Where did the idea come from to create an application that would keep track of your moods,
creativity, stress, etc.?
One of us (whose name shall remain unsaid) spent most of his teenage life writing dire diaries about young love and such, and would rate
his mood on a scale from one to 100 every day. At the end of each year he would busy himself drawing out long depressing statistics vividly
illustrating the utter miserable sadness of being a pimple-ridden, balding Danish youngster. This is how the idea of the Mood-o-Meter was
born (or as it is called in Danish: humør-o-meter).
Now, when Matt Owens came forward and asked us to supply him with an interactive piece for his Codex Series 3 CD-Rom compilation of digital
experimental work from various designers and artistes around the world, the idea of Moodstats came up. So we started debating whether we’d want
to build some generic piece of animated dullness to a dreary repetitive drum and bass soundtrack, or try to develop something entirely different.
In the end we decided to create something that we could relate to, something human, sweet and subtle, but still useful in a quirky sort of way.
And so we embarked on a long and windy journey to build this mother — it ended up taking us a long year, and still it feels like we have just
started.
Has Moodstats opened up other, more personal areas for you to explore, outside of design, such as how we live and
function as creative individuals?
We’d had a number of interesting people approach us with various ideas that would take Moodstats out of its safe little
on-screen environment and into the real world. Medical companies, psychologists, social workers and others have all suggested interesting alternative
uses for modified versions of Moodstats. We’ve begun to realize that the application is not only useful to creatives, so we are looking into new ways
of extending its use.
Many users have also gotten back to us with very positive feedback, some having used Moodstats to monitor their depressions where it has
actually helped them deal with things and life in general. This is where we realized that Moodstats is so much more than just a toy which in
turn has gotten us quite excited about moving on, extending the way the program can be used and expanding the functionality that lies beneath
it.
Has it affected the way you approach client work?
Not really. We have been thinking about how to approach clients with Moodstats-inspired projects, but the actual application
is such a specialized tool that most of the time the work that we are offered (or the work that we seek out ourselves) has absolutely nothing to do
with neither Moodstats, nor the creative process we went through when we were developing the application.
One thing we’ve learned, though, is that projects such as Moodstats are extremely time-consuming and in all honesty if we’d known beforehand how
long & hard this process was going to be, we’re not sure we would ever have begun development.
One thing I find interesting is how our stress levels affect our mood and creativity. Was this something that interested
you once you started fleshing out concepts for Moodstats?
In the current version of Moodstats you can keep track of six different categories. Three of them are common to
all users: Mood, Creativity and Stress, and the last three can be customized in any way the user sees fit. Our primary reason
for “locking” these three categories was the fact that the Codex Series version of Moodstats is aimed almost exclusively at
creatives such as ourselves. And we guess that anyone involved with design, stress is a large part of their life.
At one stage in the development process we asked our beta-testers to consider whether Creativity should be replaced by Achievements —
but, after thinking about it for a while, we realized that the three categories we had thought of initially complemented each other pretty well.
Like you mention, high Stress levels usually mean low Mood levels (but can mean both high and low Creativity levels, depending on the user) and
vice-versa, and we for one think it’s very interesting to watch the Moodstats-curves which depict these category-relationships.
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