Concept

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Take a different look at the data you produce every day 

There might be information available about you online which may not bother you at first but which might be used and put into a wrong context by someone else.
Wouldn`t it be good if you became aware of  which data your public online persona is constructed from? You could remember what feelings those data evoked in certain situations in you and you could save these feelings and be reminded of them just in time when you are about to publish similar data consciously or even unconsciously.

The Solution
Reflect on yourself by expressing your emotions towards your data which are publicly available about you right now with sound and colour. This is not about your privacy. It is about the data you published yourself, which can be retrieved with every search engine.

Save these so called data-emotions as “SoundCircles” which react to the same type of data and automatically connect with similar types. Inject these SoundCircles in your furniture, digital vases, your google glasses or your smartphone and let yourself be guided by a self-designed ambient data indicator.

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What is the benefit? 

Whenever you have done something which has created ugly green data or which has sounded horribly high-pitch pink you will be reminded of it just in time when you are about to do something similar.
By thinking about your data you might become more aware of  what you publish and be able to judge where and how you produce data and how these data might feel in the future.

The Project
This project was developed as part of my resolution unit in the MA Design for Digital Media Program at the University of Portsmouth. It combines Visual and Interaction Design with Cognitive aspects of human psychology as well as relevant Social and Cultural Contexts, embedded in a Critical Design approach. I created a processing sketch and started alongside to work out interface animations,  inspired by Ovids Metamorphosis and Kafkas “Die Verwandlung” I tried to create an Interface which incorporates aspects of change and transformation, sometimes even into things we don`t want to be, as it can happen to our digital self.

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The Data
The sketch loads search results from Google. A free library called wordrcam creates a tag cloud from these search results.
These tag clouds are mapped into soundcircles (the bigger the tag the bigger the circle). So souncircles are basically tag clouds based on search results about ourselves but enriched with emotions mediated via sound and colour.

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[Links]

Related projects: http://boogie.alfahosting.org/website/?p=1689