WHAT does the future smell like? The answer will soon be wafting through a shopping centre as perfume designer Clara Weale works to bottle the essence of 2039.

Weale, of Glasgow fragrance studio Arboretum, will move from Clydeside to Tayside this week for the annual Dundee Design Festival.

From her temporary base in the Keiller Shopping Centre – home to this year’s event – she will ask members of the public to discuss their visions of the city two decades from now.

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Collaborating with designer Pete Thomas, she will distil those dreams into scent, releasing the final fragrance into the air in the 1970s mall and distributing just 100 vials of the product to those who help make it.

The perfume produced could be made of any combination of 100 different ingredients including the scents of lavender, oxidised blood, clean clothes and wet soil.

“I’m really curious to see how it will turn out,” she says. “It’s up to the people of Dundee.

“It could smell like a rose garden with honeysuckle, or it might not.”

The Approaching Air project is one of several set to be based in the Keiller Centre, which was built on the former site of the Keiller factory, where marmalade, Dundee cake and chocolate was produced.

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Now it is hoped the space will produce new directions for Dundee, allowing passers-by to create branding campaigns, poster work and more. Audiences have been asked what would make their communities more “liveable” and “loveable”.

For Keiller Centre manager Angus Morton, that would include more tenants. While the mall was bustling during its 1980s heyday, the rise of competing venues, big brand retail and internet shopping has seen footfall dwindle and traders close down or move on. The festival will occupy

10 units and Morton, who has worked there for 29 years, says it is bringing “something completely different”, including an exterior and interior revamp.

“The amount of vacant units we’ve got, it’s good to revitalise the place and jazz it up,” he told the Sunday National. “I was a bit apprehensive at first, but I said ‘just get on and do what you want’. They are doing a great job, there’s a lot of interest from the public.

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“Hopefully it will encourage people to stay on and take on a unit.

“Everything is going more to the artisan businesses, that’s what we are hoping will take off here. We’d welcome them.”

This year the festival will be produced by local design studio Agency of None, which drew inspiration from Helsinki in Finland.

A visit there in January gave the studio’s Ryan McLeod an alternative vision of civic governance and connection to design, with creative spaces visible at street level and fewer barriers between citizens and politicians. “What came out of that was the trust they have in their citizens,” he said. “You can go to the cafe in the basement of city hall and have lunch next to the mayor. That spirit of openness was something we realised was absolutely key.

“A big part of this is about empowering people, to show them how they can make a change in their city.”

THIS includes exposure to live product design and the chance to make posters which will be replicated in public spaces during the festival’s run. But McLeod says the perfume project will provide another means of connecting with creativity. “It’s so unusual and smell is a sense that, when it comes to design, you don’t generally consider,” he states. “This will be a completely different experience to anything anyone has come across before.”

For Weale, smell “taps into human memories and experiences” in a way sight cannot.

To formulate a fragrance of the future, she will first discuss hopes, predictions and ambitions with members of the public.

Making potions with workshop parties and private individuals, this is a process she has fine-tuned. “I get them to imagine a landscape or a moment,” she explains, “and we work with the elements that make up that scene – what time of day, what they are up to, how they are feeling – then find those tones that bring them together harmoniously.”

From whaling to jam, Dundee’s industrial history has strong aromatic associations. Weale says she’s prepared to touch on this, but anticipates a move towards very contemporary concerns such as the global climate crisis and local waterfront redevelopment, which includes the opening of the V&A Dundee.

“I’m anticipating quite a lot of people will want to see a move to a greener future,” she comments, “So I have cis-3-hexanol, the smell of cut grass – that’s a material that really sums up ‘green’ and ‘fresh’. With the focus on the waterfront, I wouldn’t be surprised if people opt for a fresh water edge to the perfume.

“It’ll smell different when we put it in the air, with the smells coming in from the rest of the shopping centre and the city. It’ll naturally go out to the city and mix with the Dundee that exists.”

For Morton, the smell of Dundee past includes the waft of sweeties from the Keiller factory. “It’s that smell like candy floss or toffee,” he says. “You can always remember certain aromas.

“The smell I’m getting here now is all fresh paint and vinyl stickers. Everything is new. It’s a fresh start.”

Dundee Design Festival runs from 10am-5pm between May 21 and 28.