så känner jag iallafall (This is how I feel at least) – Designing a reflective tool for emotional expression in schools
så känner jag iallafall is a reflective journal-based book designed for teenagers aged 12–14 –– particularly sixth-grade students in Sweden) to support emotional expression and self-reflection in school environments. Through watercolour exercises, storytelling, and mapping methods, the project explores how design can create small everyday rituals for emotional awareness, behavioural change, and long-term social sustainability.
Why this project?
Students are quietly carrying stress, excitement, embarrassment, friendship drama, loneliness, pressure, confusion, joy, overthinking, crushes, identity crises before lunch….
We have all been in this position and are aware how little space there actually is for emotional reflection in everyday school life.
This project started from a simple thought:
What if reflection could become a small everyday ritual, like small moments of checking in with yourself.
What did I Design?
My final thesis outcome became a reflective workbook called “så känner jag iallafall” which is a playful and visual tool designed to feel more like a companion than an assignment.
It includes these three vital parts:
- Emotion vocabulary wheel connotated with colors
(Because we need to learn how to better vocabulateing our feelings)
- Book content pages:
Small and quick storytelling
Learning mapping methods
Watercolor exploration for creating visual characters
(Because learning new habits often becomes easier when we can first see examples)
- Blank pages with guidelines
Because of course this book is more interested in:
“What does your day actually feel like?”
A lot of the exercises were inspired by design thinking methods and reflective mapping techniques, but translated into a softer and more playful language. The blank pages invite users to compare emotions, visualize thoughts through colors, create mini stories from their day, or identify emotional shifts through simple and small writing tasks.
What is my point with this project?
A big point of the project was trying to move away from the idea that reflection always needs to look “perfect,” organized, or deeply intellectual.
Not every emotion arrives separately and politely. Sometimes feelings mix together in weird ways. You can feel grateful yet exhausted. Calm yet overwhelmed. Confident yet insecure literally within the same hour.
That’s why watercolor became such an important material in the project. The colors bleed into each other, shift unpredictably, kind of like emotions do. Instead of controlling the material completely, the users are encouraged to let the colors move freely.
Another point is to create something that could be offered to schools as a small way of poking them and asking: “Isn’t it time we started paying more attention to these things too?”
You wonder about my process?
The project developed through workshops, conversations, prototyping, testing sessions, and a lot of trial-and-error moments where I sat staring at pages thinking:
“Okay but would a 13-year-old actually care about this?”
It has shaped through feedback from teachers, students, classmates, and professionals connected to education and wellbeing. Parts of the project were also tested together with staff and students from Montessori school in Växjö, which helped me better understand how different students approached reflection, creativity, and emotional expression in practice. Since the project works with younger teenagers, ethical considerations became an important part of the design process. Rather than positioning the tool as something therapeutic, the focus became creating a pedagogical tool that could be facilitated by teachers or school staff in safe and supportive ways.
The features I LOVE the most?
One unexpected part of the project was the creation of emotional watercolor characters.
They started as accidental blobs made from watercolor experiments, but slowly turned into expressive little personalities representing different feelings and emotional states. Some looked anxious, some looked chaotic, some looked cute, and many more!
Sometimes it’s easier to point at a strange pink creature and go:
“Yeah… that one feels like me today.”
(Because in my project theory, that still counts as reflection)
There you go, my little gift to all teenagers, especially the sixth graders at school!
Throughout the project, I kept returning to the idea that emotional reflection should not only exist in moments of crisis.
It should exist in ordinary days too…
In classrooms.
At the end of a long week.
After awkward conversations.
After exciting moments.
After feeling left out.
After feeling proud of yourself for once.
The project does not try to “solve” emotions. Instead, it explores how design can create softer entry points into understanding them.
What started as a book slowly became a larger question about schools, emotional well-being, and what kinds of knowledge we choose to prioritize in educational environments.
Sometimes it can begin with:
and then suddenly you are just sitting there, quietly blabbing to yourself for a little while:
“So… how did today actually feel?”
