Change Connections - Idea: The Happiness Map

Incremental Intelligence

People have a great deal of information about the world around them. But the whole is greater than the sum of its parts and coordinated aggregation of the information could transform it into actionable knowledge. Whether it’s political upheaval or changes in the soil, the collective ground-level information can inform immediate personal action and long-term decision-making — allowing people to find rapid help and response during a crisis situation or to better prepare for climate change. However, there are currently very few ways for people to share, collect, and make sense of this information.

The Big Question

How might people better share and gain real-time value from the incremental information around them?

Idea

The Happiness Map

by Max Fowler Cohen

A study by Christakis and Fowler (Harvard and UCSD) in late 2008 indicated that happiness is transferred between individuals in a way that correlates with daily physical proximity- It should come as no surprise, since our family members, our neighbors, and our close-at-hand friends share our experiences with us, and in so doing, effect us and are effected by us. The correlation between individual happiness and the happiness of these close-at-hand others was quite high. I think it would be great if someone created a simple geotagging web platform (with accompanying app), with the function of raising user awareness of the results of your mood on the people around you. In the morning, you’d rate your mood one to ten, enter your location (or use GPS), and your happiness becomes a colored point on that day’s map, and a cumulative map of your neighborhood. The more people that use the service, and the more often they use it, the more we could begin to track the ‘epidemiology of happiness’, and give people pause, to consider the consequences of their words and actions on the people they care about- perhaps making participants a bit happier.

Like this idea

4 Comments

whymandesign.com

Great work. @ip created a happiness twitter app that you can google:)

Can we work with you to create a global not for profit engagement org using the http://www.TRAIDmark.org business structure? http://www.TRUSTlibrary.org creates spaces to meet and http://www.WEBiversity.org creates the web platform. Maybe working with someone like http://www.TED.org. would it be possible to work with you to make a re skinned version of other existing software so we can help the public to solve other social issues (Ideally using that http://www.TRAIDmark.org business
structure)? Maybe working with someone like
http://www.ONEworldHEALTH.org or http://www.earth.org which
is closing so maybe this is something I could help you take on so everyone can share local knowledge? Also can http://www.WEBiversity.org share video’s and create http://www.TRUSTlibrary.org with your team?

http://www.WHYmanDesign.com
Fisher Qua

I love this idea. I could see integrating with something like FourSquare to provide a real-time visualization of “Happiness Concentrations” or “Happiness Densities”. This would also be very applicable to “wellness” mapping.
Raul San

Yes, nice idea :-)
I used to write my dreams just after waking up and that gave me some knowledge about how my subconsciousness was working.
If people added how they felt to an interconnected network, this could help us to understand how we all feel. We would probably find out very interesting things about how we all work collectively and influence each other ;-)
And I think people would engage with it because they would receive feedback from the mapping.
win-win app ;-)
Raul San

I am just going to leave one question.
would they influence each other?
If after 10 days one person sees that is looking too sad compared to the rest: would this person raise the number just because he/she doesn’t want to be too different?
:-)

Add a New Comment

Join the Conversation!

The Feast + Nokia invite you to Change Connections

Focus Point #10