMELL
At the Scent Station, curated smells trigger a wide range of reactions and associations.
Exploring the abstract scent molecule Hedione, the children respond with vivid comparisons to it – from “soda” to “residual wast”, “poo-poo,” “bed linen, that smells like me,” or “my brother.” They also share their favorite smells, among other cornflakes, cocoa, home, peppermint tea. Together, they discover how individual – and emotional – smell perception can be.
IMPACT
Children often tell us they love “smelling strange things,” “touching unknown objects” and “experiencing something completely new.”
By combining sensory experience with playful inquiry, the workshops introduce systems thinking in an easy understandable way – and offers children their first experience of an art university as an accessible space for discovery and creativity.
Winter semester 2024 – University of Applied Arts Vienna
SENSING WORKSHOPS
These sensory workshops, developed by MUELLER-DIVJAK, invite participants of all ages to experience relational thinking and systemic awareness through smell, touch and sound.
At interactive stations, participants explore, for example, natural and artificial materials as well as art works with their eyes closed; follow scents and sounds specially created by the artist duo MUELLER-DIVJAK (Jeanette Mueller and Paul Divjak) to stimulate the imagination or unlock emotional pathways; or use seeds to visualize connections within everyday systems. Each workshop opens up space for reflection: How can we perceive our interconnectedness and, through this, our mutual interdependence and embeddedness? How do we influence (living) systems? And how can we cope with all the influences that we are exposed to?
These inclusive and playful workshops have already been implemented with various age groups and cultures – from school classes and universities in Austria and Southeast Asia to adult learners in European research contexts and ASEAN art scenes. Rather than imparting facts, they invite physical exploration and offer a sensory approach to complexity, towards an embodied awareness of living systems.
