The MoodLab

Mood management is important for empowering ourselves in the pursuit of a happier life and mental health. 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 very general in their application and don’t tend to address individual inner feeling efficiently.

The MoodLab project, started in Jan 2015, has been exploring whether a self-tailored creative emotion tracking could be more effective in mood management. In this MoodLab project in collaboration with the Kentish Town Health Centre’s Free Space Gallery and the Art Therapy Agency, people are encouraged to describe their emotions in colour, doodle and shapes, which could later serve as design input for fashion projects or art works. For people who manage to track their mood in this method for a period of time, they will not only further understand their behaviour and emotion patterns but also have a fashion collection made which is inspired by themselves.

This is an initiative to use design and fashion thinking to help people engage in self-study, self-analyses and self-help.

While these intuitive doodles and shapes reveal more original information of emotions and further reflect their richness by-passing the narrow channel of words, they also conceal the privacy of the participants, only to whom the subjective interpretations are known, like the ancient petroglyphs. This interesting character of creative self-tracking offered some opportunities on sharing creativity while protecting participant’s emotional privacy.