Emotion notation

In 2021, I performed a research and design project at Northeastern University, investigating how to display and convey emotions in a purely visual format. As my area of focus, I chose to investigate how you could create a flexible system of notation that could visually encapsulate the mood of a scene or series of scenes from a book or movie – focusing on what emotions are present, but also giving a sense of what motivations are influencing characters, what relationships exist, and what characters are physically doing.

I focused most of my research on investigating how to convey emotions in a simple, visual format. After wading through options that focused on illustrating body language or facial expression, I found a couple of people’s initial attempts to more abstractly convey emotion using lines and color, some of which felt like they had potential but were not well implemented. I decided to categorize emotions based on Robert Plutchik’s wheel of emotions so the notation would not be overly complex. I also came up with a list of 12 common motivations based on a variety of sources.

I sketched out many potential icons, shapes, and colors to represent the various emotions and sources of motivations.

Through several rounds of feedback and iteration, I designed a coherent set of icons using Adobe Illustrator to represent a character’s motivations. I ensured they were simple, intuitive, and easy to recognize even at small sizes.

I also designed notation using a combination of colors and shapes to convey emotions. When attempting to apply it to a scene, I quickly realized there are two different sets of emotions that are important to convey in a scene – what characters are actually feeling and what they are showing. It also became clear that I needed to be able to communicate the intensity of emotion, not just what emotion was present. This resulted in a flexible system where the nuances of internal and external emotions, as well as intensity, were all conveyed in a single visual ring around a character.

Next, I experimented with how to combine my various components into a single visual element that would convey the essence of a scene. My first more serious iteration was focused on looking at a single scene. I created a system for including simple visual representations of characters in the middle, with their motivations in their chests, emotions surrounding them, and the ability to include key dialogue or phrases.

After a couple of tweaks, this worked well for a single scene but when it came time to try using my notation for a series of scenes, it became obvious that a circle was not the ideal format.

Based on feedback and experimentation, I adapted it into a linear format to summarize an entire story. I increased the variation in size of both felt and expressed emotions to make it easier to quickly internalize the emotional context of a scene. To further highlight the motivations of the main character, I enlarged the symbols and placed them outside the body, although I kept motivations for secondary characters inside so you could tell who the motivation belonged to. Adding identifying features for characters also helped to follow a longer story.

The timeline for this project was quite short, so despite positive feedback, a lot remains that could be further fleshed out. This includes further refining the notation (shape, color, etc.) to make it as intuitive and clean as possible. I narrowed my scope to focus on conveying emotion and motivation, but many other key features of scenes remain that could be explored and integrated into the notation, such as topic, communication style, relationships, time, and senses. Additionally, coming up with a collection of pre-defined body positions and character-defining and background features would be important if this were to ever be integrated into user-friendly software for general use by authors, screenwriters, or others who are trying to communicate a story in a short, visual format.