The “Emotional Baggage Drop” installation—a public confessional located in Union Station—revealed evidence that art installations can play a role in reducing social isolation.
1. Please sit quietly.
2. Listen for a question from the person on the other side.
3. Once asked, share an emotional burden you wish to leave behind.
4. Remain seated.
5. Wait quietly for the next person to enter.
6. Read aloud “Hello, welcome to Emotional Baggage Drop, what baggage would you like to leave today?”
7. Listen carefully to their answer.
8. Reply “I have heard you, your baggage has been checked.”
9. Quietly exit.

Located in Denver’s historic Union Station, Semple’s Emotional Baggage Drop installation mimicked a luggage drop. Instead of collecting luggage, however, the private booth—which had design parallels to a church confessional— allowed people to share their emotional “baggage” with a stranger.
Passersby were invited to confidentially share their feelings and personal burdens with someone they’d never met before. The experiment was an inquiry into whether sharing their emotional life in this way would affect participants’ feelings of anxiety and social isolation. By bringing people together, instigating intimacy, and asking participants to share personal information, the project endeavored to build trust among strangers.
Two Happy City Denver staff, located at the entrances to the booth, managed the installation. The staff were prepared to intervene should an encounter between strangers become negative, though no such situation occurred during the course of Happy City’s experiment. A mental health professional was also present to offer additional support for participants exiting the installation.
For two to five minutes, participants listened to a stranger describe their life challenges; subsequently, the person dropping baggage exited the installation and the listener then described their own challenges to a different stranger. They shared their emotional burdens and looked each other in the eyes through a small hole in a wall that separated the pair. As they exited the installation one-by-one, every two to five minutes, surveyors would intercept them and ask them to complete a two-minute anonymous survey on a tablet. To establish a control group, the Happy City team engaged people who were sitting in Union Station but had not participated in Emotional Baggage Drop to complete the same questionnaire.