Final project update

Since the start of the idea of the Happiness Lamp we spend quite some time brainstorming and thinking about what the lamp should be. After testing and talking to other people, we decided that the happiness lamp should be something personal. The user should be glad to have it as an object and should be pleased to use it. We will be looking to create a sort of attachment between the user and the lamp, and we think this is possible when everyone has her or his personal lamp.

First we spoke with different people at the company where I’m doing my internship, Waag Society. Asked several questions concerning their happiness and unhappiness such as: what makes you happy? what makes you stressed? etc. We decided to do a workshop where all the participants could create their own personal lamp, this to see if they could get attached to the product and see how different everyone would personalise their lamp. What options do they need to have a personal lamp?

For the workshop we created a toolkit for building the lamp that consisted of; electronics, RGB LED and acrylic shapes I prepared, a briefing and a questionnaire that the participants could read and answer. One can find the files of the briefing and questionnaire at the bottom of the page. The answers on the questionnaire where very interesting and at certain points there were agreements, on other points division.

With the use of a RGB led we have the possibility to output 16581375 different colours to communicate or give a feedback on that persons happiness, and we can use brightness to visualise the importance of a certain emotion. We already got some feedback during the workshop on this topic, for example that a lot of the participants would connect red to mostly bad emotions or moods.

I was happy that most of the participants said it could become a product they would feel attached to and would be happy to use. There were different opinions from people on whether it should be a biofeedback product or a communication product. I think the user should have the possibility to use it in both ways and be able to decide if they would like their biofeedback to also be communicated.

Biofeedback:
This means the lamp will be personalised and only the user would notice what the visualisation of the lamp means. The user can select colours to represent certain emotions and factors of their well being, this way only the user will understand what emotions the colours stand for, as well as getting a more personal experience from this method.

Communicating:
You are at work and the lamp recognises that you are stressing, a fellow colleague notices this and offers to help you out to lower your stress-level.

Combined:
I see this as deciding on certain emotions that you would like to share to your friends, colleagues, strangers etc. If you decide to keep this all to yourself you don’t have to share what emotions the colour stand for. Perhaps it would be a good idea if everyone would have their own colour profile, which they can choose whether to keep public or private.

Next steps:

• Research peoples connection with colour and emotion.
• Add potmeter to different happiness factors to simulate the lamp
• Test different colours in relation to emotion
• Do another workshop
• Maybe build a big lamp visualising communities & groups for example a workspace