The Emoting City

The Emoting City 情感之城

Jie Zhang 张婕, Sayjel Patel, Raffi Tchakerian

This project imagines a futuristic scenario where the city becomes an emotional machine. A machine created from elements that see, feel, and even reconfigure their own function in relation to human emotions. Throughout history, emotional intelligence has differentiated humans from machines. While humans have an innate ability to spot subtle social cues and modify behavior accordingly, machine systems are deterministic and indifferent to human feelings; programmed to optimize human behavior for economic efficiency rather than negotiate social relations. The ubiquity of such systems improves living standards across the world. However, the imposing effect of routine and consumption also alienates people from their innate behaviors. What if the built environment could “see” and “feel” emotions to evoke new forms of authentic urban spectacle, desire and play?

The advancement of emotion-based computer vision and AI technologies will soon make this a reality. This project, named “The Emoting City”, gives these technologies physical form to speculate on their potential future. Comprised of a network of responsive architectural components, the resulting installation interprets emotions from the facial expressions of occupants as new environmental factors. Personal emotions are then manifested through shifting color and form as corollaries to a spectrum of psychological states, as either reinforcement or intervention. At the Meta scale, algorithms compute a group mood index over time from individual expression data. Ultimately, the user experience is one of personal attention as well as community building and spectacle. It encourages the deliberate collaboration between visitors to trigger novel responses and urban situations.

Situated within the active Futian Railway Station, “The Emoting City” assigns an empathetic role to large-scale public space, and demonstrates the potential of connecting the architecture of the human mind with that of the city. Promoting an emotion-aware “Eyes of the City”, this project advocates for the responsible use of machine vision to celebrate the authentic desires of inhabitants, and to mitigate the alienating effects of ubiquitous technology.

本项目畅想了一个未来场景：城市作为一个情绪化机器，能看见和察觉人类情感，甚至据此对物理建筑环境进行调整重构。纵观历史，情商是人将自己与机器区别开来的重要维度。人类拥有与生俱来的能力，收集复杂而微妙的社交线索并以此调整自身行为。相比之下，饱含确定性并以优化效率为目的的机器系统对人类情绪无动于衷。无处不在的智能系统，一方面提升了诸如安全的生活品质，一方面也在标准化和消费化的过程中徒增了人与内心，人与人，乃至人与社会的疏离。试想，城市是否可以“看见”和“感受”情感，激发全新的都市景观、愿望和社交互动？

基于情绪感知的计算机视觉及人工智能技术的进步，让想象不再遥远。“情感之城”项目通过将这类技术具象化，预测了这一潜在的未来。项目装置由互动建筑组件组成，将参与者的面部表情中蕴含的情感信息作为环境因素进行采集和解读，并通过变换与之对应的颜色和形式做出或强化、或干预的反馈。在读取个体表情的同时，自定义算法在元数据尺度上计算随着时间推移而变化的集体情绪指数。面向一至多个参与者，用户体验将个体关怀和社群营造相结合，鼓励参与者之间通过有意合作触发新奇的反馈和空间状态。

在福田高铁站，“情感之城”为大型公共空间赋予共情能力，展示将人类的心灵构建与城市建筑联系起来的巨大潜力。本项目提倡以具有情感意识的“城市之眼”，利用负责任的态度使用机器视觉技术展现居民的真实愿望，减轻技术所带来的普遍疏离感。

Credits:

Jie Zhang 张婕, Sayjel Patel, Raffi Tchakerian (Dubai Institute of Design and Innovation)