City Mood

Interaction Design One year Master

15 Credits Master Thesis August 2014

Supervisor: Jörn Messeter

CITY MOOD

how does your city feel?

CITY MOOD

how does your city feel?

Thesis Project I Interaction Design Master 2014 Malmö University Luisa Fabrizi luisa.fabrizi@gmail.com

01. INDEX

01. I

...03

02. A

...04

03. I

...05

04. M

...08

05. t

F

...09

06. d

P

...18

07. g

c

...41

08. F

I

...44

09. A

...47

02. ABSTRACT

This research aims to make the first step in the direction of creating guidelines to use for building an instrument capable to collect information about citizens’ emotional reaction toward their city.

Through the use of an existing mobile application meant to collect data about one’s own emotions I tried to evaluated the availability of people in sharing how they feel.

Later on, based on the evaluations of this app, I created two subsequent analog prototypes that can be placed in urban spaces to collect people’s place related emotions. The devices have been used both inside the university and in open urban spaces in Malmö.

Using the experiences made with these prototypes, concerning the availability of people in sharing their emotions about spaces, this thesis is used to develop guidelines and design opportunities for fur-ther development of interactive street furniture designed to collect place related emotions.

03. INTRODUCTION

againstthetermsmartcity

In the last years we witnessed the rise of a new and controversial term: smart city; this has become the buzzword politicians, industrials, journalists and urban developers are using with the expectation to convince their public that choices made under the directives of “new” and “smart” are always right and winning; unfortunately very often in our society, the knowledge and critical attitude toward the so called new technologies are scarce and tend to naively and rhetorically divide what is good from what is evil, not understanding that technology is neither moral or amoral, but it is the use that people behind it make that define it as an instrument to empower the society or to threat its freedom.

The term smart city is defying itself as a vision of a technological and connected urban environment where distribution, mobility, production and effectiveness are the principal term to define the value and success of the city (Hollands, R. 2008). Of course, this is not a reason to believe that new technolo-gies, when related to the city, are only an instrument of the neoliberal and capitalistic culture; there are other approaches, and they are coming from researchers in the universities, activists and people from all over the world who have seen the power that computation can bring to the collectivity if designed and used the right way. With this paper I am hoping to contribute to this, maybe slightly idealistic, view of what could be done to make our cities better places to live in through the use of digital inter-active design; I do this trying to understand how to use citizens’ emotive reactions to places in the city as a way to explore and understand the urban environment and to produce a discussion about it.

howdoesyour cityfeel

?

I try to propose emotions as a way to trigger a reflection about the city; this seemed to me as a way to obtain input from as many people as possible: not everyone has the capacity to develop an opin-ion about a certain matter, but every person has a personal emotopin-ional response to what’s happening around her. Once we have put together different people’s emotional responses to a certain environ-ment they can be collectively discussed leading to a new understanding of that environenviron-ment and the way it is seen and lived; already in the ‘60s Jane Jacobs states that to understand and to build better cities it’s fundamental to start reasoning from the particular and only then going up to see the general image (Jacobs, J. 1961), having the opportunity to see the way citizen’s emotions are scattered and how they describe different areas of the city could be a way to start a new reasoning about our urban environment basing it on the affective portrait of the community.

I am also, somehow, trying to propose on a city scale what design developers and researchers do when they test their designs: they try to understand what kind of emotions are triggered in their testers in order to evaluate what they built and to take decision on how to implement it (Isomursu, M. et al, 2007); cities are as well a matter of design and I think it is finally time to take in account what emo-tions they trigger in their “users”, even if so far, emoemo-tions and affect have generally been neglected in the discussions about cities, smart cities and urban environments (de Lange, M, 2013).

The kind of research I am going to write about in this paper has to be considered as a first step toward a multifaceted project in the emerging field of Urban Computing that I am intentioned to contribute to in the future; the idea behind this design is to explore in a discrete manner citizen’s feeling about

their urban environment and to try to grasp how different portions of the city are seen and experi-enced; the live data collected should be then shown through a thoughtful map based visualization on screen which would need to be open, interactive and diffused through web, mobile systems and screens around the city. Citizens should then be able to interact with this system, comment the results, cross the emotion-data with other data to try to understand if there are patterns that may describe or explain why the city has certain emotional responses, they may as well propose solutions to situation or problem they detected.

A project like this may need the financing and support of the government of the city, which should be very open and not invasive in terms of leaving to the citizen the opportunity to comment and add to the website as much as they would; also it should be a government ready to embrace, to try to un-derstand and to answer to citizens’ requests and needs.

In this paper I start to explore how the collection of citizen’s emotive responses to the place in the city could be designed and I try to answer to the following questions:

What is the right mean to use in order to help people to reflect about the relation between their emo-tions and the place where they are?

What kind of interactive instrument could be collectively used in order to gain information about the feelings a certain place triggers in to people.

What are the guidelines to follow when designing this kind of interactive system?

I began my research expecting to build an embodied mean, an “emotions collector”, two different ways of collecting seemed to be feasible:

• a wearable based on a personal mobile application (EmotionSense), • an interactive street furniture.

To answer to these questions I proceed first user tested an Android based app for smart-phones called EmotionSense, an emotion tracker, I thought that this would have been a good base to build a wearable; to understand if a wearable was a useful mean to answer to my questions I tested Emotion-Sense on a small number of people, I collected their reactions and idea about it through interviews and a questionnaire.

Based on the user tests I found out that this wasn’t a valuable mean for my purpose and I decided to move my research further in the direction of the interactive street furniture. The concept of street

fur-niture was introduced by Eric Paulos (2008) and it indicates new structures, that still need to find their

shape, meanings and use, that could be used as interactive system part of a participatory urbanistic network.

I continued my research building two analogical prototype to try to answer to the aforementioned questions.

The first prototype, made out of cardboard, was a poll asking “How are you today?” I placed it around the university’s building, people had to take a paper chosen from six different stacks, each of which had an emoticon representing a different affective state, then they had to place this slip of paper inside the poll. After three days of testing I found that this was an effective solution. I built a second and more complex analogical prototype. This prototype was made out of MDF and plexiglass, and was composed of six different polls, mirroring the six different emotional states. The question asked this time was “How does this place make you feel?”, as I was looking for more place related responses. To answer to the poll users needed to take a paper from different stacks, all of the papers had written over

the question”why?” so that users could decide to write something on this paper before placing it in one of the poll or leave it white.

