Germany’s first ‘experience world’ for mental and emotional health

"Emotional Matter - I'll Be by Myself Now" is Germany's first ‘experience world’ dedicated to mental and emotional health. At several interactive stations, GedankenKraftWerk invites visitors to explore their emotions and senses. Designed by MAST, Emotional Matter aims to soothe the senses using natural materials, soft colors, and semi-transparent fabrics, ensuring that the visitor and their experience remain the focal point. 

Investigating mental health both personally and collectively

The modular exhibition consists of five interactive stations: Emotional Landscape, Refuelling Station, Path to acceptance, Emotional Compass, and Strong piece. As visitors make their way through these exhibits, they explore a wide spectrum of emotions, learn about various coping mechanisms, and gain a deeper understanding of their inner world. Beyond the individual experience, the exhibition also serves a collective goal: at the beginning and end of the exhibition, visitors participate in a study by scanning a QR code. The information collected is used to help investigate mental health.

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Interactive exhibits inviting visitors to get in touch with their emotions
The first exhibit, Emotional Landscape, aims to explore the diversity of emotions and to enlarge visitors’ emotion vocabulary. The further visitors wander through multiple layers of semi-transparent curtains. The first layer contains words that refer to basic emotions, like anger or love, while the words on the secondary layers represent more in-depth, detailed emotions.

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Refuelling Station then presents visitors with scents, textures, visuals and soundscapes and asks them to write down the memories and feelings they evoke. Path to acceptance invites visitors to enter a cylinder shaped space surrounded by curtains, to focus on an unpleasant memory and explore possible coping mechanisms. Emotion compass is a similarly shaped room, in which visitors place emotions on a coordinate system on the floor, on the spectrum of pleasent/unpleasent and active/defensive. In doing so, the visitor becomes a cursor: a camera tracks the person’s positions and creates a digital map. The final station is a Strong piece. Adding and losing weights on a vest makes specific emotional burdens tangible. The additional, pre-recorded messages that are available via a phone give visitors advice based on their vests weight.

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