How are you really feeling?
Want to get in touch with your own true emotions? And discover what things truly excite you or turn you off? Try the new Bio Mapping system, described by its creator, artist Christian Nold, as an ‘inversion of the lie-detector’ because ‘people can make sense of their own biological data’.

It enables people to compare their moods with their surroundings. It measures not just major reactions that tend to stick in the memory, but also how much you are excited by speaking to a stranger, crossing the road or even listening to birdsong.

How does it work?
Emotion mapping combines two existing technologies. First is a simple pair of ‘finger cuffs’, long used in lie-detector tests. They record the changing sweat levels on the skin as a measure of physical arousal, making no distinction between positive or negative.

Second is the Global Positioning System popular with drivers in satellite navigation devices. In this case the user carries a receiver, which by locking on to three satellites, continually records their location as they walk from place to place. The data is downloaded and converted by Nold’s customised software into GPX format. This can then be easily visualised in 3D by map applications such as Google Earth.

Nold explains, ‘The emotion map looks like a bunch of peaks and troughs. Coming up to a traffic junction there tends to be a peak because they don’t quite know where to go and then as they go around the corner there is a new peak as they see a new vista’.

Shared emotions
For the last six months Nold has been doing emotion mapping workshops every week in Greenwich, London, an area that has undergone huge regeneration. Local residents, developers and politicians using the system on their walks around the area have found it to be a ‘great way to get themselves thinking and talking openly about their environment’.

Inspired by a need to understand environmental or interpersonal triggers for panic attacks, workshops conducted around the world have shown its practicality for tackling shared emotional issues. Nold says, ‘Bio Mapping could almost be your own personal therapeutic tool, finding which way to work is the most practical, exciting, or least stressful’. It’s a science and therapy of our everyday space.