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.

*_*

Insight Wall

To start off the process of developing ideas and initial insights for the Microsoft project, we have produced an "Insight Wall" to collect any information relevant to the project.



Throughout the project we will keep adding to this, as will the other groups. Hopefully this will help us appreciate all aspects of brief and view these in new ways. Einstein once said something along the lines of, "to solve a problem, we must change or way of seeing to when the problem occured." Hopefully this process will go some way to enabling us to do this!

Being Human

Following a recent talk by Richard Harper from Microsoft at Dundee University, I was prompted to read his book "Being Human : Human-Computer Interaction In The Year 2020". His lecture was also based on his book, and although was interesting, I wanted to read into some of the points he made in more depth.

The issues explored in his book are concerned with how the ever growing prominence of technology affects us today, and more so, in the year 2020. It examines technical and social issues which will need to be given increasing consideration in order to utilise these technological advancements to their full potential.

It also touches on the point that the next generation of elderly people will be increasingly computer literate and technology savvy. This is of course very relevant to the project Unbox Design is doing with Microsoft. However, I do wonder about the level of technological literacy that the likes of my mum's generation will have. Will they be comfortable with current technology or that that has been developed by then, which may have changed radically?

Harper puts forward that we are at "the end of interface stability...what an interface might be, where it is, what it allows, is there one at all?" Harper goes on to say that these interfaces should be "disappearing into the richness and complexity of the world around us." I agree with both of these insights, and believe that less really will be more. However, it is also vital that we consider the appropriateness of embedded devices. It does bring up this point later in the book when Harper write "If everything we see, touch or walk past is interactive, how will we know and control how to inter act?"

This leads ominously into the realm of "extreme connectivity". This term strikes fear into me, as the distinction between home and work is increasingly blurred (is this post work or play?!). We have more and more digital friends whom we may have never met in real life. But surely real communication uses all of the senses and the need for this can not be fulfilled by digital relationships. Similarly, we are communicating more and more and at an increasing pace, but at what cost? What are we saying, and are we less intimate?

One of the most interesting points made in this book is that of the importance of memories, of the lack of them. "Memories tend to fade over time and change through interpretation. Digital records are more static, tending to persist in a stable form. Many systems are built on the assumption that the more data we capture the better. In contrast, humans place great value on being selective in what they remember." There is surly the basis for a brilliant project here!

Overall, I enjoyed "Being Human" a lot, and found it more interesting than Richard Harper's original talk. There are many other great points in the book so go and read it yourself and see what you think. Better still tell me what you think! If you have a comment to make on this book of any point made, please post a comment below.

Paddy

We Want Your Opinions.

It's topical for us right now but to the rest of the world it might not be. We are currently looking at networking, and its different ways.

Is networking something that's becoming more and more internet based (thanks to the popularity of websites like facebook, twitter, bebo)? Or are we still networking on a personal level? Why do I not know my next door neighbour, but my nan knows everyone on her street?

Why do we care what other people are doing with their spare time? In my experiences it's usually something like "sitting on a train listening to muse". Is it because we don't have anything to do with our own spare time?

What is the definition of networking? Is it a connection between two things, if yes can this then mean we can network ourselves to pretty much anything, for example a tree.

We would love to hear what you people out there think of this, in my opinion its proving to be a really interesting aspect of our Microsoft project.

Hunt.x

Wouldn't It Be Cool If...

As a tool to help us with our idea generation for the Microsoft Project we are currently doing, an "Insight Wall" has been erected.  There is some great insights, ideas and information up there already, thanks for all of the brilliant content guys! 

We have put up a new section on the wall called "Wouldn't It Be Cool If..."  Please use this space to write/draw up any thing to finish off this sentence about your Grand Parent - no matter how far fetched or ridiculous it may seem.

Or alternatively, post your thoughts as comments to this post! 

Paperlights....Again.

Ok, so somehow the old blog got deleted, ticked us off a lot. Anyway, here they come again so be prepared to be amazed by the picture quality.

Last semester, the first years in Product Design here in Dundee created some really inventive paper lights. The whole project was a resounding success, impressing pretty much everyone who got the chance to see them. Here are a few choice photos I took from the back then, apologies if I missed out anyone.

Peace.x

Hunt.

Advert Love

...It's on.

Hello world.

Today the guys at UnboxDesign have embarked on the Microsoft adventure.

We have adopted a great new member, by the name of Tim, who we are sure is an absolute dynamite addition to our cause. No doubt we'll fill the .com world on Tim in a later post, but right now I'll hammer down on the brief and what we're going to do with it.

Actually, a bit of back ground first. We (Dundee University) have been invited back to participate in Microsoft's Design Expo 2009. Obviously, that is pretty amazing, but when you find out that there are only five colleges worldwide involved (the other four all being situated in North America... so we are now representing the world), it makes it unbelievable.

The guys here at Unbox would like to take this opportunity to express how grateful we are for receiving this chance. Many thanks go to last year, who did a great job to get us invited again. It really is such a privilege, and we are so determined to be the most appropriate company to fly out to Seattle to pitch to Microsoft.

I've tailed on a bit, so I'll keep this neat. The theme is "new ways of working", based around the retired population. On first glance, I'm really excited about the potential of this brief, and I know that us four guys can achieve something truely brilliant.

Peace.x

Hunt.

Rustle BRAND.

Fellas, been scoping around the .com world and I stumbled blindly into a nice looking brand called Art Vandelay.

Looks like they've got some pretty sweet looking prints and publications, along with a strong logo, really simple but effective.

Have a gander.

Hunt.

The First of 2009

Okay, since the old blog got mashed up somewhere, we at UnboxDesign are back to business with this one. For those who don't know who the hell we are and what the hell we do here's a quick explanation;

Unbox are a small design company consisting of three 2nd year Product Designers at the University of Dundee. We are extremely enthusiastic about both our course and the company we're in.

The blog we have is to tell the beautiful world about what we've done, are currently doing, and what we're planning to do. As well as telling you little bits of really interesting information from our course and related courses (the other ones in the art school).

Finally this blog is a space for us to broadcast what we find interesting too, from some bitching architecture to a quality video on YouTube. Who knows, anything goes.

Hopefully, by the way I've described it, it's gonna be one class blog. We're in the first stages now, so things have progressed in fits and starts.

Anyway we would love any comments on anything we do, so feel free to have a chat.

Peace.x

Adam.

We're Back!

After a week or so in the dark I am pleased to announce the Unbox Design blog is back.

Looking forward to a fruitful 2009.

Cheers.

hi again.

So the old blog got deleted somehow.

This is the new one.

It'll be better.

Believe.