Taste Before Emotion: A Wearable Textile Interface for Embodied Emotional Awareness
Partner Programme
Artist Statement
Yunge Tong is a London-based textile designer and researcher from China, currently studying MA Material Futures at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London. Her interdisciplinary practice explores the intersection of smart textiles, wearable technologies and material experimentation, investigating how sensory experiences shape human perception, emotion and memory. Working across knitting, physical computing and computational design, she approaches textiles as active interfaces that mediate relationships between body, mind and environment. Through tactile materials and interactive systems, her work seeks to transform invisible physiological and emotional processes into tangible experiences, proposing new ways of understanding the body through design.
Work Statement
Before we consciously recognise an emotion, our bodies have often already begun to respond. Taste Before Emotion is a research-led textile project that investigates the embodied relationship between taste, emotion and memory through wearable technology and computational knitting. Participants were invited to experience four fundamental tastes—sweet, sour, salty and bitter—while physiological data, including facial expressions, electromyography (EMG), heart rate and brainwave activity, were recorded.
The collected biometric data was translated into generative visual patterns using TouchDesigner before being transformed into knitted structures through computational programming. Through this process, physiological information became tactile form, allowing invisible emotional responses to be experienced through texture, structure and wearability. The knitted artefacts function as material translations of embodied experience, making normally imperceptible emotional processes tangible.
Taste Before Emotion: A Wearable Textile Interface for Embodied Emotional Awareness was presented in Mind × Body: Catalyst Phenomenon Archive, organised by the Reality Intelligence Association as part of London Design Festival 2026.
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