Open Source Love
Encapsulating and sharing positive energy in the urban environment
Open Source Love is an exploration and research in love as a design challenge. Open Source Love started out as a project about urban installations, sharing information and last but not least, love. The project was firstly focused around the division between singles and couples in the city, then moved on to focus more on love to life and being positive.
Open Source Love core concept is about sharing positive energy in the urban environment via public installations. When the fall and winter hits Scandinavian cities, the vibrant life and positive energy drops to a low. Open Source Love is there to light up people’s minds, remind them to be positive and share their positive energy. Jesper wanted to make it possible for citizens to show and share their positive energy and thereby hopefully spawn positive feelings in other people. And simply by having a place to go and share you positive energy would also remind people to be positive.
In practice showing others that you are happy can be done in many ways; from sending a sms to screaming it out loud. To test the concept a minor installation was build with a sensor that reads the person(s) energy level and visualises this in a light-pattern. If someone has the same energy level as the previous person, the user will be rewarded with a sudden change in the installation and thereby feel an instant connection with that user. Open Source Love will constantly show the light-pattern of the last people who shared their energy. Since the energy is transformed into light, it is possible to share this with other people in the vicinity of the installation.
A full-scale model of the concept would be to place several of these installations in the city and then have a centralised place such as the park, or display boards around in the city that would then show the energy level of the city.
Read the project blog here