wefeelfine.

Jon, our head of year at Dundee's Product Design course, prompted us to check out what's going on over at 'wefeelfine.org', so I did.


And this is what it's all about -

"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, Murmurs, Montage, Mobs, Metrics, 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."

- Written in May of 2006.

At first, I was unsure of what to think, as the concept seemed pretty cool, but I had no idea how well they'd portray it. On browsing the website, I was easily able to find out what they're aims and purpose were, and was also able to see where the creators of 'We Feel Fine', Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar, had originated from. I was then led on to the main attraction, the 'We Feel Fine' applet.

As soon as I opened it up, I was met with this...
...and I loved it!

The crazy collection of dots you see on screen is 'Madness', just one of the interfaces that allows you to surf through 100s of 1000s of different peoples' feelings and emotions all over the world. This network goes far and wide, yet still keeps it's messages intimate and personal. We Feel Fine is divided into six discrete movements - 'Madness', 'Murmurs', 'Montage', 'Mobs', 'Metric' and 'Mounds' - each illuminating a different aspect of the chosen population. Some of these movements have been broken down further into 'Feeling', 'Gender', 'Age', 'Weather' and 'Location'. Each of these utilizes a self-organizing particle system to configure its shape, color, distribution and physics to best express the different zeitgeists of: feeling, gender, age, weather, and geographical location.


That's just a basic run down of what goes on at 'We Feel Fine.', to get the full experience you have to visit 'wefeelfine.org' for yourself!



I'll leave you with some of the photos from their gallery that stood out to me.


cheers.

*_*