A social experiment in designing space for emotions & community.
A place to just be yourself.
Make room to play.
Make space to breathe.
The Feelings Playground is a four-part interactive playspace for adults to connect with 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 rest, breath, and movement.
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. From September to December 2024, we will be holding four play labs in Phoenix, AZ open to volunteer and invited participants who are open to being a part of the creative process. If you are interested in joining the adventure, send a quick email to info[at]danceswithtech.com.
The final playground vision includes 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.
Special thanks to industrial design expert and academic collaborator Hazal Gumus-Ciftci.
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.
