projectsAffective Geography | Ubiquitous Computing For Mobile Devices, Spring 2007, ITP by Vaibhav Bhawsar
A web+SMS application that allows one to record and share their day visually in terms of sensations, feelings/emotions, whereabouts and moods using SMS. The application in return sends customized weather updates as placebo reactions to your sent messages.
This project is two part. One is to log all the placebo responses (generated by this application) to the moods/feelings you send to this system. These placebo responses depend on two variables- the current weather and your mood. An appropriate response is sent to you via SMS and also logged on a website. You can find such logged responses in Placebo Logs. These SMSs are further used in the second part of the application outlined bellow.
The second part is a remote drawing application which you can control using SMS. This remote drawing application helps you create mental maps of your day using a mobile phone and SMS. These expressive line drawings are initiated when you send specific messages(commands) to the application via your cell phone. As the day passes and you send more messages to the system, the drawing or map is appended with appropriate visual representations. You can think of it as a visual log or what I have tentatively called 'State Drawings' of your feelings and thoughts. The resulting map of your day is geographically incorrect and does not necessarily tie geographic places with feelings or emotions. It instead draws subjective and psychogeographic states of you as an individual by processing the feelings and moods you send through the day (interpreting them as drawing commands). At the end of each day the map is archived and a new map is initiated at the beginning of next day. This application is under development and I will post its progress here on a regular basis. A mockup of what such drawings might look like is below.
Mobile phone as a remote- A logging device.
Experiment with how personal logging using simple text messages can be interesting and how it can offer a rich representation.
Personal mapping techniques or motives is something I am interested in this project.
To talk about geography and self without the use of cartesian coordinates (instead using generative drawings).
I intend to include and build upon PML - Psychogeographical Markup Language for the State Drawings and placebo responses.
This project is from the class- ubiquitous computing for mobile devices with Dennis Crowley. This is an extension of my interest in mapping peoples movements and urban usage combined with low tech mobile communication and its visualization.