I did a two days test inside the university, where I collected many responses and information and then another three days test outside in the city (Malmö), where I as well obtained many answers and new material to reflect upon; after it I had enough data to answer to the question I was asking at the beginning of my research, I found a valid direction to continue my investigation as I found both a way to trigger people in to reflecting about their emotional response about places and a way to make them sharing those reflection with me. Those findings could be used in the future to build an digital place located physical input used to collect people’s place related emotional statuses.

04. METHODOLOGY

This chapter outlines what are the methodologies I chose to use to answer to the research question mentioned above.

The first stage of my research was based on users test; the users were asked to test an Android based smart-phone app called EmotionSense, a behavioural app used to collect emotional data. I collected informations about the user testing through interviews and a questionnaire.

As users’ responses about the use of a personal mobile device showed that this was not the right instrument, I shifted my research to less personal collecting devices, and I kept on working on my re-search in prototyping in order to identify the guidelines to be followed when designing an interactive street furniture.

This prototype-based part of the research was conducted in three different stages and was based on the research through interaction design described by Löwgren (2007); this exploration phase was held in order to understand which of the artefact’s features were valuable and had to be kept and enhanced in more advanced stages of the design development.

On the first stage I built a first analogical prototype meant to test if people were interested to share their emotions and I placed it for three times in a row in three different places in the university’s buildings, I evaluated the prototype through the number of interaction people had with it in each of the different places where I positioned it and through the observation of people using it.

Once I found out that there was a certain number of people willing to share their emotional status with the physical input, I built a second analogical prototype, more complex and that needed more interaction. I placed this as well in different places around the university’s buildings and evaluated it through the observation of people interacting with it, through the interpretation of the collected data and through few interviews. More interviews would have been beneficiary to gain multiple perspec-tives, but due to the lack of time I was not able to conduct more.

On the third stage of the evaluation of the physical input I placed it outside in the city. I chose a com-plex area of city, in order to have an interesting and flourishing number and kind of answers; this time the evaluation of the prototype was based on the understanding of the place, on the relation between the different spots where it was located and the kind and number of answers, on a close observation and of course on the evaluation of the answers, here as well I should have chose to do some interview to have a better vision of the project.

During all the process of my research I enhanced my point of view through theories which I used mostly to direct my thoughts, to gather more ideas on the design and to develop a critical point of view both on my findings and on my design choices.

05. THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK

In this chapter I am going to give an overview of the theoretical framework my research is based upon.

In the beginning I tried to state what is the general and popular approach to the idea of Mapping Emotions, when the interest in emotion has started and what is the cultural approach toward them. I also describe here the two scales in the actual researches of the emotional mapping, those are: a micro scale, where human bodies are emotionally mapped and a macro, worldwide, scale; my exploration, dedicated to the emotions of the urban scape, places itself as an in between these two;

I want my reader to notice that with my research I am not at all trying to give a complete and struc-tured definition of what emotions are, sometimes I also use the term feelings or affect which would not be considerate as appropriate synonymous by an anthropologist or by a psychologist, but that simpli-fied this first attempt I did to approach such a complex research field.

I found very relevant the material collected by the artist Christian Nold, that has attempted to create a methodology to collect and display citizens’ emotional reaction to places in the city.

My investigation then, shifted toward more scientific approaches; I could not find any research in the Interaction Design field which I could consider comprehensive of all the aspects I wanted to take in account, but I identified the roots of my research in two main fields: Affective Computing and Urban Computing; my research can basically be seen as an attempt to understand and to find a way to connect and relate those two fields.

MAPPING EMOTIONS

As stated by Höök (2013), the first attempt to introduce a reflection around emotion and how they influence our rational thinking and our whole life appears rather late in the history of the “civilized western World” and it was made by Charles Darwin, in his book The Expression of the Emotions in

Man and Animals (Darwin, 1872), the first research exploring the world of emotions without

consid-ering them as a problem to overcome, but as a natural aspect of being human.

In the last years the idea of talking about and understanding emotions has become far more popular than it was before. Even if it is still often considered a sensitive and sometimes inconvenient topic, the approach to emotions is becoming both more scientific and more attentive. Psychologists as Alexan-der Lowen through his Bioenergetic theory (Lowen, 1975), and philosophers as Umberto Galimberti have given a new interpretation of what emotions and feelings are, overcoming the old mind/body dichotomy the whole western culture is build upon since Greek fifth century b.C. philosophy; those new perspectives gave back their value to emotions, relocating them in relation to the body, opening new, more objective and more reliable opportunity for studies, researches and understandings on what emotion are and how they influence and are influenced by our everyday life (Galimberti, 1987).

It is on this track that new researches have been made in the last year, such as the one conducted by Nummenmaa et al. (2013) addressed to create a body based emotion-map. The interesting and fasci-nating fact about this newly made research is that its foundings, explained through an easy to read and beautifully illustrated diagram (See image n.2), have become viral on the internet and could have been found for many weeks on different platforms such as news papers and science focused web pages as well as on more general location such as tumblrs, blog and even on memes based collaborative media. Those are proofs of how much the general interest has lately become focused and fascinated by the

idea of understanding the nature of emotions.

In their investigation Nummenmaa et al. found that there is a consistency in how humans feel and in how and where they place and sense emotions inside their body. This research is meant to create a new helpful chart which could help us to easily and more exactly discretize and understand specific emotional feeling (Ibid.).

On a larger scale, but symptomatic of the renewed interest in the value of emotions, is the annual

World Happiness Report made by the United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions Network

(Helliwell et al., 2013), this year, on the third iteration of the report, Denmark has been elected the happiest country in the world (See Image n.3). It is important to understand that the World

Happi-ness Report is not meant to compliment the happiest countries and blame the others, it’s a document

created with the aim to find out what makes a country happy, how happiness is perceived variously in different places around the world and, on top of all, with the intention to officially dignifying happi-ness (and with it all the emotions) as a valuable, new and consistent evaluation approach; we should welcome this new and more human perspective hoping it will help our society to reconsider the high value of happiness over the capitalistic affection for productivity, performance and outcomes.

To summarize, a new interest is arising around the subject of emotions, both from a scientific per-spective than from a more popular one, as well it is becoming clear how to localize emotions, even on very different scale, is of primary importance to have some kind of understanding of them. So far researches considered and localized emotions on the perspective of the human body and on the perspective of the entire world, and they found out that both those approaches not just make sense, but are relevant to understand the nature of emotions and how they influence and are a significant criterion to evaluate our lives;

Considered those two applications it makes sense to think to apply a similar approach to something that has a size in between the hu-man body and the world: cities.

