Heatbeats of Shared Experiences

Proposal

People experience the same event differently: meaning a shared experience can evoke different emotions from its participants. Especially when with people that we hold special relationships with (such as friendships, romantic relationships), how truthful are we of our emotions? How aware are we of others’ emotions?

For this investigation, I want to look into how to create representations of shared experiences that include equal inputs from their participants. I will specifically explore this through couples.

Whenever couples are experiencing an event together, personal wearables will keep track of data on their emotional changes throughout the time spent together by generating emotions timelines.

Through computational processes, the timelines from the couple will be compared and a final visualization representing the emotional differences between the two will be generated. This visualization will become part of a larger wall art piece that encompasses all the experiences shared by the couple. This summary is meant to incite reflection for the couple: to become more aware of each other’s emotions.

Process

With the advise of my professor Daragh Byrne, I decided to run an experiment in order to gather real data that I can work with to develop the project. I wanted to have two people do an activity together while each wearing a heart rate tracker. At first, I approached couples, however, people did not react well to my experiment as many commented, "that sounds like the start of a argument." Therefore, I switched gears and approached friends.

In the end, I was able to run the experiment with two friends. They each wore a heart rate tracker, one Apple Watch and the other Fitbit, while having a lunch date. This shared experienced about 40min.

After getting the continuous heart rates, I then began to ideate on how they should be represented. I played with whether to show both parties' heart rates explicitly or only the differences between the two.

Once the final design with nailed down, I laser cut cut the pieces in MDF and translucent acrylic.

Prototype

This little art piece is representative of the the lunch date data gathered from my experiment. For the final design, I used two different materials, each representing the heart rate of a participant. The acrylic is placed in front of the MDF so that person #1's heart rate data can peek through person #2's.

A single piece is representative one shared experience; therefore, the look of each piece will be unique depending upon the actual heart rates of the participants.

The idea is that people will be able to have a collection of all the shared experiences they have with a loved one. These pieces can slot together to create a larger art piece that is meant to be a reflection tool.

Precedents

Memory Dialogue
https://hxd.research.microsoft.com/work/memory-dialogue.php

This is a Microsoft project that explored how people's memories of the same event they participated together differ and how physical artefacts can affect the sharing of experiences.

The And
http://www.theand.us/
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-3220140/Why-did-cheat-Ex-couple-break-tears-laugh-yell-ask-brutally-honest-questions-relationship-two-years-splitting.html

This is a series of interactive documentary where former couples are brought in and given a pile of question cards to ask each other. In the case of one pair of exes, the ex-girlfriend received the question of "what is your fondest memory of our time together." She without a pause described a shared experience she loved while the ex-boyfriend had no recollection of the experience. To her, the shared experience was very significant while it was insignificant for him. This goes to show that people are not always on the same page emotionally.

Therefore, this raises the question of whether we should be more sensitive/aware of others' feelings and emotions. My project is aimed to do this. It is meant to be a critical design that forces people to reflect upon they relationships; to have those critical talks before it is too late.

Open Questions and Challenges

At the end of this investigation, I realized that these heartbeat pieces are not actually individually identifiable: there is no way of matching each one to their corresponding shared experience. Currently as a collection, it only works as a way to show trends. I wonder if it would be more effective if there was a way to connect individual pieces to their corresponding experiences. This would make each individual piece a more powerful reflective tool; whereas currently, the power is more within the collection as a whole.

Reflection

I am pretty satisfied with the design that came out of this investigation. I am still waiting for the chance to get my two participants together so that I can show them the heartbeat piece that came of their lunch date. I will post an update once I get their reactions.