Feeling Angry

[tags] moodmeter, rwjf, flickr, images [/tags]

The Art Center College [...]]]> For the past several months I’ve been working with the living profiles team at the Art Center College of Design. The project is part of the larger HealthDesign initiative, designing new open-source methods for keeping personal health records and sponsored by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Here’s a framing of our project:

The Art Center College of Design in Pasadena is developing a PHR application to help adolescents with chronic illnesses transition from pediatric to the adult care system, in which these young patients will assume greater responsibility for their health and their personal health information. The project team is working on an aggregate set of tools that gathers and integrates discrete data. By tapping into exhibited teen behavior such as texting and emotional connectivity through music, the tools seamlessly incorporate into their every day world improving communication with their caregivers.

The project is divided into several stages. For the first, we will prototype and build a moodmeter, for which the ultimate goal is to find an effective and engaging method to capture user’s moods and feelings through their daily lives. The second part of this application will include visualization of the information. The biggest challenge, I think, is creating an engaging interaction, one that will make its users want to come back and use it frequently – to create a sticky application. Our user demographics will be teens, for whom applications become sticky *mostly* because of social circumstances: they hang out in myspace or facebook because their friends are there. They participate, write comments, rate, and more, because their friends see it. One’s mood is personal. Especially when dealing with teens with cronic illnesses (the focus of this project). They will not necessarily want to share this information with all their friends. We will need to find another way to create an engaging experience. A sticky app. Perhaps in the form of a game, or with constant reminders.

But before we start exploring that, I have a more basic, underlying question. What constitutes a mood? Is hungry a mood? tired? Emotions are more easily accepted as moods. But what about physical conditions?

I fished around for a bit and found some interesting ways people use existing applications to display their “moods”. People generally use IM consoles to give some form of context to their presence. From what they feel (”head hurts”, “bored la”) to where they are (”LA”, “Away”).

moodgets is an attempt to create a sticky application that allows its users to share their feelings with friends. The site helps you create a moodget (personalized widget including an emoticon and some text) and has buttons which allow you to post it to chosen sns-es (although it didn’t work with my myspace), or provides you with the HTML code to post on the web. Very easy to use. Problem: you need to go to their website in order to edit. Here’s what I did:

twitter:: what are you doing? a very open ended question. Used differently by groups of people. An extremely simple way to get content from your phone to the web. However, for capturing one’s mood, the feedback structure is not engaging enough.

facebook :: has a status update very similar to twitter’s ‘what are you doing’. With the addition of Facebook’s SMS shortcode, it is now possible to update your status via SMS (to FBOOK).
Through the facebook apps, though, I found the moods application. It gives you a list of moods and lets you pick which one to display on your page. It also, annoyingly, asks you to write “why you feel this way” so your friends could see it. AArgh.

So explicit… And so fake. What will it take to truly capture someone’s mood? Picking emoticons is not enough. I want the application to understand the implicit. I don’t want to pick my emotions out of a category. How is it at all possible? That’s the big question for me in the weeks to come.

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