In the book Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains,

Cit-ies, and Software, Steven Johnson theorizes the vision of the city as

a macro-organism, alive and responsive to changes and aging and conforming itself as an anthill (Johnson, 2001). This means that if

Image n.2, Nummenmaa, L. et al (2013). Bodily maps of emotions.

we have the right perspective (both visual and temporal) on cities we may have the opportunity, on the long run, to understand and analyze them on a completely new level and we may finally be able to intervene with thoughtful wisdom in order to help them to develop in the most desirable manner for their citizens. In this perspective, understanding and visualizing how a city feels may become a mean to see what’s right and what’s wrong about it; may this be the place to start from to make better cities for happier citizens? What does it mean to understand how a city feels?

e

c

A preliminary answer to the questions asked in the previous section may be the artistic research Christian Nold has carried on between 2005 and 2007 in several cities around the world; Nold used a biometric sen-sor, an object that measures the galvanic response of the skin, and he composed it with a GPS and called it Bio Mapping Device (See Image n.3). He then moved in to different cities (Nottingham, Greenwich, San Francisco, Stockport) and asked to local community organizations to collaborate with him.

Nold organized workshops with the people from local community organizations and asked them to wear the Bio Mapping Device and to walk around the city. The Bio Mapping Device measures the emotional intensity response of the person wearing it and the GPS locates it. Once back to the workshop base, people were asked to share their data, comment and process them, in order to make sense, for themselves as well that for the other participants, of what their arousal intensity meant and what had triggered it. So, the subjective mapping were created retrospectively and not just based on the “objective data”, but on the personal elaboration and validation of those data. The subjective maps were then composed in to a collective mapping of the city meant to represent the community reaction to certain areas and specifically located situations.

Image n.4, Nold, C. (2005). Bio Mapping Device.

Nold’s research is as well an effort to find the most communicative city-map based visualization of the collected data. He uses a different representation for each experiment where he combines the “objective data” (from the Bio Mapping Device) with the “subjective data” (comments, information, reflections,..). There is a very deep reflection on what it means to represent the information, the attempts swing from a scientific and diagrammatic representation approach to more artistic/comic based illustrations.

The different choices Nold makes in the representation are justified as well by the different ques-tions he’s trying to answer to; for instance, he reports that the Greenwich Emotion Map, one of the most diagrammatically represented documents, tries to ask the question: “How will our perceptions of

our community and environment change when we become aware of our own and each others intimate body states?”; may a project like Emotional Cartography become a democratic mean of democratic

involvement in the development of cities future master-plans? (Nold et al, 2009)

AFFECTIVE COMPUTING

Affective computing is a very specific branch in the world of interaction design that explores the influence that users’ emotions have in the experience of the interaction. This research was born with-in the new approach to the relevance of emotion started with-in the ‘90s that began to consider emotion as the basis for rational behaviour (Höök, 2013). The first definition and comprehensive study about Affective Computing was made by Rosalind W. Picard, founder of the Affective Computing Research Group at the MIT Media Lab, in 1997 with her book Affective Computing (Picard, 1997); currently, in the research scenario there are very different approach and interpretation of what is Affective Com-puting, what kind of contribution it could give to the field of Human Computer Interaction and how to approach and understand the range of human emotion and the value and the weight they could bring in the conceiving and developing of a design.

Here is how Affective computing is explained on the official web page of the Affective Computing Research Group at the MIT Media Lab:

“Affective Computing is computing that relates to, arises from, or deliberate-ly influences emotion or other affective phenomena. Emotion is fundamental to human experience, influencing cognition, perception, and everyday tasks such as learning, communication, and even rational decision-making. However, technol-ogists have largely ignored emotion and created an often frustrating experience for people, in part because affect has been misunderstood and hard to measure. Our research develops new technologies and theories that advance basic under-standing of affect and its role in human experience. We aim to restore a proper balance between emotion and cognition in the design of technologies for address-ing human needs.” (Picard et al, n. d.)

Differently, in her interview for the web based Encyclopedia of Human Computer Interaction, Kris-tina Höök(2013) opens a debate about the different approaches existing in the field of Affective

Com-puting, criticizing Rosalind Picard’s research attitude toward it, here Picard’s view, inspired to

cogni-tive psychology, is portrayed as an attempt to discretize human emotions’ nuances through a hasty simplification, in this view affections are identifiable and can be categorized with the aim to develop interactions with machines capable to recognise user’s emotions, influence them and being influenced by them.

Contrary, Höök (ibid.) states her approach to the research as Affective Interactional Approach; this approach, as she declares, is more focused on the cultural aspects related to the theme of emotions and toward the development of software and applications meant to help users to understand and better experiencing their own emotions. Central focus of what Höök calls Interactional Approach are the attempts to design to stimulate the user in reflecting upon her emotional states and the pursuit of a non-reductionist representation and categorization of human‘s affective states; in the Interactional Approach the emotional responses sought while designing interactions with a system are not always and necessary positive: the interaction is seen as an experience needing complexity in order to be aes-thetically pleasurable and meaningful; for example the opportunity to communicate with another user and share empathy and sympathy with her is worthwhile and a medium able to support this exchange would be highly considered, while the emotions shared may not always be positive.

While the research I am conducting has a lot do with Affective Computing and try to understand some of its different souls and aspects is vital to my work, my intent, at this state of my studies, is not meant to take sides or to judge one as better or more meaningful than another as this would imply a much deeper understanding of the field, of its theoretical foundations as well as a better develop-ment of a personal ethical view about those concerns. Anyhow, in the next paragraphs I am going to describe some projects developed in those different research contexts of Affective Computing and I am using them both to outline my research and to start building a personal perspective which is not meant to be seen as a final judgment, but as an ongoing learning and evaluating process.

M

Mood Meter is a project developed by researchers of the Affective Computing Research Group

found-ed by Rosalind Picard at the MIT Mfound-edia Lab (Picard et al, 2012). The project was held for ten weeks in the MIT campus during a five month festival organized to celebrate 150 years of the University.

Mood Meter was an interactive installation scattered in different locations of the MIT campus; it

consisted of four cameras connected with laptops equipped with software able to analyze the recorded images and recognize all the smiles appearing there, then a server received those information and used them to generate a public website displaying graphics of the number of smiles, where they have been collected, with which intensity etc.. Behind each camera a screen or a projection was showing what was being recorded, but whenever a person appeared her faces was hidden behind green blobs when she was smiling and yellow blobs when she was not. This was a clever expedient both to engage more people and make them more aware of the project , but as well a way to communicate a sort of privacy: no faces are being recorded, no personal information are stored. The MIT group focused a lot in making it clear how they were addressing the privacy issue, being this a very sensitive spot (Ibid.).

