Feeliens

Expressing and talking about our emotions can be difficult, especially if they are negative. There can be some fear and judgement around expressing one’s feelings and the fear of being misunderstood. In some cases, there is an inability to describe how one is feeling with words. Our aim for this project was to produce a product that allows children to communicate and express their emotive state with a professional in a subtle and non-direct way.

Feeliens is our creation that allows children to create a creature with different features that represent various core emotions; Fear, Happiness, Sadness, Ok, Playful and Anger. Each emotion is represented with a different colour that was chosen through our research; eg. Happiness is yellow and anger is red. We decided to create aliens as our base as they are not gender-specific and allow the child to project their feelings onto an imaginary creature rather than creatures that actually exist and carry meanings of their own. The base for these creatures is magnetic
to allow them to be more interchangeable.

In addition to the physical product, we have also created an App that can be used by the child to document their emotions between their visits with a professional clinician/ psychologist.

Feeliens was awarded the SA Mental Health Commission Honourable Mention Award for 2019.