Metro Moods on Market Street - Urban Prototyping Festival

A dynamic mosaic of expressed emotions of this public space.

Accessibility was an important design consideratio

My entry in the 2016 Urban Prototyping Festival, the METRO MOODS ON MARKET street project sought to build upon the powerful capacity for “3rd Places” to enable complete strangers to share a common experience and in doing so make very real human connections. MMM proposed to explore a 4th dimension of public interaction. If our first place is our home, in essence, our ‘self’, our workplace or school, is the second, or our necessary ‘other’.

The places we chose to encounter others, are of course, those third places where we meet others drawn by common interest, values or habits. But what happens when we become connected with others through an indirect, but nonetheless collaborative act?

Another concept explored was that of “Urban Feedback”. Does the mood of the city spread, either in a good or a bad direction?  The central activity of the MMM project invited visitors to tell the world how they are feeling by tossing a mood ball into a large scrolling display.  Like pixels, the collective contributions of the hundreds of visitors will express the diverse emotions moving through the city at any given time.

A third concept being explored is one of ephemerality and permanence amidst a digital society. As the mood balls make their way down the screen, a time lapse recording will captured the changing colors and patterns that appear over time.  The position of this camera also presents visitors an ideal location to take mood shots of friends. As the majority of the photos taken will be done using smart phones, visitors will be invited to upload their images to an Instagram account created for the event. There they were able to download the day’s time lapse clip. (below)

On the final day of the festival, visitors were invited to take a mood ball home with them allowing the project to live on in their home with the feelings they experienced that day as a souvenir to them to keep long after the festival was over.

The big take-aways were a strengthened faith in the power of art to connect people especially when their participation is a valued component of the creative process. A sense of shared ownership grew quickly and with little or no prompting.

The project was a true team effort with lots of time, skills and spaces contributed to bring the whole 3-day installation to fruition. Thanks for the team: Boyd, Erina, Faraz, Yuko and the other supporters. I've been asked if there will be another version of this and at this point it's hard to say, but I will entertain collaboration offers and support to see where the next one can take us.