This project is very relevant for my research: in the way it somehow addresses the same kind of questions (understanding place related emotional responses) I am trying to answer to, in the mode it reflects upon problem of visualization of place related data (See image n.6) and looks for an engaging way to communicate patterns, but also because of some of the design choice that I would not have taken and that reflects a very peculiar way to manipulate and use data;

I found the data visualization solutions really engaging, the decision to give an “emotive portrait of a community” and the effort to try to understand patterns in the affective responses to different moment of the semester, of the week and of the day and relate them to specific places. What I found not quite correct in respect of the way data are used is the choices to only report “smiles”, which to me seems mostly a way to advertise the campus more than a way to report the emotive situation of the people working and studying there, recognising this attitude made me even more aware of the sensitivity of data and how easy is to manipulate them not only in the way they are displayed but as well in the way they are collected, of course I understand how sometimes researchers have defined technical and founding restrictions that may force them to take certain decision and not other.

A

Affective Diary is a system developed by Ståhlet al (2008) based on the idea to design a system able to help people to understand and experience their own emotions. In their approach Stål et al were seeking a op-portunity to design for the engagement of users in the embodied aspect of the processing of emotions, where the concept of cultural body was kept in account.

The Affective Diary is system composed of a mobile phone equipped with a camera, armband and a tablet pc. The system uses the mobile phone to keep traces of the sms sent and received, it uses a blue-tooth connection to disclose the presence of other mobile phones in the proximity and collects all the pictures taken. The armband is provided with a movement sensor and galvanic sensor, which detects the arousal amount of the wearer based on the galvanic conductivity of the skin (it does not, though,detect the quality of the arousal). The armband has a wireless connection to the mobile phone.

At the end of the day the user has to connect the phone to the tablet pc, which through a timeline shows the different data recorded at every time. Arousal and movements are displayed through an ambiguous shapes that while giving information are open for the use to interprets them. The user can as well add text or scribbles to the timeline if she feels like doing it (ibid.).

As is easily understandable by the name of the project and by the choice of not giving close answers the user, Affective diary is strongly meant to encourage reflection in to users; as many of us could have experienced it is very difficult to keep traces of our own emotion over time (McDuff, D. et al, 2012),;

Affective diary can be seen as an easy, clean and interpretable way to collect different status over a long

period of time and, being able to reconnect it to happening (pictures), amount and kind of relations (sms pattern, blue-tooth sensor) and moment of the day, it could be an excellent way to trigger behav-ioural changes (Ståhl et al, 2008) .

URBAN COMPUTING

The term Urban Computing was coined by Eric Paulos and Elizabeth Goodman (2004), and indicates the application of technology in urban environment with the aim of a better understanding, acknowl-edging and developing of the urban environment itself. The core concept of Urban Computing resides in a grassroots approach seen as an indispensable mean to deepen and enhance the perception that residents and civic government have of the city; of course, the grassroots approach stated before would be insignificant and weak without the modern and spread emergence of computing devices: Urban Computing builds its power and mean on the opportunity given by smart phones and other (mobile or not) computing devices to enhance the interactions of citizens with their urban environment (Paulos E. et al., 2008).

Urban Computing’s strategy is the development and design of an orchestrated network of instruments

scattered around public spaces as well as in mobile devices and capable to measure the environment they are in and; the kind of devices that we are already finding in our cities and that are probably going to grow in number, power and use are:

• Onboard sensors: embedded in our mobile devices;

• Wearable: object embodied in the clothes or in the jewellery that sends

infor-mations to the user’s mobile phone through a wireless connection;

• Left Behind: low power and low cost sensors scattered around places sending

informations;

• Scattered: sensors used in a certain context for a framed time;

• Infrastructure: sensors placed in the urban environment, with specific tasks and

embedded in a sensors’ network (ibid.).

Eric Paulos and his collaborators detected five research key themes that, constituting the framework of Urban Computing, identify it as a multidisciplinary subject where interaction designers, social sci-entists, architects, urban planners and geographers collaborate together.

Here are the five key themes:

“People – Who are the people we share our city with? How do they influence our urban landscape? Where do we belong in this social space and how do new technologies enable and disrupt feelings of community and belonging?

Place – How do we derive the meaning of various public places? What cues do we use to interpret place and how will urban technologies re-inform and alter our perception of various places? How does technology create new places?

Infrastructure – How will existing urban systems such as power, water, subways, public transportation, signal lights, toll booths, etc. be used and re-appropriated by emerging technologies?

Architecture – What new techniques and smart surfaces will emerge for inter-acting with buildings, public surfaces, sidewalks, benches, and other “street furni-ture”? What role will new structures, shapes, and forms play?

Flow – What is a path or route through a city using these new urban tools? How will navigation and movement, either throughout an entire city or within a small urban space, be influenced by the introduction of computing technologies?”

(ibid).

P

u

Participatory Urbanism, directly inspired by the mood and spirit of Urban Computing, is more

fo-cused on the empowered individual that finally become part of an influential critical mass active-ly participating to the life of the city: in this perspective residents contribute to their environment through the collection, the sharing, the crossing and the evaluation of data they produced.

On this track we could expect Participatory Urbanism to became an instrument that makes citizens (at least the one involved in the generating, sharing and evaluating of the data and content) more at-tentive and aware of what’s happening around them, more responsible for their own city, feeling more protected and supported by the fact of being part of a community (a critical mass) and better informed about the city; on the other hand, civic governments are more informed on what are the issues it the places they are administrating, they have the opportunity to justify their choices (when coherent with the data and information shared) and can share some of their responsibilities with the citizen’s them-selves (Paulos E. et al., 2008).

Of course, there are risks in the use of those tools: sensors are often seen as aseptic instruments ca-pable to represent the reality of the world around us, but sensors are setted by people to detect certain input and not others, visualization tool can be focused in showing certain data and hiding others and many other aspect can be handled in order to give a vision of reality that is distorted, strongly ideo-logical or utilitarian; this is why Participatory Urbanism, as well as Urban Computing, could became a strong political tools, they have to be handled with awareness, respect and every time the ideology behind them should be made clear and recognizable, this way those tools won’t be exploited as a pa-ternalistic instrument of soft public coercion.

d

s

Discussion in Space is an experimental system created to remove barriers between those who live the city and those who govern and build it. This operation was carried in the city of Brisbane, Australia, in 2011 and was used by the City Council during the preliminary phase of the public consultations part of the urban planning agenda.

