Getting Emotional

May 24, 2026

emotional engagement, emotional intelligence

Since my Architecture Is Not Architecture post of three weeks ago, I’ve been more aware of designers wanting me to engage with something on some emotional level and of their unsolicited desire to create “stories” that resonate for me. As much as I’m grateful for being the object of their attention, I smell a rat. My emotional engagement with the commercial world began early. Kids growing up in the 1960s were menaced not only by the sugary awfulness of Kellogg’s breakfast cereals but by the obligatory characters associated with each of them. I’m thankful these characters were limited to a single product and never stepped outside their box.

After school, us same kids were entertained by big-eyed cartoon characters such as Felix the Cat¹ that had been around since 1919 but soon began to appear on toys, mugs and postcards to add to what we now know as merch. Betty Boop² is from 1930 but, until her merchandising potential was discovered in the 1980s, her exposure was largely limited to tattoos on US navy biceps. The Disneyverse began in 1928 with Mickey Mouse and Steamboat Willie³, with the first toys and wooden figures appearing in 1930. A recent “collaboration” between Disney and Louis Vuitton catered to grown-up children with more pocket money. LV’s product line moved into T-shirts and shower curtains.

The year 1950 was Snoopy’s⁵ debut in the Peanuts comic strip that gave cartoon characters very human emotions people could relate to. Second from the right is Doraemon that, in 1969, began life in Japan as a manga character. Doraemon has been a Japanese cultural icon for decades.

However, it was Hello Kitty⁶ (since 1974) that broke new ground in liberating a character from a comic book, cartoon strip, cartoon, manga or anime. That the last two of those six characters above are Japanese may be significant. In the 1980s, aspirational Japanese graphic designers thought creating the next Hello Kitty was the road to big money. They never did. Half a century later, Hello Kitty remains unassailable licensing gold.

I was about 20 when I learned that Hello Kitty wasn’t just for children. Since then I’ve seen Hello Kitty cameras and calculators and car wraps and many other items but never purchased any of them – apart from the other day when I bought a multipack of Hello Kitty tissues because that’s what the store had. There’s probably a museum of Hello Kitty merchandise somewhere … yep,⁷ in Los Angeles. Hello Kitty can be superimposed on any product. There’s even a fragrance. Several. Later characters such as Super Mario⁸ (since 1985) had limited existence outside of their own gaming world but predatorial LEGO is on the case.

Characters like these are a fact of life in Japan but China, as ever, has quickly gotten up to speed. Chinese New Year is an excuse for endless iterations of lovable dragons, horses, snakes, etc. Here’s the Chinese zodiac (in sequence, for your reference). This year it’s Horse.

It’s pandemic. Since 1968, every Olympic Games has had a mascot⁹ and there’s a disturbing trend for them to come in families or groups, all of which are doomed to be forgotten once the event is over. Some are more lovable than others but they all tend to share the oversized eyes of cartoon characters.

I’m sure everybody can trace their own history of characters, toys and products designed to be emotionally engaging as part of some greater commercial strategy. Disney, Pixar and Dreamworks are factories for producing them. Labubu. But why this emphasis on affection, endearment and attachment when humans are said to have a whole range of emotions? One explanation is that we are programmed to feel affectionate towards puppies and kittens and chickens and baby anything with eyes oversized with respect to the size of their heads. It would make sense for us to be neurologically hardwired to have these feelings of attachment because it works to help our species survive. It’s not such good news if our inability to control this attraction means it becomes a targetable and monetizeable vulnerability. Substitute emotional attachments may fuel the consumer economy in Japan and China but it just might also have something to do with their declining birthrates. Please enjoy the images below while I delete my search history.

Q: Why is it so shocking that a bird as adorable as the Japanese Snow Fairy (a.k.a. shima-enaga, シマエナガ) exists? A: Because it’s difficult to imagine a Japanese Snow Fairy brand mascot or character more adorable than the real thing. If post-modernism made us believe that a representation of something is just as good as the real thing, then the Japanese Snow Fairy is proof it’s not – at least not in our newly emotional post-post-Modern world that picks up where PoMo left off (after skipping the uncute bits inbetween). Maybe revisionist architecture historians of the future will write papers on the Japanese Snow Fairy Rebuttal.

