Project: Mapping Emotions

The brief for this project was to create a personal psychogeographic map of a physical space or journey, transforming personal experience into a visual and interactive form. The goal was to explore how emotional data and geography intersect, and how personal perception can be communicated through mapping.

I chose to map my experiences in Winchester over a period of six months. Rather than documenting physical locations in a purely geographic sense, I wanted to represent how I felt in these spaces translating memory, emotion, and time into a visual interface.

Psychogeography explores how environments influence emotions and behavior. For this project, I interpreted that relationship through color and spatial interaction. I photographed places that I frequently visited — streets, parks, cafés, and quiet corners and later revisited these moments, recording the emotions I associated with each.

I decided to use color as a universal, intuitive emotional language:

• Teal → calm/content (my favourite colour, evoking comfort and stability)

• Yellow → happy/excited (representing energy, light, and warmth)

• Purple → curious/apprehensive (a blend of uncertainty and wonder)

By mapping these emotions, the project became both an emotional diary and a spatial record showing not only where I went, but how I felt when I was there.

1. Research

I began by studying psychogeography, emotional mapping, and subjective cartography, referencing works such as:

• Plutchik’s Wheel of Emotions (6 Seconds, 2025)

• Urban Adventure: Mapping the Emotional City (Edge Effects)

• Walking Together: Psychogeography and Psychotherapy (Chris Rose, 2016)

These readings deepened my understanding of emotional topographies and how feelings can be visualized within geographic data.

2. Data Gathering

Over six months, I took photographs across Winchester during walks, errands, and commutes. Each image was tagged with:

• The location

• The date and time

• My emotional state at that moment

I later refined the dataset by removing duplicates, similar scenes at different times, and any images containing people. This ensured that the final collection remained focused and personally meaningful.

3. Technical Development

I built the interactive map using Leaflet.js, an open-source JavaScript library for mapping interfaces, alongside OpenStreetMap for geographic data.

Each point on the map corresponded to a photograph and was marked with a colour-coded circle representing the emotion linked to that place. Clicking on a circle displayed the photo taken there, creating a dynamic link between space, image, and emotion.

The visual system of the map was designed to feel personal yet structured, balancing clarity with subjectivity.

• Colour was central - teal, yellow, and purple established a consistent emotional grammar.

• Minimal interface elements allowed the user to focus on the emotional data rather than navigation.

• Time was an implicit layer, embedded in the data sequence, showing how my emotional landscape shifted across months.

The result was a digital map that doubled as a reflective journal, inviting both introspection and exploration.

One of the main challenges was translating emotion into data without oversimplifying it. Emotions are fluid and contextual, but a map requires structure and clarity. To address this, I treated the colors as broad emotional categories rather than fixed states, acknowledging ambiguity while maintaining legibility.

Working with Leaflet.js also introduced new technical learning particularly in integrating pop-up images, managing geolocation data, and maintaining responsiveness across devices.

This project highlighted how data visualisation can be deeply personal. It showed that maps can tell emotional stories, not just geographic ones — that a line, a point, or a colour can represent not just where we are, but who we are at that moment.

By combining UX thinking with psychogeographic storytelling, I transformed everyday experiences into a layered digital artefact, one that documents both place and presence.

The process was meditative, allowing me to observe how my emotional states evolved with the seasons, routines, and spaces I occupied. Ultimately, this project became a reflection on how we move through cities, and how cities move through us.