Christian Nold is a creative technologist who builds socially constructive, bottom-up tools that shift the way we perceive and experience our everyday world. Nold is best known for his compelling Emotion Mapping in cities, where every participant is outfitted with a device that measures her/his galvanic skin response (GSR), an indicator of emotional arousal, while a gps unit maps that data to his/her unique geographical location. The resulting maps indicate how individuals respond to and interact with their immediate surroundings, while encouraging personal reflection on the complex relationship between us, our environment and our fellow citizens. By sharing this information we can construct maps that visualise where we as a community feel stressed and excited.

More recently, a new dimension of Nold's work has emerged to understand the Sensory Commons in urban places. With the Newham Sensory Deprivation Map, at left, Nold worked with 36 art students from Newham Sixth Form College in London. Rendered temporarily blind and deaf and equipped with GPS devices, the young students were asked to explore the local area relying only on the senses of smell, touch and taste. The geographical data from the GPS was downloaded and sensory observations made during the walk were spatially recorded. The result is an alternative representation of Newham, illuminating an undervalued aspect of experiencing (and designing for) urban places.

Christian Nold projects >