Newton’s Sleep – Emotion Tracker
In the story, when the teenage girl, Esther, was sixteen, ‘her temper was pretty moody.’ It was mentioned that ‘Ike couldn’t seem to say much lately without her jumping him.’. Usually, Ike did not understand her hostile and sometimes aggressive behavior. Inspired by this, I have an idea of an Emotion Tracker. This device can track users’ emotions and give daily, weekly, and monthly reports of emotional changes. More importantly, it can analyze and find the correlation between users’ emotions and the things they do. This pattern will provide suggestions about maintaining good emotions in the polluted, harsh environment during that specific time on earth.
Moreover, the artifact can link to the housing environment and visually represent the user’s emotional changes, such as a polluted land on earth, to express loneliness and despair. Therefore, the people living in the same house can timely know the user’s emotions and the reasons found from the correlation the emotion tracker calculates from the user’s action. They can improve the connection between people during the hard time living on the deserted land.
Currently, there are existing products and researches on emotion tracking. The devices mostly take the measures including:
- depth of breath
- perspiration on the hands
- Heartbeat frequency
- Brain waves
- facial expression (V.)
Despite plenty of apps designed for emotion tracking, none did a visual representation in the user’s living environment to let the user’s surrounding people understand their thoughts without even talking to them. This device can prevent a lot of misunderstandings between human communications.
However, problems will also occur with the existence of this new design. People might increasingly rely on this device to understand other people through a quick path and neglect the original way of human interaction. But looking at the bright side, this might also become a starting point of a new conversation to know one person more in-depth and further pull the relationship closer.
The Winter Market – Trash Transformer
In the Winter Market, one of the characters, Rubin, had an occupation of bricolage. He found waste by cruising around Vancouver’s alley, then turned them into his art through mending, recreating, and rehabilitating the materials. In that fictitious world, the society went into postmodern urbanism that the definitions of value and waste, inclusion and exclusion, the marketable and the broken, are largely vague. In this background, I want to create a Trash Transformer. It will be an interactive artwork that is created with the involvement of participants. The artifact will initially be a metal foundational framework placed by the street in the universe in the Winter Market. As people walk by, they can place trash onto the framework with the superglue provided beside the site. As more people join in this interactive activity, the site will gradually become a gigantic art piece. In this artwork, the daily waste carried around by the people can be easily turned into unique art. The most interesting part is that the participants are the ones to decide what the final work will look like over time. This proposal will not need many technologies, but this can be risky as the degree of involvement of the views is unpredictable.
The Fish of Lijiang – Gaze Corselet
It was mentioned at the start of the story that the protagonist “felt the stares of everyone in the office burning into the back of his neck” (Chen, 3). The only thing he could do was “shuddered,” “ignored the stares,” and walked away. These gazes became pressure and ultimately added to the various factors that caused the protagonist’s “messed up” condition. Under this situation, I believe a Gaze Corselet would mentally protect the protagonist from the sharp stares. The gaze corselet will be a wearable device with sensors that can detect the gaze of people around and analyze their intentions and emotions of the gazes. The skin-like corselet will then respond to the gaze with different motions towards the direction of the gaze. It will form wave-like shapes with mild movements towards the kind and stares in good faith. When there are ill-disposed gazes, the corselet will move rapidly, sharply, and aggressively in reaction to scare away the beholders. This interactive artifact will give the user a secure feeling that he/she is not exposed to ill wills.
In real life, there is a similar interactive 3D-printed wearable artifact that can detect others’ gazes and respond accordingly. It utilized the tectonic properties of the materials used with Objet500 Connex 3D printers, a muscle system using Shape Memory Alloy actuators (SMA) that informs the motion of the skin, and computer vision technologies. However, based on the existing project, I want this Gaze Corselet can form into more figurative shapes with stronger visual impact and faster speed of movements to scare away the gazers instead of move softly.
Citations
V., Alexandra. “How Emotion Tracker Apps Help Improve Your Mood.” CareClinic, 12 Apr. 2021, careclinic.io/emotion-tracker-app/.
“Caress of the Gaze.” Behnaz Farahi, behnazfarahi.com/caress-of-the-gaze/.
Delany, Paul. “‘Hardly the Center of the World’: Vancouver in William Gibson’s ‘The Winter Market.’” William Gibson, “WINTER MARKET”, 1994, www.sfu.ca/delany/market1.html.
“Methods in Online Marketing: Emotion Tracking.” Merkle, merkleinc.ch/en/topics-trends/insights/emotion-tracking.