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The Feel-o-Meter is an eight meter tall sculpture designed to reflect a city's mood in real-time, but one of its creators asks, "Is that a good thing?"
As reported in the BMW Guggenheim Lab blog, the Feel-o-Meter was developed in 2007 by the Fraunhofer Institute and will soon be returning to Berlin, the site of its original installation. Made of neon tubes and steel, the sculpture is fed data from software that analyzes the emotion behind facial expressions. It may appear happy, sad, or neutral depending on the emotional status of the city-goers it overlooks.
Although the sculpture was intended to show people their emotions can be "seen," one of the installation's original creators, Julius von Bismarck, notes another purpose behind the work. "We wanted people to start considering if they want people to read their emotions, and if they want to know others’ emotions; if they want to be private or they want to be public."
Bismarck feels it's better to avoid a public display. “Knowing how the stock market feels doesn’t make the world any better,” von Bismark says. “So knowing how everyone else is feeling, I don’t know. I don’t think it’s actually a good thing.”
Amy Hiller offers a different perspective on measuring the public's emotion. Hiller holds a Ph.D. in social welfare and teaches city and regional planning at the University of Pennsylvania’s school of design. After reviewing maps of deaths related to gunshots in Philadelphia, she conceived the idea of measuring the geographic distribution of emotion based on neighborhoods rather than a city at large.
Hiller sees the potential in developing a plan for help and action based on the use of this type of metric. ". . . to map something like sadness, frustration, or the feeling of opportunity," she says, "would really unlock the true inequalities within the city."
Science tells us that emotions, happy or sad, are contagious. Ultimately, would knowing the true pulse of your neighbors or neighborhoods on a given day change the way you feel and live? It might be interesting to see what would happen if we were given a daily choice to put our private emotions on public display, as done with this heart sculpture in New York City.
Images courtesy of Julius von Bismark.
