process book 2

dev elopment.
narratives.
After all of the experimentation, I decided to focus
on nine emotions trying to draw from a variety of
positive, negative, and neutral emotions: grief, ecstasy,
tension, present, rage, satisfaction, longing, comfort,
and silence. I also picked some common materials that
would have interesting emotional connotations from
person to person: eggs, ice, crumpled bed sheets, embroidery,
subtractive cut outs of paper, velvet, christmas
lights, cotton balls, sugar, flour. After I narrowed
my focus, I conducted 15 interviews asking questions
regarding the emotions and materials.
• Do you view this material as positive or negative?
• What emotions do you associate with this material?
• What other materials do you associate with this material?
• When was the last time you felt this emotion?
• If it is negative, what did you do to overcome this emotion?
• What symbols or objects do you associate with this emotion?
• What other emotions do you associate with this emotion?
Initially, I wanted to conduct these interviews individually so that they would be completely
honest and open with their emotional conversation. However, I ended up getting
interupted during my first interview, improvised, and made it a paired interview. This was
a major breakthrough as the two interviewees built off one another and contributed very
honest experiences.
During the interview, I did my best to type exactly what the interviewees were saying to
stay honest to their stories. Afterwards, I went through and highlighted points that were
essential to their individual stories as well as the emotion as a whole. The goal was to use
the quotes and my own experiences to create a narrative that embodied the emotion. From
this narrative I was going to connect the reader with the quotes but also with the experimental
type I chose to explore. After conducting all of the interviews, I realized that the
number of emotions I had chosen to explore might be impossible to achieve with the timeline
of one semester. So I narrowed the nine emotions down to five based on the quality
of the interviews, the quality of the narrative, and if the emotion was positive or negative:
grief, ecstasy, tension, rage, and comfort. I still hoped to achieve a balance of positive,
neutral, and negative emotions.
The last step was to determine which phrases would be expressed using experimental typography.
I went through the narrative and bolded the words I would express experimentally
based on it’s relavence to the emotion and where it was placed in the narrative. The
final narratives are as follows.