Wear Emotions
Based on the last week's presentation, our group mainly discovered body sensory functions. During this week, we decided to reveal how organisms feel the environment and make appropriate responses for survival.
Figure 1: The body maps illustrated the emotions associated with words (Nummenmaa et al, 2014, p. 2, fig. 2).
Somatosensory - relating to or denoting a sensation (such as pressure, pain, or warmth) which can occur anywhere in the body.
In conventional scientific understanding (Jack et al., 2014) is that there are six "classic" emotions, but new research (The Atlantic, 2014) suggests there may only be 4 "basic" emotions: happy, sad, afraid/surprised, and angry/disgusted.
Our prototypes were designed to "wear emotions", participants would wear what they actually feel or what they want to represent. Each of us explored one emotion.
Afraid (Qendresa)
Angry (Alex)
Sadness (Maria)
Happy (Svaney)
The Relationship Between Colour/Texture and Emotion.
Based on these emotions, we decided to create squares with colour + texture that represents one of the base emotions.
1. Colour
We used Plutchik’s wheel of emotions (Figure 2) to explore the colours associated with the emotions we wanted to represent
Happiness/Joy - yellow
Sadness - blue
Fear/Afraid - green
Anger - red
Figure 2: Robert. P,. (2011) Plutchik’s Wheel of Emotions.
2. Texture
Emotions associated with different textures during touch.
We referred Iosifyan and Korolkova's excellent study to explore the textures associated with the emotions during touch.
"People associated touching different
textures with distinct emotions. Textures associated with each of the basic emotions were identified." (Iosifyan and Korolkova, 2019)
The data (Iosifyan and Korolkova, 2019, p. 10, table 1) shows medians and interquartile ranges of emotional ratings of textures
Created "Happiness"
My task was to create 4 squares to explain happiness, after reading articles about colour and textures associated with emotions, I tired to use "happy materials" to design my squares, I chose soft towel, hand warmer, cotton, candy, sweater, toy slime, glitter and flowers to create my squares, and most of them are yellow. In the following picture, I explained why they felt happy.
Prototype Making
Thursday morning, our group gathered to make our models, everyone created 4 emotional textures, so we had 16 squares. We used velcro to stick pieces on legwarmers with 3 holes so that both people wear it and people touch it all could feel materials.
Presentation&Feedback
We invited participants to choose squares then take it in turns to be blindfolded and guess the other person’s emotions based on the textures chosen, after that, we interviewed them how they feel about it? Do they feel happy or sad?
Overall, our experience translated well on the day and we were happy with how it went. People liked our ideas all based on scientific research, one suggestion was that some materials made them confused, the same square may make people happy or angry, I already knew that our prototypes were quite "personal" because different people have different feelings about different materials. It wasn’t a negative, as the sentence in brief, "Skin is so often tied to the individual". Although the result didn't turn out the way we expected, we still learned a lot about skin expression.
References
Jack, R.E., Garrod, O.G. and Schyns, P.G. (2014) Dynamic facial expressions of emotion transmit an evolving hierarchy of signals over time. Current biology, 24(2), pp.187-192.
Losifyan, M. and Korolkova, O. (2019) Emotions associated with different textures during touch. Consciousness and cognition, 71, pp.79-85.
Nummenmaa, L., Glerean, E., Hari, R. and Hietanen, J.K. (2014) Bodily maps of emotions. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 111(2), pp.646-651.
Sixseconds(2011) Plutchik’s Wheel of Emotions: Exploring the Emotion Wheel. Available at: https://www.6seconds.org/2020/08/11/plutchik-wheel-emotions/ (Accessed: 9 November 2020)
The Atlantic(2014) New Research Says There Are Only Four Emotions. Available at: https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/02/new-research-says-there-are-only-four-emotions/283560/ (Accessed: 8 November 2020)