Brief

Mood management is important for empowering ourselves in the pursuit of mental health and a happier life. Self-help books are popular but people often fail in following the text-based practices. There are many emotion tracking Apps however they are often found very general and doesn’t address individual inner feeling efficiently.

The Creative Mood Management project which starts from Jan 2015, explores whether a self-tailored emotion tracking could be more effective in mood management. People are encouraged to describe their emotions in color, doodle and shapes which could later serve as design input for fashion projects or artworks. For people who manage to track their mood in this method for a period of time, they will not only harvest their behavioral and emotion patterns but also have fashion collections made which is inspired by themselves. This is an initiative to use design and fashion thinking to help people engage in self-study, self-analysis and self-help.

Stage

1. Identify collaborating institutes and organizations as well as individual participants;
2. Discuss and confirm working methods with professional advisers;
3. Workshop duration: (8 weeks of creative emotion tracking and meet up regularly to discuss and reflect mood management as well as make fashion samples);
4. Develop App version if successful in funding application;
5. Fashion collection development (4-6weeks);
6. Exhibition and sales to raise fund for mental health charity or social projects;

Useful Info

– The self-tracking can be done on diary (designed paper notebook); or via an App, although the artist is now seeking funding opportunity to improve the function of the App version.

– The personal emotion data can be kept totally private and under personal protection. For the fashion design project, participants do not have to share their emotional tracking data, but only the colours, doodles, shape, texture track that they have accumulated during their mood tracking.

Related Image and Exhibition

1. Images: on Fashion collection design informed by Creative self-tracking on emotion, please click here to see more.

2. Exhibition: Degree Show – Silhouette of Anxiety, Patterns of Emotion, Victoria House basement, Feb 2015

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