Emotionally Vague – Color Coding emotions

Emotionally Vague is a research project about emotion, sensation and feelings. In order to produce the study, the researcher interviewed 250 people from 35 countries, between the ages of 6 and 75. Each final survey contained five sheets of A4 paper, one reusable colour swatch board, a red marker pen and a memento card. The result is a multi layered map of emotions and how people reflect them in their bodies. The color coding looks like a DNA sequence with the different tones that people chose associated with each emotion.

“Emotions can be overwhelming. But not always so. They affect our thoughts and perceptions far more than we realise. It is well established that we are subliminally affected by visual media, and particularly in terms of unconscious emotions, drives and feelings.

I wanted to question how feeling can be experienced in the body, not simply in mind. I believe that we can use familiar tools to express understanding of experience, and not be restricted to the use of photographic stereotypes.

Can people describe their visceral feelings of emotion visually, and if so, would any patterns arise? In order to answer this, I had to develop some way of asking people to reflect on and describe their private feelings in a simple, repeatable manner, the results of which could be correlated visually and demographically.

By gathering concepts of feeling by word, colour and line and creating visual languages for anger, joy, fear, sadness and love - a kind of democratic visual language is created - a backwards-brand”.

Found via information aesthetics.

Thoughts on Happiness

(Cross posted from Hyperkinesis Blog)

Just found a pretty odd event taking place in The Netherlands on the first week of November, the first Thoughts on Happiness Conference. I thought it was interesting that they will be exploring happiness both from scientific research and “daily life” perspectives covering topics like “Happiness in the workplace” or “An evolutionary approach to quality of life”.

The reason I find the event a bit “odd” (due to lack of a better word) is because it’s so non-Dutch to explore these topics. For people outside The Netherlands, it may not be apparent, but for those of us who have spent a considerable length of time here, this event appears to be a significant detour from the usual Calvinist mentality that more or less shapes this country’s sociological landscape. It is by no means a negative trait, just that normally, happiness is not a subject discussed in the open by Dutch people.

I am of course, slightly disappointed that there is no session to explore how the arts and related activities can contribute to social and individual happiness, but this is the first event of its kind in The Netherlands as far as I know, so there is a chance it might be included in future conferences. Alas, the conference fee is way too steep for me to just attend out of curiosity, but I will at least, be keeping an eye on their blog, which covers some interesting matters as well.