Mood Phone

November 25, 2009
Stacey Mason

I can’t count the number of times I’ve called friends, bosses, but especially parents, only to immediately regret calling. Call at the wrong time, and they release hours worth of pent-up frustrations on me. If only it were possible to know what kind of mood they were in before I called! According to Margaret Morris, the idea might not be so far-fetched .

In a recent post on Quantified Self, she details plans for mood mapping through touchscreen phones. The goal is to keep mood logging painless enough that people will actually do it. The mood phone is designed to let the person on the other end know what kind of a mood you’re in; if it’s to be useful, it must be used. This means it can’t rely on annoying surveys or one-dimensional sliders.

When I first heard about this technology, my mind started immediately ticking off interesting ways this could be incorporated into a mobile hypertext readers. What if the story could adapt to the reader’s mood?

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