Meet Your Self

Solitude is everywhere, but almost nothing is designed for it.

Loneliness and being alone are near-universal, yet rarely given a space of their own. The question behind Meet Your Self was how to let someone meet their own experience of being alone — to see it, shape it, and sit with it — without being told how they should feel. Rather than treating loneliness only as an inner mood, the work asks whether it can be made visible: something that can be seen, shaped, and re-related to through the body.

Meet Your Self is built on EmbodiMap, a VR body-mapping method developed at fEEL Lab in UNSW Big Anxiety Research Center(fEELab, 2024). It lets a participant create a life-size human figure, adjust its posture, and draw into and around the body to externalise thoughts, feelings, and sensations in space. I reframed EmbodiMap as a space for self-encounter, structuring the session into three stages — ‘constructing the self’, ‘emotional mapping’, and ‘co-existing with the self’.

It’s grounded in evidence, not assumption. I ran the experience on myself first, then conducted two qualitative user tests with first-time users and wrote it up as a formal evaluation of the onboarding. The tests showed that long pre-experience explanation overloaded users, simultaneous multi-user instruction fragmented attention, and — most importantly — that fully open, abstract space created uncertainty rather than freedom. The recommendation that came out of it: begin not with “how to use the system,” but with “how to enter the feeling.”

A participant puts on the headset and is guided through three stages. They first construct a self — posing a life-size figure that stands in for them. They then map emotion onto it, choosing colours and marks to draw their feelings and story directly onto the body. Finally they co-exist with that self — hugging it to bring it alive, interacting and leaving a trace, watching it move — so the loneliness they arrived with can be seen, held, and re-related to.

Across both user tests, one pattern was consistent: moving and posing the figure was far more immediately engaging than abstract emotional drawing — and participants began to relate to the figures as “a part” of themselves, but only once the technical learning settled. Openness alone didn’t create freedom; without an emotional cue, people spent their energy deciding what the experience wanted from them. That finding reshaped the design: open with a prepared emotional frame and a clearer entry point, so a participant moves from adjusting an interface to actually meeting themselves.

Design from evidence and emotional truth — begin not with “how to use the system,” but with “how to enter the feeling.”

fEELab. (2024, July 17). Embodimap - fEEL. FEEL. https://feel-lab.org/research_projects/embodimap/

UNSW Big Anxiety Research Centre · fEEL Lab · EmbodiMap (Supervised by Dr. Gail Kenning)