Let the Heart Break:Creating a Safe Space for Grieving

Let the Heart Break is a wearable interactive device that explores heartbreak and grief as embodied emotional experiences rather than internal or invisible states. Rooted in my background in jewelry design, the work treats the body as an intimate site where material, movement, and emotion converge.

Participation occurs through wearing and sensing rather than observation alone. The work encourages slow engagement and sustained presence, allowing the wearer to remain with emotional states without pressure to respond, resolve, or perform. By limiting external stimulation, the wearable creates conditions for vulnerability to exist without interruption.

The project is informed by the understanding that grief does not unfold in a single way, but through multiple emotional forms. These different states are reflected in distinct heart rate patterns. The wearable system translates these variations into five levels of mechanical response, corresponding to different intensities of emotional experience. Changes in heart rate activate gradual shifts in movement rather than binary states.

Mechanical structures positioned close to the face translate emotional intensity into perceptible changes in visual boundaries. In one piece, the structure progressively contracts as heart rate increases, reducing the exposed area of the face. In another, an opening and closing mechanism alters the range of vision through five degrees of movement. As emotional intensity rises, the wearable increasingly obscures sight, softening external visual stimuli and creating a private space where the wearer is less exposed and less interrupted.

These movements do not aim to regulate or correct emotion. They respond quietly to bodily signals, existing in slow and predictable rhythms that redirect attention inward toward breathing, heartbeat, and internal sensation. Rather than offering solutions or recovery, the wearable functions as a quiet companion, providing a protected perceptual boundary in which grief is allowed to remain, unfold, and take different forms on the wearer’s own terms.

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Ziheng Qu is a Toronto-based designer and artist currently pursuing a graduate degree at OCAD University. Her practice focuses on embodied emotion, heartbreak, and care, explored through interactive and wearable objects. Working with biofeedback, movement, and physical interfaces, she is interested in how emotional states can be sensed, visualized, and gently held by technology.

Drawing from somaesthetic design, affective computing, and poetic interaction, Ziheng is interested in how emotional states can be sensed, visualized, and gently held by technology. Rather than focusing on efficiency or optimization, her work emphasizes slowness, vulnerability, and emotional presence.
By bridging traditional craft approaches with digital systems and physical computing, her projects investigate how technology can support emotional awareness and create safe spaces for reflection and healing. Her current thesis translates experiences of grief and heartbreak into subtle, embodied, and experiential forms.