Mind Your Feelings
Project details
Developed the touchscreen-to-LED system behind a public library installation where 800+ people mapped their feelings onto a responsive brain sculpture in real time.
Project highlights
800+
community participants
5 months
installation in public use
Real-time
touchscreen-to-LED response
Our supporters.
Walkthrough of the kiosk.
The color of the emotion you draw is sent to the brain, which lights up in that color.
This was the first project where I had to connect physical hardware to a live software system in a public space. The Arduino brain needed to respond to user input within milliseconds or the experience would feel broken. Getting the Python backend to reliably bridge the web interface to the WLED controller took more debugging than I expected, but once it worked, the brain responded before people had finished choosing. That lag mattered more than I expected.
What surprised me was how quickly strangers opened up when given a space that felt safe. People were not looking for the right answer, they just wanted to be seen. 800 participants in five months, and the data we collected is now being used by local mental health organizations tracking how communities process stress and emotion.
