A Concept to Display the Emotion of a Community

As part of his course on Principles of Interaction, Carson had a significant role in authoring a paper on the development and prototyping of a visual installation attempting to effectively communicate the emotion of a community.

In this paper, Carson and his teammates designed a system with the intention to give members of a community(city, neighborhood, etc) a way of understanding the emotions of the collective whole. This starts by attempting to understand what may affect the emotions of individuals on a macro and micro scale, including things like weather, news, sports, and personal issues. Then it is about collecting that information, whether through indirect or direct means. Finally, the team chose a way to display this information, through both background and foreground display, with facade lighting and an interactive central sculpture. Through these means, the team developed their idea of what presenting the emotion of a community can look like.