Materializing: Sit-Down Workshop

[Sitting down together] to make emotions visible and tangible

New to Materializing? Go here first.

What is it for?

It is a mobile workshop activity where participants make objects that Materialize their feelings. This tool involves light facilitation that lets participants pick and choose how they want to reflect on their experience.

Impact

This tool enables participants to articulate how they feel about an experience through the process of making and provides a structure and framework for reflecting and capturing insights.

Participants’ State of Mind

open, creative, reflective, introspective

Level of Complexity (1–5)

4

Time of Participation

60 min to 120 min

Emotion-Centered Design

Use Cases

The following illustrates Materializing in action and more specifically, how Sit-Down Workshops can be practiced.

1. Materializing: Axes of Your Identity
2. Materializing: Desired Rituals

1. Materializing: Axes of Your Identity

Making visible and tangible people’s identity and how they express it.

Project
Island of Full Expression at Wonderlab Playdate. Melbourne, 2018
Anne Gibbons and Myriam Diatta

Individuals first sit down to three activities: naming places and things that help them maintain the axes of their identity. They then collage a full-scale expression of their identity. Finally they build an object that symbolizes what idea or message they want to remind themselves of.

Participants each hand-build and see what makes up their own individual identity so they can name what works for them. They Materialize who they are more fully and without apology.

Image Description: Two facilitators and four participants sit around a table and individually collage. One person is reaching for an image in a large pile of printed photographs, paintings, and drawing. Others are cutting images out and gluing. Photos by Anne Gibbons and Myriam Diatta

Image Description: Three photographs each capturing blue strips of paper, a hand-made postcard, a collage on green stock paper, and a hand-made object with a pink tag on it. The text is illegible. One of the objects in one of the photos is a grassy string knotted into a circle. The second is an orange feather. The third is a tangle of a small ribbed plastic tube, string, yellow tape, and white mesh. Photos by Anne Gibbons and Myriam Diatta

2. Materializing: Desired Rituals

Making visible and tangible desired rituals for emotional wellbeing.

Project
Designing Emotional Tools workshop and Ritual as Emotional Tool workshop by Matter-Mind Studio.

In this Materializing workshop, participants explore different types of emotional tools, as well as various ways of designing them.

Image Description: Left: A room of about twenty people seated in two long rows of tables sit and work and listen to the facilitator who is at the head of the room making an announcement. Two right images: A hand-made abstract object sits on top of a filled in worksheet with writing and drawings. The text is illegible. Photos by Colleen Doyle

Image Description: Left Image: 7 participants smile looking closely at worksheets and hand-made abstrct objects lined up in a row. Right image: A hand-made abstract object made of two clear cups stacked lip to lip with confetti inside. It sits on top of a filled in worksheet with writing and drawings. The text is illegible. Photos by Colleen Doyle

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