British designer David Hedberg, who has recently graduated from the Royal College of Art, puts forward an idea that reverses our relationship to watching tv shows. Instead of smiling in response to what you see, you’d have to smile in order to watch your favourite programme.

Smile TV consists of a CRT monitor and a hidden camera that uses face-tracking technology to recognise the viewer’s facial expression. As long as the viewer smiles, the TV set plays a series of funny clips, but when he or she stops smiling, the screen goes back to static.

”Now, with content widely accessible the question is no longer if we can receive but if we are receptive. By expressing that we like something, we have very much become antennas ourselves - transmitting the content on to somebody else. This TV installation elaborates with facial recognition technology and a last-decade TV set to re-consider viewers engagement and how content is accessed”, explains Hedberg on the project’s website.

Smile TV was first introduced to the public at the SHOW RCA in June, and is currently shown as part of Future Room, an RCA-currated exhibition at John Lewis.