Our Anxiety Monsters

Masters Thesis: Anxiety Monsters Data Collection & Analysis

For my Master's Thesis, I created a web application that can be used in the early stages of design research. To show off this idea I created a small cultural probe on anxiety and personal monsters.

The website initially has one prompt with two response fields;
1. What is causing your anxiety?
2. It causes me anxiety because...

Then the web app asks the visitor to draw that anxiety as a monster in 1 minute and either share it the creation to the horde or destroy it.

I received over 150 monsters from up to 32 countries around the world.

The creation of this work was informed by: methods of relieving negative feelings (sadness and anger) using creative art-making and designing for mood regulation. I researched methods people use to relieve anxiety and ways to foster creativity. Using that research, research into prior design work, and relief techniques including experimentation (with Play-Doh, drawing, short film making, and more), I ultimately created a web application that allows people to contribute their personal anxiety monsters and share them anonymously, or destroy them.

All of the monsters were collected in databases then I analyzed the written themes of the monsters’ names as well as the different visual elements of them. Interesting theme groupings and visual similarities can be seen in the excerpts below.

View the website.

The full thesis is available on ProQuest.