Lessons from Poptech: Understanding emotions

It is quite daunting, coming home from the PopTech conference and diving right back into work with clients. There is so much information to process, ideas to ponder and wonders to consider. I want to make sure I can capture as much as possible and pass it along to you. My goal is to review one topic at a time and get the resources your way.

My mission is aided by the wonderful visual summaries of Peter Durant.

One of the fascinating highlights for me was a presentation by Orlagh O’Brien, an Irish designer, artist and educator who led a project to better understand how people feel and express emotions.

“I wanted to question how feeling can be experienced in the body, not simply in mind. I believe that we can use familiar tools to express understanding of experience, and not be restricted to the use of photographic stereotypes,” she writes in explaining her experiment.

O’Brien asked people to target where in their body they felt specific emotions and whether the emotion came at them or radiated from them. If you click on the photo above you can get a sense of their responses.

At RapidChange we have found emotions to be useful data that helps leaders make better decisions. O’Brien’s method can be a means of visually representing feeling in an interactive, participatory manner.

Here are some of her observations, translated a bit into RapidChange language:

• Mad is a force; Glad is a field

• Mad is felt in the head and the hands, which makes sense because when the Reptilian brain kicks in gear it sends blood and oxygen from the head to the hands and feet.

• Glad is felt in the head and the chest and radiates out from the body.

• Scared is felt in the stomach, which is interesting because when we are scared the brain produces excessive cortisol. Cortisol ends up in the stomach.

• Sad is felt all over the body.

To learn more about this engaging work, go to her website, emotionallyvague.com