By getting volunteers to walk around cities with biofeedback machines and GPS devices, Christian Nold has created a series of ’emotion maps’ of cities around the world, including San Francisco, (East) Paris and Greenwich, London.
Participants are wired up with an innovative device which records the wearer’s […] emotional arousal in conjunction with their geographical location. People re-explore their local area by walking the neighbourhood with the device and on their return a map is created which visualises points of high and low arousal. By interpreting and annotating this data, communal emotion maps are constructed that are packed full of personal observations which show the areas that people feel strongly about and truly visualise the social space of a community.
Emotional Cartography: Technologies of the Self, a book created about the project, is a collection of essays from “artists, designers, psychogeographers, cultural researchers, futurologists and neuroscientists” and is available as a free, CC-licensed PDF.
via Mind Hacks