SmileyMap

Image Map of Berlin

© Ilaria Biotti

Questions and Content

What processes are behind the collective emotional state of a city? How do the structures of subjective perception develop and change? This project links and illustrates data on human emotional states and the factors of space and time. This helps to reveal and analyze the processes that can determine the emotional state of a city.

The team, which was composed of an artist from the UdK Berlin and three researchers from the Quality and Usability Lab of Telekom Innovation Laboratories (TU Berlin), was developing a mobile interactive application that enables people to input their mood at a particular place. Users associate their emotions with specific places. The overview generates an emotional map of a place. The overall picture depicts the entries for the emotional state of people in a city as a snapshot or over time. For example, thanks to the user-generated content, the maps offer a picture of how happy people are in a city. The technological and artistic challenge was to find a clear way to depict this that both permits simple and rapid interaction and is visually appealing.

Use and Target Audience

The development of this program benefitted form the interdisciplinary expertise of the project partners. The technological know-how focusing on usability and aesthetic-design competencies complemented each other. Specialized approaches were exchanged. The resulting synergy effects were crucial to achieving the project’s shared goal.

The mobile application itself makes it possible to discover emotional structures and reveal their connection to places in the city. Associating places with emotions can alter the perception of a city, for example. That is interesting for people concerned with Berlin, either because they live there or visit the city as tourists.

Support from the Hybrid Plattform

The Hybrid Plattform brought together the project partners and supported the cooperative project with publicity work.