Mind Your Feelings is a participatory installation at the Johnson Public Library in Hackensack that visualizes the feelings of community members. The system combines a touchscreen interface with a responsive LED brain sculpture, allowing users to select emotions, map them onto the body, and see them come alive through light. Over 800 participants have experienced the installation, turning internal emotional states into shared, tangible moments of reflection.
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Walkthrough of the kiosk.
The color of the emotion you draw is sent to the brain — and the brain 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 it felt like magic.
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 to better understand community wellbeing.