2026

Design Awards Silver Winner - Meiqi Zhao

Know Your Mood

Entrant

Meiqi Zhao

Category

Social Design - Designs for Social Impact

Client's Name

Country / Region:

United States

Know Your Mood is a children’s emotional learning card set designed to help young users identify, understand, and express their feelings in a clear, engaging, and age-appropriate way. The project is inspired by Plutchik’s Wheel of Emotions, translating a well-established emotional framework into a playful visual language that children can easily approach.

The card set organizes emotions into major emotional families and more specific sub-emotions, helping children move beyond simple labels like “happy” or “sad” and develop a richer emotional vocabulary. Through colorful illustrations, gentle descriptions, and collectible card-like presentation, the design turns emotional education into a visually inviting and approachable experience.

Each card represents a distinct feeling and offers children a simple way to recognize what they may be experiencing. Rather than treating emotions as something confusing or overwhelming, the project presents them as understandable, nameable, and worth exploring. This helps children build self-awareness, emotional literacy, and communication skills from an early age.

The visual system is intentionally warm, imaginative, and child-friendly. By combining structured emotional theory with playful storytelling aesthetics, the cards create a safe and encouraging entry point for conversations about feelings among children, parents, caregivers, and educators.

This project aims to support emotional development through design. It reframes emotional learning as something children can hold, collect, revisit, and discuss, making abstract inner experiences more concrete and easier to understand. In this way, the card set contributes to social impact by fostering empathy, self-recognition, and healthier emotional expression during childhood.

Credits

Meiqi Zhao
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