The Shape of Feeling

The Shape of Feeling animates your emotions as you speak, transforming your words into evolving digital sculptures. Grounded in affective psychology and embodied cognition, it features a library of 35 symbolic forms, each designed to capture how a feeling moves through our minds and bodies. This platform listens, interprets your emotional patterns, and visualizes them as dynamic forms. The tool helps people recognize and reflect on their feelings as they arise, strengthening emotional literacy and self-awareness.

The process involved individually designing each emotion-based sculpture and building a speech-to-visualization system that responds instantly to verbal input. The emotions were curated based on their relevance to verbal expression, prioritizing feelings that naturally show up in speech. Each sculpture was rendered with code to visually reflect how an emotion feels, using parameters like amplitude, movement, and texture to capture its physical and mental qualities. For example, joy is characterized by high arousal and positive activation, leading to increased heart rate, smiling, and a sense of openness. The design reflects this through a bright yellow, glossy, bouncing sphere that pulses rhythmically, symbolizing heightened activity in the dopaminergic reward system and the natural social and contagious nature of joy. With the library of visualizations integrated into the platform, people are then able to speak out loud and watch their feelings take shape.