Not long after we were told we wanted our products and buildings to have more “meaning”, we were duly presented with a wave of them dripping with the stuff. In the end, it turned out we weren’t craving allusions to neoclassical architecture after all. For every Michael Graves there was a Philip Starck, but they all found common ground at ALESSI as part of the greater post-Modernist project for designing products to appeal to the emotions of consumers. I’ve already confessed and repented¹⁰ my own history of falling for this. The Michael Graves kettle – his one second from the right, not his one furthest right – is ALESSI‘s best selling product of all time.¹¹ Never knew. I wasn’t alone in being resistant to Frank Gehry’s fishy gestures on kettles, jewelry and the occasional building. Never cared.

But is it all as simple as designers stimulating some innate desire of ours to have warm loving feelings towards anything with big eyes? It may well be. Probably for reasons of scale and longevity, this is easier to achieve with fluffy toys and graphics but trickier to pull off with buildings¹². Evidence so far is circumstantial.

I’m not saying this as justification, but the middle building below is a pre-school and the other two are at some place called Cat Island – in Japan, obvs. Perhaps putting eyes on buildings is nothing more than some cheap trick but, let’s remember, nobody’s driving this bus. It’s not the late 1960s anymore when the opinions of the then architectural influenti were thought to matter. Our brains are already half mush and so control of our hearts and what’s left of our minds is up for grabs.

Japanese pre-schoolers might grow out of their cuddly buildings or they might not. Either way, we’re talking about buildings as if endearment is the only emotion worth exercising. True, pre-schools and holiday cabins aren’t meant to be threatening or intimidating but what if the building on the left or even the middle one were law courts or the one on the right a penitentiary? If we aren’t aware of our innate need to harbour warm and fuzzy feelings towards anything that looks a certain way, then there’s a very real possibility we may be misled. If we admit the possibility of an architecture designed to evoke emotions then we must also acknowledge the possibility that it could be used to manipulate and mislead them. We need a word for this. Now. As a word, greenwashing found immediate traction because we already had whitewashing as a concept to hang it on. Emotion-washing and emotional propaganda are accurate but clunky. Emo-con. There! I just gave it a name. We can now discuss it and decide how we feel about it.

Buildings don’t have to have a smiley face or big eyes but that seems to be the way it’s going. Unit-1 Reactor of the Fukushima-Daiichi Nucler Power Plant was painted in cool pastel graphics to make us less disturbed by that thing called A Nuclear Reaction happening inside it. This is early emo-con and I say this as a person who has no problem with nuclear reactions as long as they are contained and controlled and not upwind of where I am. But, if we’re going to go down the emotions route, then I wouldn’t mind a nuclear reactor looking more like some giant ball of fire like the building on the right, below, even if it’s only trying to represent our smiley and benign notion of The Sun rather than the enormous uncontrolled fusion reaction it actually is. I don’t feel the need to hug the nuclear industry but, before all this gets out of hand, I’d like to call for at least a degree of emotional honesty over emotional propaganda. Emo-con will be a thing because architecture has history of being used to make unsavoury realities palatable. I sense architecture in motion again.

Now it’s me getting all emotional but, given the present state of geopolitics and since I’m on a rant, I don’t feel any feelings of endearment towards the petroleum industry either, even though the adorable automobiles in this 2007 Chevron emo-con animation¹³ were created to evoke them.

We still don’t know what this new emo-con architecture of our future will look like but in a weird way I kind of welcome it because we’re getting back to some fairly brutal basics. I’m just sad that our role will be as passive consumers of emotional stimuli and not as users with any agency to change it. This last is a Chevron parody video that nails the essence of emo-con.

For now, let’s not even think about how AI can turbocharge this. Calling for an architecture that fosters more emotional engagement may be intended either as heroic defense or as cynical selling point against an architecture substantially generated by an AI not known for its emotional intelligence. AI-generated art, music and writing already exist and, as with art, music and writing, all that architecture has to lose is some emotional bandwidth but who’s going to even notice?

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Emotional Ambush Log: Thursday, May 21, 2026