The Mappiness project: mapping happiness across space in the UK · August 11th, 2010
mappiness is a research project created by George MacKerron and Susana Mourato of the Department of Geography & Environment at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), designed to gain a better understanding of how people’s feelings are affected by features of their current environment—things like air pollution, noise, and green spaces.
To that end, a free iPhone app has been developed, regularly pinging its users to ask them how they’re feeling, as well as a few other things: who they are with, where they are, what they are doing. The anonymous data gets sent back to a server, along with the user’s approximate location from the iPhone’s GPS, and a noise-level measure.
The project being in its early stages, the map displayed on the website doesn’t really give an acurate picture of the spread of happiness in the country – a huge proportion of respondants being in situated in London! – though interestingly the real-time hedonimeter shows that London people are slightly happier than the rest of the UK. I’m pretty sure this could easily be challenged, but I’ll leave that to the academic paper that will come out of the survey…
Leave a response or trackback from your own site.