Making leftover feelings from troubled times more palatable.
Inspired by my mother's act of love in preparing Traditional Chinese herbal soups during stressful times, Leftover Feelings is a playful space, stored in a soup packet, for people to reflect and represent their feelings and experiences in troubled times that can be difficult to confront and as a result, get pushed aside. It uses stories, metaphors and visuals to help people reflect produce and their own stories through Traditional Chinese Medicine concepts along with visual methods, creating their own comforting soup.
This project was run and conducted in my honours year as a workshop, exploring how cross cultural metaphors and participatory storytelling can represent overlooked everyday narratives and perspectives around mental wellbeing.
This work has been selected to be exhibited in the Australian Design Centre's 'Beyond Design as Usual.'
The Workshop
The final workshop oversaw 18 participants attending with creative and non creative backgrounds. Prior to this, the workshop was iterated three times before its final structure. To read more of its behind the scenes and findings, head on over to Leftover Thoughts!
User Journey map outlining workshop structure
The workshop consists of three stages, Preparation, Cooking and Sharing.
It all starts with a letter...
The entry point and narrative of the workshop comes in a letter sent from a friend with a soup packet that asks the participant to cook to bring to a potluck party being hosted. The space is set in a world where everyone is a traveller who go on journeys to different worlds.
The following activities and stages in the workshop are stored in a recipe book.
Preparation
Once reading the letter, participants undergo the Preparation stage where they create their traveller, and build a world that reflects their response to a series of prompts around a troubled time they faced in the past, or in the present or a worry for the future. The purpose of worldbuilding is to create a safe space for people to explore these troubling moments.
Particpants then undergo mark making on the body map to visualise how they might have felt physically in that 'world', inspired by Traditional Chinese Medicine beliefs on how the physical and mind are closely intertwined.
Cooking
Cooking involves mark making emotions onto provided herb cards as well as participants creating their own ingredient inspired by their world. They dedicate an emotion to that ingredient that might not be covered by the herb cards.
These patterns form the visuals for the soup that they can create on the paper plate through collaging or drawing to reflect how they felt in that moment. Participants then bring the soup to life by filling a Soothing Soup check form that allows them to further build upon their creation.
Sharing
This stage concludes the end of the workshop where the potluck party takes place. Here, participants share their soups and their stories to each other.
Make your own Leftover Feelings workshop here! A condensed slide deck will be made available soon.
The Material
The workshop material, stored in a Traditional Chinese medicine inspired soup packet, consists of a letter from a friend, a paper plate, two concertinas containing the stages of the workshop in the form of recipes, a Healing Herb red packet with the ingredient cards and a Soothing Soup check form.
The Soups
A menu of soothing soups produced from the workshop. Each soup contains a story of a troubled time, leftover feelings, a sprinkle of reflection a dash of creativity.
This project was completed as part of the Bachelor of Design in Visual Communication Honours degree at the University of Technology Sydney. A massive thank you to Andrew Burrell, Jacquie Lorber-Kasunic, Georgina Hibberd, my peers and my friends
for your support and contributions to this project.
for your support and contributions to this project.