We Feel Fine is a web applet that explores human emotion on a global scale, it looks through blogs searching for the phrase "I feel" or "I'm feeling" and identifies the emotion; these are then organised so that patterns can be formed.

Smile High Score

These are the photos from our 'high-score' experiment, they are ordered from biggest to smallest smiles (as decided by our smile detector).

This experiment was actually a great success... We managed to fuel competition through word of mouth and Facebook and had many repeat visits as new high scores were set. We also had a lot of people asking us what the smile detector was actually looking for, unsure on whether we should answer this we experimented with the answers we gave.

One conversation that I had was particularly insightful to me. We discussed whether this big smile was 'better' as he asserted that it was fake and consequently not better; although he was not rewarded by the machine for his smaller natural smile he refused to put on a larger smile for its benefit. This got me thinking once again about fake smiles...
I am particularly interested with how fake smiles affect us and others, and if they are more useful or harmful.

Incentives

This has got me thinking about incentives and the way that we are convinced into thinking that doing something is a good idea. For instance 'high score' boards and 'employee of the month' competitions... Competition is an easy way to get people to engage with what what you would like them to.
 
Considering this I have decided that we are going to hold a smiling competition as our next studio experiment; getting people to compete on who can pull the biggest smile.

Will the winner be the happiest person? Will this sustained smiling make them happy? If you rank the smiles 'high-score' style, will those that do not make the leader board be less happy as a result?

These are some things that I would like to see how others respond to.

Grand Mutual Smiles

Grand Mutual Smiles is a work by Pierre Prosk, it is a real-time installation that sends an ever updating array of smiling faces between Linz, Austria and Thimphu, Bhutan to allow people to communicate in a universal way (by smiling) . This work explores a  1987 quote by the King of Bhutan, that “Gross National Happiness is more important than Gross National Product”. 

This installation is quite a simple idea but I like what it seeks to achieve, it recognises the smile as a form of universal communication and something that can be traded like a commodity.