Discussion in Space was designed by the Urban Informatics Research Lab of the Institute for Creative Industries and Innovation of Queensland University of Technology led by Ronald Schroeter (2012).

The system consisted of a certain number of screens in different places of the city; the screens were showing a question to the citizens that could be answered sending sms or through a twitter message; being the screens public there were moderator with the power to decline certain messages when con-sidered inappropriate for public displaying.

The idea behind this design is to have citizens’ feedback on proposed urban planning projects, and mostly to trigger the interest of young people who instead would not be interested or would not expect to be listened and taken in account in such important decision about their city.

The project received a lot of participation; one of the most interesting facts about this project is how the researcher found out that most of the messages they received had been sent through sms and not

through twitter accounts, which mostly meant that the user preferred to participate using a “low bar-rier” mean. Other interesting aspects, understand through online questionnaires, are how important was for the users to see their comments displayed around the city, as well as seeing how many people were using the system.

s

f

c

s

San Francisco CrimeSpotting (http://sanfrancisco.crimespotting.org/) is a smart-phone and web app

part of a category of applications that Kevin et al (2012) define citizens apps; those are mobile applica-tions, generally designed for a specific urban environment, with the aim to empower citizens giving them a deeper view of the space around them, augmenting the reality in which they are living in and offering them the opportunity to make their voice being heard and/or making them aware of what is going on in their city.

In the group of the citizens apps, which can be built with different aims and different systems and level of interaction, collection and distribution of the data, San Francisco CrimeSpotting is a Public

Safety app,with the goals of Problem Identification and Creating Awareness (Ibid.); the app (that is not

affiliated with the City of San Francisco or the San Francisco Police Department) presents an inter-active map showing crimes happening in the city, the crimes are as well classified and can be easily consulted; citizens can comment and leave their opinions about a certain crime.

One of the most interesting things about the web-page of San Francisco CrimeSpotting are the state-ments that can be read at the bottom of the homepage: this system is considered by its developers (Stamen Design) not only as a way to create awareness about what’s the criminal state of the city among residents, but is also a “manifesto” to show to the local governments the value and power of data visualizations.

Image n.8, Schroeter, R. (2012). Discussion in space, screen.

06. DESIGN PROCESS

Based on the idea that an embodied instrument would have probably been the best solution to gain collaboration from citizens to share their emotional thought about the city, I started my research ex-pecting one of these two outcomes:

• building a wearable collecting emotional responses based on a mobile application (Emotion-Sense),

• an analogical prototype of an interactive street furniture;

the testing of these instruments would have been used to outline guidelines for the best designs of an actual “emotions collector”.

I started to approach the design process through the user test of an existing Android based app called EmotionSense as this seemed to be the fastest way to understand if a wearable would have been a valuable mean for the collecting of emotional reactions; EmotionSense is an emotion tracker which had some of the features I wanted to develop further in my project. Seven people tested it for a week, I interviewed two of them, the other five answered to an online questionnaire. From both the interviews and the questionnaire I found out that people didn’t really used EmotionSense, they mostly found it pointless and too intrusive, those founding together made me understand that personal devices, as a wearable, would not be the best choice as a mean to obtain emotional information from people to have a general view of how the city feels.

As I decided to put aside the idea of the wearable, I introduced in to my design process the proto-typing of place related physical input and their user testing in order to develop guidelines to use when designing an interactive street furniture.

At first I designed a fast prototype, made out of cardboard and paper, with a simple design. It was meant to be easily understood and used: a writing on the top of it was asking “How are you today?” and it was supposed to be left in some place so that passer-byes could take one slip of paper with one of the six basic emotions (Handel, 2012) drawn over it, and stick it inside a poll through an hole in the middle of the prototype in order to answer to the question. With this first prototype I wanted to understand if someone would have been interested to share her emotional status through a poll and if and how much the positioning of the poll itself would have mattered on the kind of answers. I tested this first prototype for three days and I used as a base for my tests the C floor of Kranen, one of Malmö University’s building; the C floor is the main and busiest floor in the building, where the entrance, the cafeteria, a study area, and relax area are placed. On each of the three testing days I placed the pro-totype in a different place of the C floor. Through the different number of answers the poll collected every day I had the opportunity to understand that people were actually willing to share their emo-tional status and that places where people are passing bye are also the one where it is possible to collect more answers.

As the first prototype gave me interesting answers and it mostly revealed itself as a working mean to gather answers from people about their emotional statuses, I designed a second prototype, more complex and basically built on what I found out during my previous user testings.

This second prototype was meant to understand if giving a feedback on the received responses could have been a way to obtain more answers this is why part of it is made of transparent plexiglass. Also

I wanted to give more than one different way to answer in order to understand what is the one that people prefer. The second prototype, made in MDF and plexiglass, was asking the question “How does this place make you feel?” in order to try to obtain answers related to the place itself and not about a general emotional status. This time users were requested to stick some small slip of papers with the answer “why?” written over it inside one of the six polls behind the plexiglass; each of those polls was representing one of the six basic emotions previously mentioned. The users could chose to write some-thing on the paper or just use it to answer to the general question placing it inside one of the polls. On the prototype there is also a short link to answer to a general questionnaire.

I tested this second prototype first inside Malmö University’s buildings and after outside in the city. The first test happened on the bridge connecting Kranen with the building Ubåtshallen, this is a place where people move very fast and never stop; in this occasion the poll obtained 62 responses and over 34% was left blank while 22% of them had a meaningful written feedback on it.

On the second day of testing of this prototype I placed it in front of the entrance of the university library. This time I collected 79 answers, the 30% of which were strongly related with the place while another 30% was left white. Only one person answered to the online questionnaire.

I considered this user testing very successful as it seamed that people were actually eager to partic-ipate and share their emotional status about places and they often understood what was asked them; another reason why I think I had many answers was because I left the choice to the users to decide how much to share.

As this first user testing gave me reasons to think I was going in the right direction with my research, I decided to take the second prototype outside in the city to test it in the wild.

The place I chose for this second part of the test is Södervärn, a neighbourhood of Malmö in the district of Södra Innerstaden, where an important public transport hub is situated. This time I tested the prototype on three different days and in front of three different bus stops. The first day I placed it in front of a bus stop where city buses going to the south and to the east of the city where stopping; of 20 answers collected the 40% was strongly related with the place while another 40% was left white. On the second day I left the poll where regional buses were stopping, it received 29 responses and less than the 7% of those had a strong relation with the place, while almost the 60% was left white. On the last day I placed the prototype where buses going to the city of Lund where stopping; Lund is a city char-acterized by its university and most of the people going there are students, this time the poll received 40 answers, the 32% of which strongly place related and about the 10% left white.

