‘Mood ATM’ Checks in on User’s Feelings Instead of Their Money

Now instead of checking up on the varying states of their bank accounts, New Zealand pedestrians can take a look at how the residents of their city are feeling.

The Moodbank is an ATM-like machine where users can select a combination of over 1,000 moods and emotions to explain how they’re feeling.

Engineered by Australian artist Vanessa Crowe as an experiment in human and technologic interaction, the installation has been making its way around New Zealand, creating a geographic mood map of the country.

The graphs show incredibly colorful and elaborate trends of people feeling moods such as ‘snappy’, ‘peachy’, ‘groggy’, ‘loved’, and ‘buzzing’.

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“City spaces have often been thought about in terms of the functional flows of people and things: the money that is exchanged, the congestion of rush hour, the accumulation of rubbish and the cold face of professionalism,” reads the Moodbank Tumblr. “More recently businesses, governments, and social media have come to see the value in finding out how happy we are. But what about the more diverse and complex emotional life of the city?”

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The first Moodbank branch opened in Wellington in March 2014, with over 2000 mood deposits made in the first ten days, many of which took shape in the form of colored pencil drawings. The Moodbank ATM itself has moved from Wellington, to Auckland, to Whangarei.

You can check in on the Moodbank deposits on the project’s website, Tumblr, or Facebook page.

Make Your Friends Feel Informed, Click To Share – Photo by Moodbank