Watching this excellent Vodcast from Cool Hunting a few weeks back revealed an amazingly talented artist/storyteller Jonathan Harris who uses primarily Web technologies and the internet as his medium of expression.

His most accomplished interactive work (in my opinion) is the 2007 Webby nominated ‘We Feel Fine’. Described by the artist as ‘an exploration of human emotion’, it’s a Java Web Application which searches weblogs on the internet for postings that relate to feelings and emotions, and harvests the words and images. You can then search or filter the information to narrow the results, by type of emotion, for example ‘happy’ or ‘sad’, location, sex, age and time, and then view the snippet of the weblog.

Not only is it an excellent concept, but it’s beautifully executed both from an interface design perspective and from a code perspective.

A similar concept, with a specific focus on depicting the romantic lives of American teenagers is called the Dumpster. It also visualises content harvested from the internet, but more specifically ‘a fixed collection of 20,000 romantic breakups that occurred during 2005’. It’s also interesting in that it uses a playful and interactive visual interface to access the content, making for a fun and engaging experience.

Jonathan Harris’ most recent work, called Universe, is also a Web application and described as “a system that supports the exploration of personal mythology, allowing each of us to find our own constellations, based on our own interests and curiosities….Using the metaphor of an interactive night sky, Universe presents an immersive environment for navigating the world's contemporary mythology, as found online in global news and information from Daylife”.

Wow, super-cool. I hope by exploring these sites you’ll also be left inspired and encouraged to share your stories with the world.

Actually, all this reminds me of a project we did a few years ago for the Australian Drug Foundation, called Somazone, which gives young people a space to share their stories with others, dealing with issues such as sexuality, health and drugs.

Carl Panczak, General Manager, Sydney

Labels: Design and Usability, Technology, Web Culture and Trends