This iteration of the prototype’s user testing outside in the city gave me the opportunity to confirm most of my previous findings, I also noticed some differences in terms of collaboration and of trust toward the poll and who built it; those differences are probably to be ascribed to the diversity between the university, a semi-close environment where a certain amount of mutual untold trust subsists in between the people that consider each other part of the same community, and a space like the public transport hub of Södervärn where this mutual belonging feeling lacks and consequently people feel less like trusting and helping a stranger who placed a poll in the street asking for feedbacks.

EMOTIONSENSE

EmotionSense is an emotion tracker smart-phone app and is the app I used in the first phase of my research; I made the decision to use this system to began my exploration because it had some features that were very similar to the features I was interested to bring forward in my research and it made

sense to use an existing instrument to understand its values and to proof my initial perspectives. Emotion trackers as EmotionSense are also known as behavioural monitoring systems (Lathia et al., 2013) and are used to keep track of the user’s moods and feelings. The idea behind those systems is to understand behavioural patterns, arising awareness around those behaviours and to give the opportu-nity to the user to change what makes her unhappy, angry or depressed.

The idea of tracking behaviours in order to trigger changes is not new (eg: www.lifeguideonline.org), but has been revolved by the large scale diffusion of smart-phones. Those devices, so common in our everyday life are as well a complete novelty and they present an infinite number of opportunity. In the case of behavioural change studies and applications the use of smart-phones could be powerful; a smart-phone is an object meant to be carried around all day everyday, is something we are in con-stant touch and in concon-stant control of, it has several sensors that combined together are an open door on a myriad of information and insights about its user. As scary at it may seem, when ethically and thoughtfully approached and handled, those instruments are a great manner to monitor and under-stand patterns on a personal and on a large scale and this is why behavioural app are becoming more and more popular in researchers (Lathia et al, 2013).

“Emotion Sense” is an app developed by researcher of The Computer Laboratory at University of Cambridge and released under a ISC license, it has been claimed to be a “pocket therapist” by different reviewers (Huffington Post UK , 2013; Ruki Sayid , 2013);

EmotionSense is able, combining passive sensor data collection and machine learning, to provide continuous monitoring of participants’ emotional states while collecting data representative of each person’s social interactions and mobility (Lathia et al, 2013).

h

e

s

?

EmotionSense has a very complex system of sensors and data monitoring that gives extra informa-tion and insights on the user’s behavioural pattern. The sensors used are the smart-phone’s accelerom-eter, the Blue-tooth, WiFi, GPS and microphone. This means that the app is able to collect information about the quantity of motion, the position and the level of noise around the user; In order not to bee overwhelming sensors are unlocked weekly. Those sensors are used to describe the device’s physical behavior. The app is able to collect as well the device’s social behaviour which is described by the num-ber of SMSs received and sent, the numnum-ber of calls, the activity on social media. The screen state and the battery used (device’s status) are collected as well (Lathia et al, 2013, Googledocs). All those in-formation (that remain anonymous and not connected to the app’s users) are collected and both used to show the user what may have triggered the user’s mood and for the sake to enhance the research on smart-phone apps adopted for behavioural change.

When first using the app it asks you how many times per day you want to monitor your mood, then, whenever is time for you to do so, you are reminded through a short buzz and an icon on your

phone’s screen, basically the same system used for received SMS. The user records her mood through what Lathia et al (n.d.) call “Affective Grid” following the researches of Russell et al. (1989); an affect grid is a two dimensional scale meant for a fast recording of feelings; on the x axis are negative and positive states while the y axis indicates the grade of alertness or sleepiness (Russell et al., 1998). Every time, after recording the mood on the grid a few questions are asked,those questions vary depending on the chosen quadrant on the grid.

The recorded emotions are stored and are shown all together on the affective grid. This is supposed to be a mean to reconsider the behaviour that may be behind those emotional response; as every week a new sensor is unlocked every week there is as well a new Affection grid relating the recorded moods to the new sensor or situation.

u

t

At the very beginning of my research I asked to a small number of friends (10) to try to use Emotion-Sense; It was important for me to understand a certain number of things:

• how people would have reacted using this kind of app;

• if the app itself was a valuable way to indicate sensitive data as emotions; • if there were certain people more interested than others in using EmotionSense; • if starting to use this app would have triggered some kind of self consciousness

in the people using it;

• if any of the people using emotion sense was relating her mood to places .

As I already mentioned I mostly tried to involve in this process people close to me, whom wouldn’t have been too reticent in sharing delicate information as their emotional data; in this phase of my research I didn’t need to have all my users placed in Malmö and this is why I had some contribution from people placed both in France and in Poland.

Not too surprisingly after the initial enthusiasm some of my “users” stepped back; this happened for several reasons as technical difficulties (the app only runs on certain Android devices), privacy issues (one of my tests didn’t wand to try the app because he would have had to sign up in order to use it) or because it just felt pointless and disturbing to keep track of their emotions and then share it; this is quite understandable, emotions are a sensible topic and not everyone is willing to share them for a research.

To have a more comprehensive understanding of the application, its use and of my testers’ opinion I used the app as well for five weeks.

I

I had two different approaches when it came to gaining the results from the user tests I did on Emo-tionSense: I conducted both interviews and surveys; I chose one or the other method depending on the strengthens of my relation with the users, the time they had to dedicate me and the physical dis-tance between me and them.

them were not using the app, because of compatibility of the app with their mobile phone’s system or because of privacy issues (“it reads my sms and call history (and my phone is not supported)”, “Because

I don’t like registration in apps”).

Some of the people answering to the questionnaire found the idea of EmotionSense fascinating, but were as well concerned about how useful it could be for them to use a behavioural app, they didn’t seem to be fascinated by it and mostly they were very unhappy with the kind of questions that Emo-tionSense was keeping on asking: “... I find it really hard to answer the questions from time to time. Am

I anxious? I don’t know. Compared to what? Extremely difficult is the “To what extend was your day like other days?”, because it can involve sooo many dimensions. In terms of what? In terms of my mood? my experiences? where i’ve been, whom I talked to? It’s all so unspecific.”. Someone said that she would have

been much more interested in knowing other’s mood:”...I’d be more interested in other people’s moods,

around me.”.

