Beneath Language: Visualizing Emotion Through Design
Esther Klingbiel
How can we visualize the unseen? The arts of mathematics, language, and science have, over the course of history, been compounded into visual symbols and systems that help to understand the natural world around us.
Yet no such visual system exists, in complete, of the experience of emotion and mental illness. For this project I avoid showing viewers what or how emotion should be expressed visually. Instead, I am proposing a series of replicable visual systems that are evocative of the experiences of certain emotional states. I am also looking to translate the common practices of modern-day psychology and psychiatry into these systems. It is a bridge between the highly structured, rule, and fact-based world of clinical psychology and a potentially structured practice of design.
I am a methodological designer. I invest most heavily in creating a distinct set of working rules for myself when creating anything visually complex. In this way, rules free my creative abilities because they allow such abilities to exist within distinct boundaries. It is important to understand this because I have employed rule sets and systems (a kind of conceptual artist’s approach) throughout my project. The outcome of my work is not the most important aspect of whatever I create.