Affective System
Details
Creative direction, editorial, type, & set design
Variable typeface — 108 masters
Year
2023
Credits
Support and guidance from Lucy Hitchcock, Douglass Scott, Ramon Tejada, Richard Lipton, Anita Huang, Mizuki Hanada, Ed Brown
Web development: Anmol Govinda Rao, Govinda Rao V
What is the first thing that comes to mind when you think of happiness, or anger? Usually, it is a memory of an occasion on which you felt those emotions. On its own, emotions have no form, and hence face a difficulty in being described. They are highly contextual and personal, relatable only through an experiencing a particular circumstance that cannot be feasibly replicated. My understanding of, say anger, is very different from yours, and our relations and responses to the feeling are, of course, equally different! Isn’t it a travesty that words don’t describe emotions any more than our names describe us — that they are just over-simplified representations of a complex idea?
So I began thinking to myself, can emotion be given a new visual form?
Can I truly create a new system that can cater to the complexity of the topic, and capture the nuance and scale of our psychology? If words fail to do this intricate phenomena justice, then maybe it’s time for a new way for us to communicate our feelings.
