The human's olfactory sense is closely intertwined with parts of the human brain that directly controls human emotions (Spence, 2015; De Luca and Botelho, 2020); therefore, olfactory stimulus has been widely used by sensory marketers for many years to connect with their customers on emotional level and cultivate a strong brand awareness and loyalty (Morrin and Ratneshwar, 2003; Roschk et al, 2017). However, olfactory stimulus has not received as much attention as other sensory stimuli, particularly visual and auditory stimuli, by the design research community to date. Although the body of extant literature in the marketing discipline explores the effect of olfactory stimulus on customer emotions and behaviour, an empirical study context of most of these studies lies in retail and tourism sectors. As a result, there is still a gap in the current knowledge as to how to leverage olfactory stimulus as design material to design for the aesthetics of an interactive experience between human and AI.

This research responds to this gap by taking a close look at the potential use of olfactory stimulus in the context of human and AI interaction and introducing an Olfactory-Inspired Aesthetics of Experience Design Framework for Human-Computer Interaction. The contributions from this research is threefold: first, this study offers an interdisciplinary perspective which situates at the intersection of design and services marketing. In doing so, it directly responds to the call from the service marketing research community which asks for further contributions from interdisciplinary studies to advance the current knowledge in smart service system, especially for building a better understanding of actor-to-actor interaction within a complex smart service system; secondly, this study explores the human's olfactory sense as design material which is under-explored in the design discipline (Obrist et al, 2014); and lastly, this study examines the lack of user engagement and the user retention problem in smart service system through the theoretical lens of service dominant logic, while it takes a research through design approach to explore rich details of human emotions and behaviour in the context of human-AI interaction. Its hybrid approach to combine the theoretical foundation from marketing and methodological approach from design discipline is original, and it introduces design experiment as a legitimate research method for exploratory research to scholars from non-design disciplines.