Are You Feeling Fine?

Imagine a place that collected the entire depth of human feeling, and imagine just how diverse and wonderful this could be. Even better, imagine if you could segment these feelings by location, weather, age and date. And imagine if this information was available for free on the internet and displayed in a uniquely beautiful way.

This place exists, and it's a website called We Feel Fine. Started in 2005 by computer nerds and designers Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar, the website collects around 20,000 feelings every day. Every few minutes, the system searches the internet for blog posts containing the phrases "I feel" or "I am feeling". When it finds a match, it records the sentence and the user's name, age and geological location; cross-referencing the former with weather services. This allows We Feel Fine to paint an international picture of emotion, allowing you to see whether people are happier in Los Angeles than New York, or whether people in Paris are angrier than those in London.

Having all this data is great, but data is worth nothing unless it's communicated properly. This is a core facet of graphic design; indeed, its raison d'etre. Design exists to communicate information. Design without information is art, and information without design is often incomprehensible.

We Feel Fine offers viewers a variety of different displays. There's a node view, which collects a selection of dots together on screen, corresponding to different emotions, a bar chart-esque view and several others. The beauty of these visualisations is that they turn the project into so much more. It's not just a dry list of statistics and meaningless ramblings, it's a living, breathing work of art. It's enough just to look at.

Surprisingly, the project runs in Java which is a refreshing change from the usual Adobe Flash-based sites that tend to carry these kinds of projects. It does work the processor pretty hard, but that's a worthwhile sacrifice for the cornucopia of emotional delight at your fingertips.

Check it out here: http://www.wefeelfine.org/index.html.