Feeling London - mapping emotions

Agency Personal

Role Research, art direction, design, embossing

The genesis of this project was a curiosity about how people respond emotionally to living in cities.

London’s transport zones one and two were marked out on a map and participants were asked to draw/write on a translucent overlay how they felt about particular areas.

Some areas generated consistently positive or negative emotions from participants when the overlays were superimposed to produce an ‘emotional map’.

Part of the challenge was how best to present the results of this research, and the final outcome is a set of two posters, compressing the research data into positive and negative responses.

The positive responses are embossed to show the areas generating happy and positive emotions in London. The second poster, showing the negative emotions, is debossed.

The idea behind this emotional map is that like the emotions it shows, it can only be felt and not clearly seen.

Mapping the scans in Adobe Illustrator in preparation for embossing them.

Much trial and error was involved in producing the dies for variable-depth embossing and debossing. Hand cutting, although very labour intensive, produced the best results.