How can you measure happiness? Tekja created the Happy-o-meter an experimental installation for the Barbican, to investigate how data visualisation and design can increase audience engagement with evaluation. The audience of Walthamstow Garden Party, a free festival that welcomes over 30,000 in London guests each year, were invited to answer a series of simple questions: Where do you live? What has been your favourite thing today? How happy are you feeling today? Are you male of female or you’d rather not say? Participants then dropped their ball into the tube that best represented their feelings, creating a physical bar chart of audience sentiment.
The installation was designed with the aim of enticing audience members to engage with the evaluation process and to ensure that the process and purpose of collecting information was transparent and as insightful (and entertaining) for participants as it was to the Barbican. The installation itself proved a highly popular feature of the festival and was filled to capacity with over 1,000 participants with many audience members queuing to submit an evaluation response throughout the day.
