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