Mind Salon

Mind Salon is an interactive toy that connects our emotions and hair style and creates a playful character which the users can play with to relieve their emotions. Mind Salon shows an interactive character that grows 7 different emotional hairs. When a certain emotional hair grows too much, the balance is lost. The character will cry out its emotion and the hair will be cut to regain balance. The users will click on the icons to trigger a certain emotion to grow. Mind Salon is an attempt to provide a chance for us to feel catharsis through the crying character, and ease our emotions.

According to Asian philosophy, a balance of seven emotions is what gives you happiness, and these emotions are happiness, anger, sadness, fun, love, hatred, and desire. If a certain emotion gets higher, then the broken balance will cause you pain, as illustrated by the character on the screen. Catharsis is a western philosophy to explain why Greek people enjoyed watching tragedies and crying. It is because we can relieve our emotions by watching at someone else’s sadness, and our tears would carry out our stress. My attempt is to enable catharsis through the crying interactive character. I used the analogy of “hair” as emotions, because I find that we often try to show and express our characteristics or emotional changes through our hair styles. Living in the city has so many events happening simultaneously, which affects our emotions and I find it difficult to find relief without any help. Within the hypeness of the city, I experience extreme ranges of emotions and feel uncomfortable. Mind Salon will enable people to find their emotional balance by playing with the character. Technical Statement
I used Flash and Actionscript 3.0 for the input and output control. I used Adobe Photoshop to draw the icons, and Adobe Photoshop to convert a photograph of my friend to an illustrative way.

Sleepy Cow

Sleepy cow is an interactive toy and screen animation synced and played. Each toy is connected to the character on the screen. A corresponding animation will be triggered depending on the user’s play.