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Caption from the study: "Heat map showing stress hot-spots from EEG brain monitoring revealing stress-points on the road network around Reading station of visually impaired participants"
This is Rhizome Today for Friday, November 14, 2014.
Rhizome Today is an experiment in ephemeral blogging: a series of posts that are written hastily in response to current events, and taken offline within a day or so. The latest post can always be found at http://www.rhizome.org/today.
Last week, Future Cities Catapult, Guide Dogs, and Microsoft UK published "Cities Unlocked," a report on the design of a headset whose purpose is to make cities more accessible for people with sight loss.**
Of the research phase, Dan Hill of Future Cities Catapult writes:
We asked the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA) at UCL Bartlett to use their 'appropriated' electroencephalography (EEG) brain monitoring to measure the cognitive and emotional responses of people with sight loss as they moved around [London]. These enabled new 'stress maps' of the city to be produced.
People without visual impairments participated as well. While road crossings, train station entrances and exits, and boarding platforms were all locations of stress for the group with sight loss, the study concluded that "green spaces are calming for both people with sight loss and those without."
The universality of this finding is striking. What if we used EEG devices to help us map a wider range of emotions? Stress and calm, sure, but also happiness, anger, and sadness. Of most concern to me are feelings correlated with ego-depletion along with decreased willpower and decision-making ability. A map of our negative moods could suggest new ways to improve the built environment, which was one of the civic-minded motivations behind earlier experiments in this area such as Christian Nold's "Bio-Mapping". But it could also offer a lucrative opportunity for businesses and advertisers.
The value of geospatial data to business is relatively new. In the last few years, companies have started to augment business intelligence systems with geographic data enrichment tools. Most notable among them is Esri's Tapestry Segmentation.
Tapestry is a mashup of sorts. Esri engineers applied cluster analysis and data mining techniques to a mix of spatial data, Census data, and marketing data. The result is a highly specific geodemographic segmentation system: each zip code belongs to one of 67 distinct demographics. They have names like "Boomburbs," "Laptops and Lattes," and "Barrios Urbanos." They are classified by ethnicity, occupation, income, hobbies, and purchases. And thanks to more robust methods of analysis, the latest version of Tapestry also includes projections of demographic changes like reduced income and increased aging. It can tell Whole Foods where to open a fourth store in Boulder. If you want to open a luxury consignment store in Houston, it can suggest mixed-use, high-income neighborhoods in which to look for retail space. The possibilities of location analytics are vast.
Ignoring, for a second, its serendipitous pleasures, urban life stirs up irritants and tiny indignities that abrade our senses and drain our cognitive resources. Advertisers, armed with Tapestry and a detailed map of our affects, would only get savvier: they would know the places where we are at our most stressed, where we would be most likely to give in and buy what they're selling. True luxury would remain what it is now: the freedom to be out of sight, to guard sadness and joy, to buy a way out of buying.
** The report reminded me of the artist Sara Hendren, whose guiding principle is "All technology is assistive technology." She's been thinking about this for the last several years: assistive technologies, accessible cityscapes, prosthetics, how we think about the body, and how we imagine and reach beyond its boundaries and limitations.
Read Lucy Chinen's Rhizome Today from November 13 about SentiStrength.