Institute For The Future

From mood rings to mood phones

Of all the interesting people I have met during my time here at IFTF, Gary Wolf ranks way up there.  A contributing editor at Wired, he and his colleague, Kevin Kelly, have been developing the idea of the quanitifed self for at least the last couple of years.  They maintain a website devoted to the subject, and hold monthly meet-ups in the San Francisco Bay Area to bring together others interested in various forms of self-monitoring and data collection about oneself.

 

 

I've been thinking whether personal tracking will become more "mainstream" over time, and if so, how it might transform how we live our lives.  I hadn't visited the QS website in a while, so I decided to see what Gary has been writing about these days.  His most recent post is entitled, "Margaret Morris — The Mood Phone and the Circumflex Model." He acknowledges that, at times, it is difficult for us to discern our own moods (those darn mood rings from my childhood never reallly worked); it can be a far greater challenge "perceive the mood of a person on the other end of a phone conversation."

So along comes the mood phone.  I followed Gary's link to an earlier post about Margaret Morris, a clinical psychologist and Intel researcher, who has "developed a research application for fostering emotional self-awareness on the mobile phone."  It turns out that in the last couple of years, several companies—from Panasonic to D-Link to Digital Agua—have played around in this space.  But Morris has developed what Gary describes as "a serious version of the mood phone," and includes a video that explains more about her work.  It may sound hokey, but maybe it will really help people for whom mindfulness is a stressful endeavour in and of itself.