Valleys to Peaks: Co‐Creating Temporal Emotional Landscape Maps for Ugly Feelings Across Participatory Trajectories

Participatory design promises care and long-term responsibility, yet many projects leave participants feeling frustrated or cynical when implementation lags. These “ugly feelings” are often dismissed as inconveniences to be managed in brief workshops, rather than recognised as diagnostic signals of structural friction across a project’s lifecycle. This article explores how “emotional trajectories”—the way feelings rise, fall, and settle over time—can be collectively traced and interpreted. We introduce the Temporal Emotional Landscape Map (TELM), a protocol for mapping and collectively interpreting these shifts. Tested across five participatory design projects in Belgium and Türkiye, TELM combines initial interviews with joint “landscape readings,” completed in four of the five cases, allowing interviewees to refine the maps, contest timelines, and reflect on whose experiences are visible. Integrating affect theory and participatory mapping, TELM uses a flexible vocabulary of landscape terms—such as peaks, valleys, and bogs—to analyse group and institutional dynamics. Rather than using fixed scales, its scoring is interpretive, positioning events by participants’ own descriptors. Across the four co-read cases, co-reading produced a repertoire of distinct corrections—re-grounding a baseline, re-timing an origin, requalifying interpretive categories, and, across the co-read cases, both softening a researcher-drafted rupture into a slope, and steepening a researcher-drafted flat into a decline—suggesting that it functions as calibration rather than validation. Ultimately, TELM offers a way of reading emotional trajectories as evidence of misaligned timelines and structural frictions rather than personal deficits; its possible role as a low-tech, digitally compatible complement to existing forms of urban-intervention evaluation is outlined as future work.