Summoning Smoke
Summoning Smoke is an olfactory method for alerting a large group of people across a wide area. Conceptually, it's like a tornado siren, church bells, and the odorant added to natural gas. Its roots go way back, even before the Theophany, when the shaman of a shire would add more wood to her bonfire, producing a large amount of fragrant smoke. After the Theophany, hearthkeepers developed incense that would be added to the fire to call the shire to liturgy.
Its liturgical use is much less prevalent at the time of First Contact, though it is used during the proclamation of the Gospel of First Meeting when the Dewfall makes contact with humans on Earth.
Different formulations of summoning smoke have been developed to serve secular purposes as well, with different odors and occasionally colors signifying different things, usually to warn of impending natural disaster or industrial accident.
Dish Storage
Yinrih, especially planetside, may store dishes and cooking utensils in something that washes, dries, and stores the dishes when not in use. The dishes are taken out of storage, used, then put directly back into storage to be washed. This minimizes the need to touch the dishes to move them from a dishwasher to a cabinet.
If they had a separate dishwasher and cabinets, they'd have to wash their paws before moving the dishes from dishwasher to cabinet, and waddle around on their hind feet to transport them so their forepaws don't touch the ground.
In general, cooking employs a lot of the same strategies as surgery, though cooks don't shed their fur the way healers do. In restaurants they may work with glove boxes.
One may be asking why they bother with manual cooking at all if they're a K2 civilization. Canonically, AI hits a hard limit near where it is today on Earth, so fully autonomous robots for complex tasks don't exist. They could use remotely operated robots similar to those seen in telemedicine.
Ooh, the smoke thing seems so cool. Makes sense too, if you can make smoke at will, its visibility from a distance means it is very plausible that itll be used similar to how we humans shout and wave our arms around to alert others and call for help.
Thanks :)
I've been wanting to incorporate incense in some way as I really like the smell, but I wanted to be unique. I mentioned a long time ago in the original thread on the CBB that some machines may use olfactory indicators in a similar way to status LEDs. This made me think of ways humans use odors to communicate. The only way I can think of is the odorant added to natural gas to tell you when there's a leak, as gas is normally odorless.
Ooh this is a really intresting idea. Id say perfumes are kinda humans communicating with odours right? The natural gas thing tho i think is the better direction, using smell to make something previously unoticed, noticeable. Heres the only way i can make sense of this concept, other animals generally view baring their teeth as a threat display but somehow humans see a subdued version of this as inviting. So imo maybe, strong, chemical smells would be associated with anger and emotional extremes and subtle natural scents may be more inviting?