Designing Emotional LanguageWhat if you could see the dance of language?
Consider writing down your 8 favorite letters.
Letters in Motion: The Synesthetic Dance of Intention
What emotional colors do you associate with the letter 'S'? How does 'K' feel in your body? We asked hundreds of people to identify their eight favorite letters and describe their emotional responses to each. Remarkably, patterns emerged across the culture—evidence of a collective synesthesia we rarely acknowledge.
Our dancers then transformed these letter-emotion mappings into movement, creating a physical vocabulary that explored what's preserved and what's lost when translating between systems of meaning. Like a game of emotional telephone, each transition—from symbol to feeling to movement—revealed the beautiful imperfections of human communication and the rich terrain where intentions and interpretations diverge.
While studying at the Royal Academy of Art in Belgium, I compiled many of these works into essays on humanizing experiences in art and design.