*This Project is still in a concept development phase

My Role: Concept | Programming (Processing) | Design | Installation

This project is on-going project that is sponsored by Microsoft Research Fuse Labs, supervised by Kati London.

My team members were Harry Chen, Vanessa Joho, Max Ma and I. My role in this project is concept development and visualizing data.

Project idea:

Use NYC Open Data to make personas emerge in every block.  We hope NYC residents will cultivate empathy by communicating directly to the city with our personalized interactive map.

Data Input: 

NYC open data is a collection of New Yorkers lives. It is for everyone to access and use.  However, very few people tries to use it to tell their own narrative as its hard to find themselves in a big sea of data.

With our project, we tried to connect individuals with NYC by making NYC as one of us. This is an opportunity to impact New York City by invoking compassion in people who experience our map.

Personality Design and Output:

Clearly visualize the city’s emotions such as shy, angry, sad, disgusted, scare, surprise, trust, contempt and joy.  The surface will have different effects depending on emption types. For example, shy map will try to go inwards and shrink but angry map will tremble and outburst upwards. Negative emotion of problematic areas will vanish from our interactive NYC map because New York wants to show it’s best at all times. We will explore how each emotion can be visualized creatively on a surface.

Identify opportunities:

There is an opportunity to impact New York City by invoking compassion in people who experience our map.

Challenges: Defining the most accurate emotion per matter. Getting the data real time.

Risks for proposed project: This is not a functional map, it’s an art form.

Platform: It will be an interactive, special purpose map that will be built as regular size subway map in one of NYC subway stations.

Users will be able to customize the setting for the map to see the topics they are interested in.  A messenger device will be installed next to the map for users to leave messages about their feelings and comments. These messages will go directly to social media.  Most common question might be, “Where is my neighborhood?”

MVP & User Scenario:

Harry takes the 6 train in Union Square after work. While he is waiting for his train, he notices that there is a new NYC map stand on his platform. He is curious why the map is continuously changing. He goes up to the map for a closer look and sees a big sign on top that says “Sorry, I am embarrassed. - NYC”. He also reads the subtext and understands that the map is purposely hiding the crime scenes of New York. He can view the parts going inwards as if it’s sucked into a vacuum. On the right side of the map, there is a menu where you can customize to see topics you are interested viewing. Harry wants to see what are the dirtiest places in New York. He changes the setting to cleanliness, and the map completely changes its form and shape depending on the NYC’s 311 sanitation data. The map is incapable of displaying NYC’s general geographical information. However, New York City only wants to show it’s best. I mean; humans already see what we want to see right? Let’s hope that one day New York will be confident to show it’s whole self.