Kate McLean: Finding new route to mapping the Capital

As I stepped out of Waverley Station in July 2009 and saw the News Steps for the first time, I knew instinctively that Edinburgh was a city where I wanted to live. I had tears in my eyes. Was it the architecture, the rock or the air?

Within half an hour of arriving I was feeling the texture of the stone, smelling shop interiors on Victoria Street, hearing the sounds of the countryside in the middle of the city, watching sunlight flit up the steep steps.

I'm a master of fine arts graphic design student at Edinburgh College of Art exploring the idea of "sensory maps". These are maps of cities that highlight the smells, textures, tastes, sights and sounds. For the past two years I have been developing a way of profiling cities by our sensory experiences of them and creating maps of my findings.

Edinburgh is my flagship city, "mapped" for the first time by taste, smell, sight and touch.

I started by exploring. I looked at the city districts and texture. What makes Tollcross different from Morningside? What is the New Town in comparison with the Old Town? Kind ladies in Stockbridge gave me some starting points - the cobbles and the tweeds of the Old Town in contrast to the smooth stone facades and cashmere jumpers of the New Town.

I walked and ran through much of the city absorbing textures, finding the natural boundaries. "Gritty", "fluffy", "contoured", "delicate", "grassy", "linear" are all words in my sketchbook.

The final map is an item that you want to reach out and caress - to run your fingers along the raised pathways, to rest on the Old Town and twirl an index finger along the narrow flat strips between the "cobbles", to scoot down through the indents of Canongate and head south along the flattened outcrops of Arthur's Seat.

There is one over-powering smell in Edinburgh - malt fumes from the Caledonian Brewery. But I discovered that a single smell is not enough to represent a city. I associate the very same malt fumes with another UK city more than 200 miles away. So I started asking people what their scent associations for Edinburgh were.

In Henderson Wines I heard about the lingering aromas of the boys' toilets in Morningside primary school. A Polish immigrant mentioned the distinctive odour of the iodine coming from the seaweed of Portobello and Crammond. He swears he smells it as soon as he lands at the airport. French tourists pointed out the mustiness drifting up into the air from the city's vaults and underground streets.

In February in Edinburgh highland water falls from the skies in a form that alternates between frozen and liquid. It is cold and wet. Bruntsfield is still beautiful. The tenements, dampened, become darker. The views are moodier, equally darkened by the deep blue-grey sky that merges with the sea.

The supermarkets compensate with foods to cheer the coldest bodies - haggis pizza, neeps and tatties, cullen skink, plentiful shortbread, oatcakes. The queues in the fish and chip shop opposite my flat seem a little longer. In this cold our bodies crave fat. Many of the tastes and foods of Edinburgh are linked to the weather conditions. In response to these fat calories I constructed an elevation map of the Scottish diet - a heart-stopping fat calorie intake over a period of 24 hours. Angus, my favourite Bruntsfield butcher, loaned me a terrine tin and sold me four pounds of beef dripping to use as the raw materials. The end result resembled Salisbury Crags, so much so that I finished the taste map with small toy figures to resemble the constant stream of people roaming along the ridge.

Ask any visitor to Edinburgh what visual memory they have of the city and 90 per cent of the time the answer will be "the Castle". When I recounted this tale to long-term residents their response was often "but it is very similar to Stirling".

Looking at the Usher Hall in silhouette, I recalled the silhouettes of Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Closer to my studio at Edinburgh College of Art, the view through Chapel Wynd over to Castle Rock summed up this city's views. They appear for unexpected moments between tall buildings and rocky outcrops.

The silhouettes of Edinburgh buildings in themselves are not instantly recognisable, but the small gaps through which you glimpse them make them unique.

The term "panorama" was first used in Edinburgh, coined by Irish painter Robert Barker to describe his paintings of the city in 1792. Edinburgh views are extreme vertical and horizontal panoramas. My map of this is a kaleidoscope of lines indicating where you might like to start looking to find your own memorable panorama.

Edinburgh is where this journey begins. There's to be a smell map at the Science Festival in April and hopefully another at the airport in October. By 2025 I want to have sensory maps in 100 cities worldwide. That's 100 cities communicating their sensory identities, a pool of sensory memories from which every visitor takes home their own personal collection.