A social playspace for emotions & community
Make room to play
Create room to feel
Imagine & build an emotion toolkit
The Feelings Playground is a playground for adults to feel their feelings. It encourages connection to four core emotions: sadness, anger, joy, and surprise. It will cultivate a shared experience that encourages you to feel and express your feelings socially, facilitate larger social conversations around the importance of recognizing and naming emotions, and processing emotions through intentional movement, rest, and breath.
The Playlab series is a participant-based exploration space to imagine possibilities for what a feelings playground could look and feel like, and a toolkit of ideas you can take home, explore, and share.
Playlab Goals
To design your own playground space to feel your feelings in pairs or trios. What would a physical space need to have in it so you could build something that fits your social/emotional needs for a specific emotion (sadness, anger, joy, and surprise).
About the Playlab experience
Think of the experience as a workshop that is thoughtfully and lovingly designed to offer opportunities to connect to your body and a specific emotion. From that point of naming and connection you are invited to create something for that emotion that might help you and future playground participants. The invitation is to feel your feeling, acknowledge it, imagine what would help you feel the feeling in a physical/social space, and to explore crafting a physical thing for it (using cardboard, fabric, chairs, tables, and craft supplies). You have the option to work in duos or trios to invite the social element of creation together. By the end of the playlab, you will have made some kind of tactile thing you can touch, lie or sit on, wrap around, move through or with, or otherwise experience in some way and share your creation with the group. Everyone will try each other's idea out. At the end, each participant will be asked to reflect on their experience on their own and then share together as a group. The hope is that you will take away some tools and ideas for moving through your feelings at home and with your circles of connection (and maybe even some new friends!).
How to Play
The installation is in the research and development phase, which means that we are exploring the possibilities of what this playground might look, sound, feel, and move like. In the workshop, you will explore building a toolkit for a specific emotion.
From October to December 2024, we will be holding four play labs in Phoenix, AZ, and additional play labs over zoom. These workshop sessions are open to volunteer and invited participants who are interested to being a part of the creative process. Interested in joining the playlab?
We are currently looking for 10 people per play lab workshop to participate.
There are 2 ways to play: either IN-PERSON in Phoenix, AZ or over Zoom!
Are you ready to embark on a creative adventure that brings you closer to your emotions? We invite you to join The Feelings Playground Playlab, a unique and interactive experience designed to help you feel, express, and connect with your emotions in a playful, social way.
What is the Feelings Playground Playlab?
It’s a workshop for adults to explore the four core emotions—sadness, anger, joy, and surprise—through intentional movement, rest, and breath. You’ll work with others to design physical spaces that encourage emotional expression and connection. Whether it’s through quiet reflection, conversation, crafting, or creativity, this experience will deepen your understanding of your feelings and how to feel them.
What to Expect:
- Explore your emotions in a supportive environment.
- Collaborate with others to design a space that helps you feel and express a specific emotion.
- Use materials like cardboard, fabric, and craft supplies to create tactile structures that reflect your emotional needs.
- Share your creations and try out each other’s ideas, ending with a group reflection on the experience.
- By the end of the session, you’ll walk away with new tools to navigate your emotions and a deeper connection to your feelings, body, and community. Plus, you might leave with some new friendships!
This is your chance to be part of the research and development phase of this exciting project. Your participation will help shape what The Feelings Playground could look, sound, feel, and move like in the future!
Sign Up Now: Don’t miss the opportunity to be part of this groundbreaking exploration. Reserve your spot via one of the links below!
Details for In-person Playlabs in Phoenix, AZ
(location address confirmed after sign up)
Sunday Dec. 8 - 1-5pm [emotion: sadness] - location Central Phoenix
Saturday Dec. 14 - 10am-2pm [emotion: joy] - location Downtown Phoenix
Who can join? We’re seeking 10 participants per workshop to help co-create this unique experience.
Details for In-person Playlabs in Phoenix, AZ
Saturday Dec 14 - 4-7pm [emotion: joy] - ZOOM
Sunday Jan 5 - 2-5pm [emotion: surprise] - ZOOM
Saturday Jan 18 - 9am-12pm [emotion: anger] - ZOOM
Who can join? We’re seeking 10 participants per workshop to help co-create this unique experience.
All zoom sessions will be held in PST/MST (Arizona) timezone
PROJECT INSPIRATION, a note from Ri Lindegren:
The idea for this project came from many directions between 2023-2024. I was learning how to sit with difficult emotions and actually process them through my body, as I navigated challenging lifequakes personally and professionally. The sociopolitical landscape felt like it continued to implode/explode with violence and people hurting people all around. Complicated layers of history and oppression and injustice. There was a lot of grief to sit with. And in feeling all the feelings, I was able to move through my own sadness. Find anger and vocalize it. Be surprised by my surprise. And find moments of joy that made the rest of the difficult sitting easier to navigate. I was inspired/led by Buddhist meditation teachers and yoga practitioners, racial and gender justice activists, dance and somatic movement practitioners, and physical therapists and bodyworkers.
The spark for this project really launched with this idea/need for a communal screambox (which I swear one day I will successfully create). It also came from my own exploration of physical postures and movements as a dance and yoga facilitator. I noticed how asking my students to jump literally brought a smile to their faces (and mine), even if they/I/we were having a rough day. Any posture where my head was below my heart helped ease sadness, anxiety, and depression. In one of the yoga classes I taught at ASU, the students reflected that they were learning to listen to their bodies. I think that was the most beautiful gift I have ever received as a teacher. I hope that in holding space for people to focus on a singular emotion (in all its branches of complexity and nuances), a similar moment of listening can happen.
I have imagined several different iterations of this project. The original idea was that it would be a literal playground built by the community, for the community filled with low-tech interactivity. Since I live in Phoenix, AZ, it would most likely have to be indoors, in a community center or museum. I co-imagined a version with Hazal Gumus-Ciftci that was a four-room shade structure to built outside in the desert 110 degree plus daily heat. I realized quickly that trying to build a singular physical structure right now was not as interesting, or as helpful to the people who might want to play on/in/around it, as trying to understand what people might actually need for it to be, and what they might imagine it might be. So this is a "research and development phase," and it's also a dreaming/scheming/magical realism/prototyping possibilities and let's build a toolkit phase.
So the next iteration is still to be determined...and I hope you will co-create whatever the next spark of inspiration for a feelings playground might be.
Rough sketch of an outdoor version of the Feelings Playground by Hazal Gumus-Cifti
INITIAL VISION:
This was my version 1.0 imagination station:
The final playground vision will include resting spaces that are slightly inverted, extra wide, and well-cushioned with an audio guide for moving through sadness; a communal screambox that transmutes screams into different symphonies of sound; a mini-trampoline river that invites jumping for joy with photo documentation at the height of the jump; and a touch-sensitive low-light tunnel that invites movement through a soft tactile environment. QR codes provide opportunities for the audience to engage directly with the work, upload photos, videos, audio messages, and to dive deeper into the stories behind it. As participants move through the experience and encounter different structures, objects, and media, they will be encouraged to connect to their bodies and emotions through exploration, rest, reflection, and most of all, play.
The Feelings Playground is made possible through the Artists to Work Grant from the Phoenix Office of Arts & Culture and the Artist Opportunity Grant from the Arizona Commission on the Arts.
Special thanks to industrial design expert and academic collaborator Hazal Gumus-Ciftci.
Graphic Design by Rushmika Malik.
Production planning made in partnership with Jeremy Williams and Convergences Theater Collective.
Additional thanks to Arizona State University students from the spring 2024 graduate industrial design class and undergraduate media for dance class for playing along in the first ideation session.
