Emotion changes in various reasons. ILLUMIO is an abstract model of how a human feels in his/her human relationship and the environment, proposed by Mac Funamizu, a web/graphic/industrial designer of Tokyo.
ILLUMIO has a base with 16 holes and 4 light bulbs. The main body of the base is made of frosted glass, which reflects ambient light around a light bulb. The curved shape represents the earth and the shape of the light bulb implies a human being.
According to the position of the light bulbs, the color that the LED in a bulb emits changes. This shows a human feels differently when the surroundings change. The arrangement of the bulbs means human relationships. There are numerous patterns of the bulb arrangements. Some examples are shown in the image at the beginning of this post.
Color Variation Examples
Robert Plutchik’s psychoevolutionary theory of emotion is one of the most influential classification approaches for general emotional responses. The colors that the lights change to are based on his color graph. In addition to color variations, the intensity of the lights also varies according to the lights’ positions. For example, if the “trusted” square is located in the corner, the intensity of the green light becomes weaker because the position implies “united but biased”.
See full article at http://petitinvention.wordpress.com/2009/05/30/illumio/