A week ago I explored the Dutch Design Week. For me it’s the event of the year and this year I took the time to see and read ALL works at the Design Academy Eindhoven graduation show. It took me 3 days to read the book (460 pages) and see my selection of work and speak to the alumni. The last days I shared some of my favorite works.
I wrote about Stefan Bukkems’ ‘Senza’. A visual aid to help decipher human emotions.
And about Laura van de Kruijs’ ‘And I FEEL!’. Wooden message boards with compliment labels, love signs, an honesty stick and a mood meter allowing parents and kids to communicate without words.
It reminded me of one of my favorite internet based art works. I stumbled upon it in 2006 and it is called We Feel Fine by Jonathan Harris and Sepandar Kamvar. They call We Feel Fine “an exploration of human emotion on a global scale.”:
“Since August 2005, We Feel Fine has been harvesting human feelings from a large number of weblogs. Every few minutes, the system searches the world’s newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases “I feel” and “I am feeling”. When it finds such a phrase, it records the full sentence, up to the period, and identifies the “feeling” expressed in that sentence (e.g. sad, happy, depressed, etc.). Because blogs are structured in largely standard ways, the age, gender, and geographical location of the author can often be extracted and saved along with the sentence, as can the local weather conditions at the time the sentence was written. All of this information is saved.
The result is a database of several million human feelings, increasing by 15,000 – 20,000 new feelings per day. Using a series of playful interfaces, the feelings can be searched and sorted across a number of demographic slices, offering responses to specific questions like: do Europeans feel sad more often than Americans? Do women feel fat more often than men? Does rainy weather affect how we feel? What are the most representative feelings of female New Yorkers in their 20s? What do people feel right now in Baghdad? What were people feeling on Valentine’s Day? Which are the happiest cities in the world? The saddest? And so on.
The interface to this data is a self-organizing particle system, where each particle represents a single feeling posted by a single individual. The particles’ properties – color, size, shape, opacity – indicate the nature of the feeling inside, and any particle can be clicked to reveal the full sentence or photograph it contains. The particles careen wildly around the screen until asked to self-organize along any number of axes, expressing various pictures of human emotion. We Feel Fine paints these pictures in six formal movements titled: Madness,
Mobs,
and Mounds. 
At its core, We Feel Fine is an artwork authored by everyone. It will grow and change as we grow and change, reflecting what’s on our blogs, what’s in our hearts, what’s in our minds. We hope it makes the world seem a little smaller, and we hope it helps people see beauty in the everyday ups and downs of life.”
A book based on the project, We Feel Fine: An Almanac of Human Emotion, was published by Simon & Schuster in 2009.
See his TED talk here:
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