Global Emotional Mapping Concept

The Elephant Effect • 2015
Overview
The Elephant Effect was a creative mapping platform to show how the world is affected by global events.

Every day, millions of events are happening throughout the world that have an effect on peoples lives. What if you could see the global emotional impact that an event has? And see how parts of the world are affected by an event?
The Elephant Effect is a new way of visualizing news analytics. By tracking how people respond to events through social media, we are able to map a global emotional consciousness.

This is one of my earlier visual design projects, and there are many design changes I would now make to the UX/UI. However, I decided to still included it in my portfolio because of the type of conceptual thinking that I enjoyed doing for this project.
Foundations of Inspiration
The Elephant Effect is a passion project that has evolved over the years. It started in 2014 when I was studying interactive art at the University of Oregon. It was a public interactive art piece that I created and was installed on a concrete wall of a parking garage. With Processing, I used the Twitter API to sift thru tweets that used emotional key words like, "happy", "sad", "excited", and "scared", and with motion tracking, I would display the tweets on a pedestrians as they walked by.

Unfortunately, the only thing I have left of the project is this poorly documented video. I now know the importance of good project documentation.