CATTID

From within the interaction design laboratories of CATTID (Centro per le Applicazioni della Televisione e delle Tecniche di Istruzione a Distanza) at Università La Sapienza in Rome, arises The Future Mood, an innovative project which aims to represent the mood of Italians in a dynamic and interactive way. In a setting defined by the growing centrality of the social sphere within digital communication, where social networks and blogs have become new spaces for socialization, for construction and diffusion of oneself, and for interaction with others, The Future Mood comes to life to gather, analyze, and visualize, automatically and in real-time, the moods of Italians on Facebook in order to understand what the nation’s mood is and what tendencies the future may hold. In order to reach this objective, a team of researchers created a modular system that acquires data from Facebook profiles and statuses, which is then processed and handed back to the users as a visual and interactive representation. Each mood is linked to a color in order to convey, in a simple and immediate manner, the nuances of our emotions, moods, and thoughts. The central thread of the project is the metaphor singled out to visually represent the emotional database obtained: the infructescence of the taraxacum (dandelion), symbol of lightness andvolatility, which aptly represents the dispersion into thousands of trickles of an idea, a desire, and more generally speaking, of oneself online and within one’s network.

Digital technologies constitute the extensive innovation that has affected the Internet and mass media. In this environment of great change emerges C.A.T.T.I.D., a research center at “Sapienza” Università di Roma, which has been operative since 1988 and had become a national and international reference point in its field. Within the center, directed by Prof. Ugo Biader Ceipidor with the technical-scientific coordination of Prof. Carlo M. Medaglia, there are 6 laboratories: RFID Lab, LUA, Logos, Multimedia Lab, LaBeL, CrimeC Lab. | cattid.uniroma1.it

TECHNIQUE

The Future Mood is a modular system articulated into three phases: acquisition of data, carried out through the development of a spider which scours Facebook profiles and procures statuses; data processing facilitated through the use of Expert System’s semantic technologies; visual and interactive representation of the body of data acquired and processed with technologies and interactive paradigms of “natural interaction”.

CATTID Sapienza Research Center coordination Amedeo Perrone, Carlo Maria Medaglia Team Claudia Rapuano, Valerio De Cecio, Belinda Di Nardo, Viktor Malakuczi, Manuele Tamburrano