What

MoodBox is a project attempting to reveal our common but not linguistically shared feelings in our everyday life. Our feelings change couple of times throughout the day. My aim is to create a collective system where people can share and watch these feeling patterns which are among all of us. Hopefully those actions will elevate our feelings in general.

Questions I am asking:

• What if we can log our emotions over time?
• What if this log consists of not only our individual data but a collective log of environment we participate in.
• In what ways being aware of other people’s emotions affect us?
• Could this collectivity create expressions we can perceive? (make us more happy, less tired etc.)

Sensory Description

An early monday morning at ITP. You are still sleepy, you said hi to Gloria, and as walking through the hallway you passed through the box on your right which is illuminated in pink. You smile, because now you know that someone on the floor is in love. You want to participate so you go ahead and press the button with yellow color and labelled tiredon the box. Now the color of the box turns into yellow.

At the same moment in the lounge two itpers are talking to each other about how m$ is worse than evil and the box next to them turns into yellow suddenly. They start to laugh because they know that someone on the floor is tired at this early hour. One of them goes ahead and feedbacks this attempt with another button.* joy*. They are having fun.

How Does it Work

Each semitransparent box contains a xbee radio, R,G,B colored LEDs, an avr chip and 8 momentary push-buttons on top of the box.

There is going to be a central box which is connected to xport and access to network to collect all the data and put it in a database over the network. (This data is going to be visualized on the screen realtime.)

When the user press a certain button on the box, this triggers three things:

• First, the box changes its color according to that input which is already assigned a distinct color.
• Second, this data transmits over the xbee protocol and distributed to the different xbees on the floor. Apparently they change their color too.
• Third, this data is transmitted to the central xbee which then sends this data over tcp/ip through the help of xport to some database. This database gradually fills with temporal stats of our generic mood on the floor.

Details, solutions, and revelations

Since emotion and color association is a fragile subject, I spent a good amount of time researching on this. First I found about a paper which categorizes our emotions based on 6 different representations. Here is the first categories with some smileys.

Although we could describe those emotions might be accurate, over time I understood I made a mistake with this research. The problem was I didn’t consider colors at that point.

The paper that I found out later was more accurate. It based on college students in southeast and it was directly a research about color-emotion associations. I think this resulted in better selection of different emotions not only in terms of categorization but also about validity for our own conditions. The results could be visited from here. link. Another good point about this research was, it was not dated and it was based on Munsell Color System. So this is the final scheme I have come up with.