Emotion Space Self-Construction

Overview

"My university is similar to other Chinese colleges, which lack enough facilities to provide private spaces for their students. When you feel depressed, sad, or breakdown, there is no separate room for you to deal with your negative emotions. You can hear others crying and shouting from the corridors, which makes everyone feel embarrassed. This situation can also happen to people living in large cities today. Life is fast-paced, and pressure exists everywhere. However, these people don't have time or space to mitigate, and the negative emotions constantly aggregate."

This is a freelance activity. This project is about emotion and based on my observation towards things happened around me as well as my own experiences. This project includes two types of presentation, one is a unity game called Contend For Room, another is a performance Emotional “Monster”.

Background

Nowadays, we spend most of our time in public spaces, such as offices, schools, subway stations, and even the places many people live in are shared apartments.

The long exposure time in public places, makes us feel squeezed as we don’t have a private space to deal with our emotions, especially negative emotions. Therefore, suppression becomes the main method for emotion regulation. However, according to the research, suppression can lead to some bad consequences, such as a decrease in memory ability, an increase in blood pressure, and worse mood repair.

If suppression is not a good idea to deal with our negative emotions, what could be? We can see that one of the prominent problems is the lack of private space. So in this project, I propose a theory to construct an emotional space, which can” extend our private space, so that we will not feel squeezed and help us to deal with our emotions.

Core Theory

Emotion Assemblage

It is an aggregation of any thing, for example, a piece of music, a dog, the sky you see, that can be accepted by yourself under current emotional circumstances.

Emotion Space

Emotion space is a cognitive form and can be seen as an extension of private space, as opposed to physical form. It is composed of emotion assemblages.

Emotion Space Construction

The construction process of emotional space is an active process. At first, treat an individual as a primitive emotional assemblage. Then the individual looks for each surrounding element and judg- es whether he expects it to appear around him under this circumstance. The accepted elements together with the primitive emotional assemblage combine into a larger emotional assemblage.

At normal state, our internal body can exchange emotion with public space, which can make our emotion achieve a dynamic balance. We can easily receive and respond to emotions that surroundings bring to us. When people in negative emotion, the exchange process can not work well. The internal bad emotion is dashing on body, while the emotions outside also influence people and make them feel uncomfortable. They requests more private space. After people succeed in constructing an emotion space, their private spaces extend.

Game Design

The game is developed on Unity and illustrates a scene to show when people need and how to create an emotion space.

The more information about this project can be found on github.
The game can be played on website.

Performance

This section shows the theory in depth through a wearable installation and performances, using our bodies to connect our emotional spaces physically. Hence, this part develops my affordances to identify other emotional assemblages and the process has been documented through a film.

Materials and Design Process

Design Status

Negative and positive states are indicated by the color of the tube material wrapped around the clothing.