Emotion and Communication
A workshop designed and led by Xinglin Sun and Caroline Claisse at the Weston Park Museum for the Festival of Social Science in Sheffield. A part of AHRC founded project:Designing Video Games for Hospitalised Childern.
Inspired from both our previous workshop and research about ‘Tangible Emotion’, participants were asked to contribute to create an installation with us by creating a ‘quilt’ of stories and emotions which hopefully could be displayed in a children’s hospital to encourage conversation and communication between the hospitalised children and hospital play specialists to express their emotions.
The quilt was in a special form from the ordinary quilt, as no stitching was required. We pushed the traditional concept of quilting to a new dimension: Emoji quilt had three layers of transparent balls featuring the following components:
- Face (line drawing)
- Story + image
- Materials (colors, textures etc…)
Step 1, drawing.
First the participants picked an image printed from our game Hospital Heights ©. They cut images of hospital and/or play context out and they were asked to draw a face on the transparent ball in response to how the image would make them feel.
Step 2, story.
Then, participants wrote a personal story inspired from the visual and placed both their image and story within the second transparent ball.
Step 3, material.
Finally, they picked a third ball on the table and created a visual composition inspired from their personal story, feeling and images. A wide range of materials were provided to the participant to manipulate and put inside the three ball as a representation of emotion from the materiality perspective.
Workshop design and leader, installation fabrication, collaboration with Caroline Claisse. Photo by Xinglin Sun.
Xinglin Sun 