Isabella Hong – Looking Outwards – 07

In April of 2016, Stamen, a design company based in San Francisco, collaborated with the Dalai Lama to create the “Atlas of Emotions“. The project visually represents the emotions enjoyment, disgust, anger, fear and sadness as continents and was created in an attempt to guide the emotionally distressed to a state of calm.

Preliminary sketches of emotional exploration.
Preliminary sketches of emotional exploration.

The five emotions were translated into visual continents via extensive sketching and brainstorming. The analogy of continents works such that each emotion also has a set of states which in turn can lead to triggers, actions and then moods. Here is an example of what everything looks like in combination.

"This is an example of a mood, a longer-lasting cousin of the emotion that causes the related emotion to be felt more frequently and intensely. It is not always apparent what triggers a mood."
“This is an example of a mood, a longer-lasting cousin of the emotion that causes the related emotion to be felt more frequently and intensely. It is not always apparent what triggers a mood.”

This project integrates the one common link of the human race – emotions. Emotions and their timing are what make us human. The “Atlas of Emotions” stresses the universality of feelings and represents them in an accessible manner. This task is extremely difficult and I admire the fact that Stamen was able to create a tangible representation of a vague concept.

Leave a Reply