It seems as well that people using the app are mostly using it at home and they think that the place where they are influences their emotions (“certain places just make me feel like things aren’t so bad after

all and on other places I almost always feel stuck.”, “There are places where I feel secure (like my home) ,places where I just feel strange (where I don’t know people) or places where I feel relaxed and happy (like the cinemas)..”). Also they didn’t find themselves reflecting much more upon the way they feel (it has

to be remembered that the test was taken after one week of user testing, quite a short time); it seems that the opportunity to check the data previously collected is the one taken more in account from the users(“I’m curious how the app can “see me” only after my responses every day, cos I know myself quite

well :) but it’s funny and interesting to see almost your psychological profile.”).

When it came to the interviews the answers were mostly very similar to the ones given to the online questionnaire, but is quite noticeable how angry one of the users I interview was against the Emotion-Sense app: “It keeps on buzzing, why? It buzzes at seven in the morning asking me how I feel, I’m ******

mad at you because you woke me up, this is how I feel!”.

Another user referred how skeptical he was feeling in the beginning about sharing his emotional sta-tuses through an app, then he just referred how he was mostly keeping on forgetting about using the app and as well how difficult it was from time to time to answer to the various questions.

c

e

s

The user testing of EmotionSense revealed this application as clumsy, disappointing and not appro-priate for the kind of project I wanted to develop (collect collective emotional view on places around the city); this made me decide to take a bend in the development of my research and to focus in the creation and user-testing of analogic street furniture prototypes of a to be used to create design guide-lines.

The reason that made me decide to give up the use of EmotionSense to continue my research are both connected to the responses obtained by the user tests and to a personal better understanding of what would have been the best instrument to answer to my research questions.

First of all the user testing of EmotionSense made it clear how many people are very concerned about privacy issues: many users were not keen on sharing all their sensor based data, even if it is made clear when starting to use the app that none of the data(used for further researches on behavioural app) can be reconnected to the user that produced it; also, some of the users were feeling very annoyed by the continuous requests to report their mood and the use of the app were reported as not being a trigger for further reflection about specific places and their relation with emotional responses.

While conducting the user-testing of EmotionSense, while using it myself and in parallel going deep-er in the research of the relation between cities and emotions I unddeep-erstood that a portable and pdeep-erson- person-al instrument wouldn’t have been the right one for the project I had in mind; first, a wearable would only suit people whom are fascinated by behavioural computing and this wouldn’t be a “democratic approach” for a city based emotional map because it would exclude all the people who don’t have the same kind of interests; also the only way to have a real emotional response about something is to ask for it while that “something” is happening (Isomursu et al, 2007), this means that the only way to have a real emotional reaction about a place is to ask for it in the place itself; differently the user that tested EmotionSense were only using the app while at home, which means they were not actively reflecting over places in the city.

Those reasons made me decide to change the direction of my research toward a design that could be considered as a part of the city and this is why I decided to enhance the research of what Paulos (2008) calls “street furniture”, trying to understand what kind of guidelines a designer has to follow when de-veloping a city based instrument able to collect citizens’ emotional reaction to places in the city.

EMOTIONAL POLL

Once founded out that a wearable wouldn’t be the right way to gain city related affective data pro-duced by many and different people I decided to try a different approach I already mentioned before, this would be the use of “city located street furniture”; this would be a mean to understand if in-place digital augmentation may be a valuable method to obtain citizens’ point of view (in this case emotional response) about a certain place in the place itself (Schroeter, 2012) and an opportunity to outline design-guidelines for further development of an interactive street furniture. The idea would be to place physical interfaces in specific places around the city that could be used by pedestrian or cyclist to record their mood at a certain time and place. This way I would avoid both privacy issue, the risk of only obtaining data about a small number of people and the risk of annoying my users keeping on asking them “how do you feel?”.

Of course this method may not lead to any interesting material, the input station may not be no-ticed, the project may not be seen as interesting, someone may think about trolling the station and other kind of issues may arise that would make the project useless or not valuable.

F

, h

?

I built a prototype of the street furniture made out of paper and cardboard and I placed it in different places around Kranen (One of the building where the university of Malmö is located) to see if this approaches works in the relatively small environment of the university.

This prototype I built (the first one) is called “how are you today?” and it is composed of an inclined cardboard sheet placed on a stand. The cardboard sheet has an hole in the centre and behind it there is a box. This first prototype was meant to be used to find out:

• if people are willing to share some information about their emotional state, • what are the best places to ask questions about it.

Those are the reasons why the building phase was very fast and I tried to be very economical with the time spent to build it and with the material used. There is an A3 paper with graphics glued on the

cardboard; on the top of the paper there is a question: “how are you today?” and under it the instruc-tion that need to be followed: “please choose your mood and drop it here”, an arrow indicate the hole in the middle of a coloured hexagon. Each side of the hexagon indicate one of the six basics emotions: happiness, excitement, calm, anger, sadness, anxiety (Handel, 2012); the choice of the colours for each emotion is based on different theories on colours as stated by Anna Ståhl (2005). On the left and right side of the cardboard are hanging six stacks of papers, each with a different emoticon symbolizing the six mentioned emotions. Under the hexagon there is a statement explaining what is all the object about followed by a Qr-code; the Qr-code is meant for whom is willing to answer to a questionnaire (“This is a research about the relation between moods and places. If you want collaborate further, contact me answering to the questionnaire using the Qr-code.”).

On the bottom of the paper there are two last lines:”thank you!” and “have a candy”. Those are meant to reward who is helping me collaborating in my research. Of course on the side of the cardboard sheet there is a cup full of candies.

u

I tested “how are you today” for three days, each day I placed it on a different area of the C floor in Kranen; the C floor is the busiest one in the whole structure as here is the main entrance, the cafeteria, there are couches and tables where the students rest and work during the day (and sometimes at night as well) and here are the entrance to the corridor leading to the classes.

On the first day, a Monday, I installed “how are you today?” in the main hall in Kranen, between the boat and the glass wall, where the study/rest area is. At 17.30 (all the classes end generally around

0 5 10 15 20 25 30 DAY TWO DAY THREE DAY ONE

Image n.12, results from “how are you today?”,

16.00) I had 18 answers to the physical pool, but no one compiled to the online questionnaire.

On the second day, Tuesday, I moved “how are you today?” to a new spot: Kranen’s main entrance just at the end of the stairs, a very busy transit point. While in the middle of the day, around 13.00 thhe number of responses was scarce at the end of the day, at 17.30, the number of “physical” answers was 71 and all the candies were gone, compared to the previous day that was an outstanding result; again the internet questionnaire had no answer.

On the third day of my experiment, a Wednesday, I placed the physical poll in front of one of the entrance to the corridors where the classes are; it is important to notice that on that day, 04/30, there was a public celebration for Walpurgis Night (Valborgsmässoafton) which means that probably many people were not attending lectures or being in the building to study. At 19.30 I had 37 emoticon papers in the box, but no one answered to the questionnaire. In total I had 126 responses in three days.

c

“h

?”

