Hope vs. Despair looks at our collective mood on Twitter. It is a simple way of tracking people’s feelings – about the economy, their pork chop sandwich…whatever’s top of mind. The measuring device tracks tweets every 30 seconds, looking at the frequency of smiles and frowns, specifically :) vs. :(
We’ve always been interested in building connections between the real and the digital world, so we created a way to physically display the results of our experiment in our office. We built a small rotating carousel within a larger stationary one, cutting a window into the larger one so you could see inside it. We then made ten iconographic faces ranging between the widest smile (Hope) and the saddest frown (Despair). We glued these onto the smaller carousel. Next, we attached a servo motor to the base of that carousel and connected the motor to a computer via USB. This allowed the apparatus to react to the custom application we developed, adjusting every 30 seconds to display the face that best conveyed the disposition on Twitter.
The result is not only a device that reveals our overall mood, but something that we’ve found can even influence the mood of those who walk by the machine. We are collecting data to see what sorts of patterns emerge and plan to share our findings. How do you feel about that? Tweet your mood.
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