Our Emotional Tango with Objects — Part 2

It all started one day when I finally organized my wallet. And I found numerous receipts overflowing.

I laid out all the receipts in front of me. And pieces of memories came back to me. I remembered that coffee I bought before an interview. I was nervous and it somehow made me feel more confident. I remembered that dinner before a friend was about to leave New York. The food was expensive and bad, but the environment had a warm feeling to it and subtly made it easier to say goodbye…

I am intrigued by how unconsciously we all become receipt collectors. They are pieces of evidence tracing our consumption voluntarily. They fill up those tiny spaces around us silently without any particular use.

Looking more closely into the information captured by receipts, most of them are standard format with the product name, unit price, quantity, sale, time and location. On the top, there’s brand name, logo and address. There are marks of an exchange, a financial flow and a provider-receiver relationship.

However, it also strikes me how much is left out of that standard format.

How about the experience of my purchase? How about the emotions I invest in it? It never is just a one-way relationship. And all these feelings and emotions are essentially part of what we “consume.”

Taking the idea further, I started a project called receipt of feelings, where I designed receipt-shaped postcard to draw insights on people’s emotional relationships with the items they purchase.

People are asked to fill in the postcards step by step and then toss it into a mailbox to be mailed back to me. Below is one of the postcards I received:

Receipt of feelings to be continued…

At Matter-Mind Studio, we charge products and services with emotions.