26

Jul

Meet Brad the Toaster

I met Simone Rebaudengo at frog design Munich today. We spoke about social machines and addiction. Specifically we spoke about Brad the toaster, part of a project called Addicted Products that he finished in May in London during some time at Haque Design & Research. Brad wears his emotions on his sleeve. Use him infrequently and he gets upset. Render Brad useless by not making toast and it’s over – he’ll probably send a message to a courier to fetch him. Then you’re on the “black toast list” – which is pretty dire. Brad is not owned, he’s hosted. Brad tweets. If you host Brad you could follow him. - Natalie Dixon

Addicted products: The story of Brad the Toaster from Simone Rebaudengo on Vimeo.

299 days ago Short URL Comments

Expression of Emotion/Social Machines/social media

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03

Jun

FoodMood.in

FoodMood was presented at When the City Meets the Citizen workshop in Dublin on 4 June as part of the 6TH International AAAI Conference On Weblogs and Social Media. The related academic paper, published by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, is available for download here.

Food Mood is an interactive data visualization and sentiment analysis tool using Twitter as a primary data source. It is a collaborative project between Affect Lab and the brilliant people at AI Applied and Jana + Koos.

Using natural language processing techniques, English-language tweets are collected and analyzed for sentiment, location and foodstuff. We capture, in real time, the foods that people are tweeting about and how they feel about them.

We then add a layer of public data about countries’ obesity and wealth to better understand the global food landscape.

Find the beta site at www.foodmood.in.

352 days ago Short URL 4 Comments

Data Mining/Data Visualisation/Expression of Emotion/social media/The City and Emotion

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04

Apr

There’s no sunshine when she’s gone….

Dutch design firm CleverFranke  harvested 714,843 pieces of digital flotsam about the weather from social media, blogs and elsewhere for their latest project. The aim: to show the relationship between weather and sentiment in Holland.

The design result is a spiderweb of loveliness, refined and minimalist. But it would have even lovelier with some interactivity. A zoom? Can we go deeper? See the actual tweets, blogs mentions and more…

cleverfranke_weather_chart

This weather chart project* continues to support the notion that we can see how expressions of emotion/sentiment/mood reflect the real-life landscape of our world. In this instance sunshine hours and positive sentiment** show an incredible correlation.

Sometimes things go without saying, but we still love to see it confirmed in the data.
What they found:

  • It’s cold in December and people feel negative about that.
  • The Dutch love sun – more so, sentiment ratings and sunshine hours  are closely correlated as shown below.
cleverfranke_sunshine
  • There’s a lot more weather chatter in the summer months.
  • When it’s Spring (and there is very little rain – April) people are happier.

*data from Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute.

** Sentiment analysis by Ai-Applied.

412 days ago Short URL Comments

Data Visualisation/social media

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23

Mar

The Poking Machine

While social media has its undeniable affordances, we don’t need a conference to tell us we’re reinventing our expressions of emotion online. We’ve steadily relegated our handshakes, glances, winks or smiles to below those of digital “pokes” and “likes”. In a parody turned technical, Dutch artists Jasper van Loenen and Bartholomäus Traubeck developed the Poking Machine, showcased at the alt-conference Unlike Us held in Amsterdam on 8-10 March. It’s a wearable device that physically pokes a person whenever a friend virtually pokes them on Facebook. The Poking Machine consists of a custom-built circuit (ATtiny, servo, battery, and bluetooth module) that connects to an Android phone that tracks incoming pokes. The circuit is housed in a coloured laser-cut box that users wear on the arm. While people happily poke away on Facebook, Van Loenen and Traubeck are poking fun at us. Even without the benefits of hindsight they can see the future. There’s little disputing that in years to come, digital poking will not go down as one of mankind’s finest moments.
Poking Machine
Poking machine
Poking Machine

424 days ago Short URL Comments

Expression of Emotion/social media

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