Welcome to Emotaional Market
Collected at ArtCenter Archives and Special Collections
A speculative platform where emotions are no longer felt—they’re traded.
What if your happiness had a market value?
In the Emotional Market, your feelings are transformed into assets.
Emotions rise and fall in value, are traded for attention, and curated for visibility.
This project imagines a near-future where emotional expression is not just personal—but transactional.
It has been observed that emotions have become not only external experiences but also consuming products, which can be manipulated, sold, and even consumed...?
In today’s social media landscape, our emotions are constantly packaged, displayed, and optimized for reactions. Happiness, gratitude, and vulnerability are not just expressions—they are signals in a value-driven attention economy.
Inspired by stock markets, this project visualizes how emotional trends are shaped by external forces. The goal isn’t to reclaim “genuine” feelings, but to expose how emotional experiences are repurposed to serve social and economic interests.
Tool 01: Trade Emotional Stock
Emotions on the Rise. Or Fall.
Tool 02: Create Your Mood Wrapper
In the Emotional Market, emotions function like public stocks. Common feelings like “happiness” flood the market, driving their value down. Rare or timely emotions—like “fear” or “rage” during crises—become high-value assets.Users can track real-time “mood charts” and buy/sell feelings to increase their emotional portfolio.
Just like markets respond to economic signals, users learn to predict which feelings will gain value next.
Dress Your Feelings for Display
Your emotions aren’t raw—they’re wrapped.
Users design personalized mood wrappers—visual tokens made from color, texture, and icons that symbolize their emotional state. These wrappers are then entered into a virtual market, where others can view, rate, or “buy” them.
What you show becomes what you sell. Do your designed emotions reflect how you truly feel—or how you want to be seen?
Wrapped Like Commodities. Traded Like Stocks.
The stock market is a system of speculation, manipulation, and artificial value. It parallels how our emotions are shaped, staged, and promoted—often not for ourselves, but for others.
Wrappers for commodities represent emotional packaging—colorful, attractive, and digestible. Just like wellness culture packages emotions for mass appeal, we too curate how we wrap our feelings.
By blending these two metaphors—diversified packaging and ruthless economics—the platform critiques how emotional expression is both aestheticized and monetized. Are you feeling… or just performing?
Emotions Make Headlines
Speculative News from the Emotional Market
Emotional Market is a mirror disguised as a marketplace.
It exaggerates a truth we already feel: that our emotions are no longer fully ours.
We wrap them, polish them, post them—until the line between feeling and performing blurs.
It doesn’t offer answers.
It asks:
What is the value of a feeling in a world that sells it back to us?
And what’s left when we begin to unwrap it?
ArtCenter GradShow
What I Learned
Through Emotional Market, I learned how speculative design can uncover the hidden systems that shape our emotional lives. Translating abstract ideas like emotional commodification into visual and interactive forms pushed me to think critically about how we package, perform, and trade our feelings—both online and offline.
This project also made me reflect on my own emotional habits and how easily they’re shaped by social pressures. More than just a critique, Emotional Market became a space for me to question, visualize, and reimagine the value of emotional expression.