Mike D. @ ITP

After bouncing back and forth with ideas for a few weeks, I made my final project proposal today in Computers for the Rest of You (slide deck here). I’ve been fascinated by the intersections between stress, paranoia and technology lately, and while some of my projects have been more practical (or at least serious), I went a bit the other way with this one.

The basic idea is that I’ll be running a text logger to record what’s typed and using Processing to watch for an abundance of sad, depressed and/or angry words.  When too many of those words appear, Processing triggers Asterisk to call you and chear you up.  It goes like this:

You’re sitting at your computer, frustrated and sad, typing away.

Then if you type too many sad or depressed words, you’ll get a phone call.

Which will cheer you up and take you a step back from the situation, so you can return to it later, happier and more relaxed.

This is the basic science behind that:

The issues are that I’m not a Processing wizard and I’ve done limited work with Asterisk, but this should be fun either way.

Oh, and thanks a ton to Adam Parrish for volunteering (err, falling to my repeated harassment) to be my model for this.  I promise to do absolutely nothing nice for him as a thank-you.