This article analyzes how artists and scientists use emotion as a methodological tool to study participants and cocreate projects. It uses a science and technology studies approach to identify a typology of five emotion assemblages and the material, social, and cultural components that make them operate. These assemblages include or eliminate cultural and environmental context, the role of participants, and artist/researcher reflexivity The paper argues that there is an imperative for artists, designers, and researchers to make deliberate choices as to who or what to include and exclude when working with emotion.

Biotagging used audio-visual equipment to engage a range of individuals in ‘tagging’ plants and animals with specific and local meaning to them. This was an experiment in subverting conventional approaches to biodiversity monitoring with the aim of expanding ideas of both biodiversity and citizen science.