“Hedonometer” 2011 Peter Dodds, Chris Danforth

It’s what most people say they want. So how do we know how happy people are? You can’t improve or understand what you can’t measure. In a blow to happiness, we’re very good at measuring economic indices and this means we tend to focus on them. With hedonometer.org we’ve created an instrument that measures the happiness of large populations in real time.

Our hedonometer is based on people’s online expressions, capitalizing on data-rich social media, and we’re measuring how people present themselves to the outside world. For our first version of hedonometer.org, we’re using Twitter as a source but in principle we can expand to any data source in any language (more below). We’ll also be adding an API soon.

“Transcendence” 2014 John Slepian

John Slepian is using his brainwaves in this performance by way of an EEG sensor. The structure he sits on is linked to the EEG sensor and reacts to his emotional state. When he reaches an emotional state of meditation the seat rises.

“Mood.Cloud” 2014 Younghui Kim

This interactive installation is a visual representation of collective emotional moods that are translated from PAM (The Photographic Affect Meter, JP Pollak, Phil Adams, and Geri Gay) input.  The PAM is a one-click measure of emotional state now widely used in place of or in addition to traditional pen and paper psychological assessments.

This piece is an on-going collaborative research to see how these voluntary PAM inputs of building users would be relate to the visual representation of collected mood at a given timeframe.   This mood.cloud platform can be re-programed in diverse visual patterns.