The first thing to notice about the different outcomes I had during the three days of my experiment is how relevant the location choose to place “how are you today?” was. While on the first day people had to decide to go and check out what it was about on the second and third day it was much easier to reach the poll; it seems to be very obvious that installing “how are you today?” in a busy transition point gave it more opportunity to the people to notice it and to have the will to answer to it. I think this outcome is not only due to the visibility of the object, but also to a kind of awkwardness people may experience going to check out a new object that is not completely understandable from a distance.

Another noticeable outcome is given by the total number of responses the physical poll received (126) compared to the fact that no one used the Qr code to answer to the questionnaire. This shows how important is to set what Schroeter (2012) calls a “low barrier of entry” in order to have many (or at least some) answers. Of course it has to be considered that the Qr code may not have been the best technology to use, in my next experiment I would like to try to attach to my physical device a short link.

Another fascinating aspect regards the value of the reward given to who’s participating to the poll: each of the three days the amount of candies consumed was proportional to the number of answers received; based on this observation I will need to take in account to think some kind of compensation in the design of the final Emotional poll.

This experiment gave many insights on how to proceed in the designing of the next prototype, but I still have no information on what kind of different outcome I would receive if I gave to users some

kind of feedback on the collected data. Would it be a reason to participate more? Would it affect the results as people often tend to be influenced from what others say/do?

Anyhow other experiments have shown that displaying in public the obtained results is an effective mean to gather more content and more visibility, Schoroeter (2012) refers that one of the reason for the contributors to share their opinions during the iteration of Discussion in space (Ibid.)was to make their opinion public.

SECOND PROTOTYPE, HOW DOES THIS PLACE MAKE YOU FEEL?

With my second prototype I tried to understand if giving some kind of feedback on the answers while receiving them would have had an influence on the outcome. As well I wanted to understand if someone would have been interested in giving more detailed answers to the physical poll.

I called my second prototype “How does this place make you feel?” as I wanted to address a question that would have had more place related answers. I chose the world “place” because of the deep mean-ing that the word brmean-ings in itself which is not only related to the physical space, but, as Augè M.(1992) states, a place is affected by identity, relations and history, this way I expect the answers not to be only related to the physical state of the space, but also with other more ethereal aspect of the chosen site.

While designing this second prototype I decided to give it a more refined look than the first one in order to engage more people with its slightly more professional feature; this time the material I utilized were mostly MDF sheets of 6mm and plexiglass which I cut and engraved using a laser-cutter.

The physical poll consists of a MDF reclined surface of 45*65*0,6 centimetres (placed horizontally) with a squared hole of 30*30*0,6 centimetres in the centre, in this hole is placed a plexiglass sheet; on the top of the MDF surface I engraved a question: “How does this place make you feel?”, the typing has a height of 2.00 cm: big enough to be easily seen by any passer-bye; this is the main concept I wanted to transmit and this is why is written in a bigger type than any other element on the board. Under this written another one, smaller (height: 1.00 cm), says: “Explain why and then choose your mood”. On the left side, next to the hole in the MDF surface there is a written explanation of what all the board is about:”This is a research about the relation between places and moods. If you want to collaborate further,

please respond to the questionnaire using the Qr code or the link below.”; under this written there are

a short link and Qr code leading to a questionnaire; the questionnaire in this case is the same used during the previous poll.

On the right side of the board, on the top, there are two holes, used to fix a rope that holds a pen. The pen is used to write on some slips of paper. The slips of paper are hanging on the right side of the board, on each paper there is written the question “Why?”.

Under the bottom side of the boars, under the squared hole there is a final written: “Thank you, have a candy!”, two holes one on the right and one on the left of the written are used to tight a rope that holds a basket where candies can be placed; as founded with the other prototype some kind of reward is useful to obtain more answers and attention.

The plexiglass sheet placed in the centre is divided in six areas by horizontal and vertical engraved lines, on the top of each of those areas there are circular holes of two centimetres diameter, over each of those hole there is a slip of paper indicating the six basilar emotions: happy, sad, excited, angry,

anx-ious, calm (Handel, 2012). Under the holes there is as well an emoticon, clarifying the emotion written on the top; for each emotion is used a colour as well, the choice of the colour is based on different the-ories on colours as stated by Anna Ståhl (2005). Once a user has torn one of the “Why?” slip of paper and has answered to the question she is supposed to place it in one of the six holes to indicate which is her emotional state about the place. Behind the plexiglass sheet there are separated MDF boxes, one for each of the emotions that can be chosen, this way the slips of paper stays separated once they are used for voting, the boxes are designed to be open to make it possible to take the responses without having to break the whole prototype. The choice of the plexiglass sheet was made to leave see-through impression and to make it possible for users or simple passer-bys to see the amount of answers for each emotion, this is a simple analogical way to give a feedback to trigger interest and attention.

The whole poll is placed over a stand that keeps it at an height of circa 90 cm in order to be easily readable.

Finally the purpose of this prototype is:

• to draw passer-byes’ attention - this is why I chose a refined look, • to be easily understood and used,

• to give a feedback on the previous answers and see if this has some impact, • to give different opportunities to answer - just sticking a paper in one of the

poll, writing down an answer or answering to the online survey,

• to keep to myself the opportunity to change the prototype during the research in order to adjust it on the different founding.

To understand the data I collected I used a legend to evaluate how much the answers given were useful for an interpretation of peoples’ mood in a special context.

It has to be noted that I had many doubts while classifying the data I collected and that I don’t con-sider the legend I am using as a final solution to categorize this data; both the classification and the legend have to be considered as a first attempt to arrange the information I gathered, an attempt that can be improved and made more appropriate.

Here is the legend I am using :

Place related: when the answer given is strictly related to the place considered, could be taken in account as something that could to be changed or has a certain configuration based on a human choice (de-sign);

Somehow place related: when the answer given is related to the place, but can’t be changed or wasn’t influenced by a human choice (e.g.: it’s not possible to change the weather, having exams is part of a student life, etc...) ;

Not relevant: when the answer given has nothing to do with the place considered;

Troll: the answer given is an insult or a goliardic joke.

USER TESTING, INSIDE THE UNIVERSITY

Before taking this second prototype outside in the city I decided to test it again inside the university’s buildings to see how it worked and if there was some major issues in its usage.

Image n.15, two students interacting with “How does this place makes you feel?” while on The bridge.