Every day, the millions of people that are connected to the internet confess their feelings and emotions to an unknown audience. It provides a forum where you can feel as though you are talking to no one yet speak your emotions like you could be heard by everyone. In 2006, Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar created We Feel Fine, an interactive exploration of peoples feelings through blog posts. The application filters the plethora of information that is posted on blogs and shows you real time posts that relate to a specified emotion. It then gives different methods to visually search and sort through that information.
Yesterday I came across twistori(by Amy Hoy and Thomas Fuchs). Drawing on the same idea as We Feel Fine, twistori searches twitter posts and filters them by the emotion written in the post. The interface is pretty, and it is interesting to watch what people are saying for a while, but I find that the project lacks meaning. I maybe shouldn’t say that, I guess what I mean, is that I would like more meaning out of it.
The concept of using a visual, interactive interface to sort and communicate large amounts of data is far from new. As we all seem to be some sort of visual learners, visual representations of information are one of the most effective ways to communicate complex data. Using this method of communication design to enhance social interaction and to connect people or groups of people is a much less explored field. In both of these projects, I feel like the application is allowing you to interact with the data in a way to bring you closer to an individual, yet at the same time acts as a wall between you and the person from actually interacting. This is quite possibly the intent of the authors, but I would find it very interesting if a project used this type of visually represented data to enhance social interaction.
What do you think?
This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 6th, 2008 at 12:31 am and is filed under design, humanity. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
I think the scroll speed should be adjustable. Or there should be a pause button.
Maybe it would be more meaningful to list posts that are semantically connected in some way.
“I believe in god”
“Today I met a man who said he doesn’t believe in god.”
“I cannot believe all these idiots that believe God is a man.”
It would be more like a conversation. Somewhat like twitter madlibs.
I think the scroll speed should be adjustable. Or there should be a pause button.
Maybe it would be more meaningful to list posts that are semantically connected in some way.
“I believe in god”
“Today I met a man who said he doesn’t believe in god.”
“I cannot believe all these idiots that believe God is a man.”
It would be more like a conversation. Somewhat like twitter madlibs.
May 6th, 2008
8:09 pm